We are back with a double-bill decoding! That's right like moths to the flame, or aliens to a Unified Geometric Field drive, we are back in Weinstein world.This time we are looking at a conversation between the irrepressible (ex?) podcaster & mathematician, Eric Weinstein, and skeptical investigator, author, and recent guest on the show, Mick West.The conversation here concerns the evidence for UAP/UFOs and the reaction of skeptics and advocates. It had the potential to be something forensic and transcendent but sadly it gets mired in the messy 'interpersonal drama' that Eric just hates so much and tries to avoid at all costs.Nonetheless, there is much that can be learnt here, including: the linguistic complexities of the word 'flex', the precise levels of passive aggressiveness that a human mind can tolerate, if there is already secret anti-gravity tech, and whether our obsession with Einsteinian physics is what is stopping us from really understanding what is going on with UAPs.We don't have answers. We are just asking questions... honest!Also featured: a recent kerfuffle in the online psychology world over DEI statements, the numerology spectrum, the potential harms of green drinks, and much much more!So join us, won't you, as we boldly venture through the outermost reaches of the gurusphere.LinksTheories of Everything- Eric Weinstein & Mick West: UAPs, Evidence, SkepticismJonathan Pageau: The Surprising Symbolism of 666QAnon Anonymous- Episode 168: The Mutant QAnon Numerology Cult in Dallas.Very Bad Wizards- Episode 263: Free YoelReason article on the Yoel Inbar incident2020 Paper on the potential liver impacts of Green Tea ExtractMick West's Book- Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
Chris Kavanagh is sitting right in front of me in virtual space.
Good morning, Chris.
It's the end of the week.
It's a Friday.
Have a good week.
I haven't spoken to you for a while.
I haven't recorded for a while.
That's true.
You know, the problem is, I'm just going to tell you, that was a beautiful introduction.
This is your feedback.
So introduction was perfect.
I was almost going to make a comment about how you could bottle that professionalism and sell it on the open audio clip market, make a pretty penny.
But then you mentioned the specific time that this is being recorded and day.
And it doesn't factor in, you know, that...
When will people hear this?
It won't be a Friday, will it?
Is it going to be?
It could be.
No, it won't be a Friday for them, but people understand about the magic of asynchronous communication.
They're just going to be very confused.
Hey, I thought it was Sunday.
Like, I was just getting ready for Monday.
That's it, man.
You have to keep the illusion that we're all on the same planet.
We're just here.
We're with them, you know?
It's the parasocial bonding.
We're doing that now.
We're doing it live.
We're doing it live.
That's right.
There's no editing that goes on, taking out the ums and the ahs and Chris's ranting.
Ums and ahs.
What are those?
No, we don't do that kind of thing.
We're professionals.
Apologies, Chris.
This has probably been a little bit of a gap since our last release of a main episode, and it is entirely my fault.
As you know.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah, let's blame it on you.
Yeah, it is.
Got you, Matt, and your work and stuff.
My career.
Yeah.
It does take up some of my time sometimes.
A grant application in this case.
And it's exciting.
I've complained to you about this.
It is like 28,000 words.
It is huge.
And these tenders, it's like they award them to whoever.
Makes the most effort because it's not enough to show you've got the capabilities, that you meet the requirements, that you've got interesting ideas.
No, no, no, no.
You need to show that you care.
And the way that you show that you care is to just write an immense amount of material, soul-destroying stuff.
But it's almost over, Chris.
It's almost over.
And then I can come back and give you and the DTG crowd my full attention.
Interesting, Matt.
There's actually a relation there, a good pivot to one of the things that we were planning to cover in our short introductory segment before we get to our main decoding this week.
So you are basically saying that there are sometimes tasks in academia that you are required to do which serve largely symbolic signaling purposes, but may be used to evaluate your...
Suitability for receiving a particular benefit.
Is that what you were suggesting?
Well, it is about signaling.
That's topical.
That's topical, Matt, because rival podcast with other psychologists, one of which we had on a previous co-host, Mickey Inselick, but two psychologists, four beers.
It's actually, it's one of those like podcast metaverse thingies where Joel Limbor...
Who is the co-host of Two Psychologists, Four Viewers, a podcast focused on psychology-type topics, as the title suggests, went on our main rival podcast, Very Bad Wizards,
with Ghost Hunter Tamler Summers and psychologist David Pizarro.
And there he told a tale, as old as time, of basically...
That he was being considered for a position at a university and it seems likely that comments that he had made on his academic-themed podcast about diversity,
equity and inclusion statements and some other comments about whether it's appropriate for professional organizations to take stances on things like abortion or other political issues were brought up in a letter.
Which was circulated during the potential hiring process and it seems likely this led to the hiring being scuppered or at least put a significant dent in it.
And so he told that story, and I think he did it in a very reasonable manner, not hyperbolic, just presenting his perspective on it and pointing out that he isn't cancelled.
He has a position at Toronto University.
This was a potential partner hire where there's an academic working for an institute, and if they have a suitable vacancy, they might hire their partner to make it more attractive for the academics and they can live together.
So, it was very clear that this is not...
You know, the end of civilization or he is not being hounded out of the profession.
Just that he thought it was an example of some of the dynamics that people have talked about in recent years.
But the main thing is this led to the predictable culture war storm across the Twitterverse and in the various camps.
And in this occasion, Matt, we are a podcast with a psychologist and psychologist.
A quasi-psychologist?
A psychologist?
A person that teaches in a psychology department but is yet a cognitive anthropologist.
And occasionally we venture to offer opinions on similar topics, culture war stuff.
If this is not in our ballywick, Matt, what is?
What is?
What can we pontificate on?
And this is actually our little specific niche.
You know, the very bad wizards, two psychologists, four beers.
This is our sense-making sphere, really.
That's right.
We're allowed to talk about it.
Yeah.
We're academics.
We have a podcast.
This is a situation where you'll talk in unflattering terms about DEI statements, importantly.
So these are the sort of...
Formal kinds of statements people make and job applications and things like that where they, you know, talk about their commitment to such and so and et cetera.
So, he's not talking about how he's against diversity itself.
Full stop.
Yeah.
He's not an ethno-nationalist.
No.
That's right.
And, you know.
Or is he?
I think he made the point that if something you say on a podcast three and a half years ago.
What was it?
Four and a half years ago.
A couple of years ago anyway.
Just say couple.
It's easy.
Yeah.
It's a long time ago.
If you say something quite reasonable, and I think lots of academics would agree with him, myself included, about DEI statements not being particularly useful things, then that can have professional implications for you, which I think is a shame.
I think it's a shame.
Yeah.
So, there's this.
Thing, which I think everybody who's ever applied for a job knows that you may be asked to fill in something which feels largely symbolic.
In an interview, you may be asked, can you give an example of leadership roles that you have performed?
You know, tell us about an example where you engaged in conflict resolution.
I don't know, right?
Chris, at my university, we need to, for the promotion applications, I remember we have to make a statement about how what we do at our work aligns with the, like, mission statement of the university.
Right.
So people have to look up the mission statement.
Not me, not me.
I'd internalize you.
No, you're fully aligned.
I know.
But, yeah, on the...
On one hand, there is just this aspect that, you know, when I was applying for my job as a shelf stacker at Tesco, I had to fill in various parts on a form and declare stuff.
And it's just normal.
It's a part of life.
On the other hand, it is true that specific kinds of requirements in academia seem symbolic in the sense that you learn how to...
Pass them.
Or at least it's easier for people to pass them when they come from certain educational backgrounds or cultural groups.
So typically, knowing how to write the EI statement is something that well-educated liberal people know and people from non-Western, lower-income backgrounds know less.
So in that sense, it could actually be...
Harmful if DEI statements, you know, a well-crafted DEI statement is taken as the, like, the indicator of the actual thing.
What's that thing where people describe where a marker becomes the target?
Yeah, I know what you mean.
I forget what's, I forget the...
Like citation metrics in academia, the H-index.
It's not actually supposed to be that you're seeking the number to go up.
It's the number is supposed to reflect.
The amount that your papers are influential and your research is good quality.
Yeah, so to give you an example of that, it would be totally wrong to approach a DEI statement by, for instance, enumerating...
You know, all of the good relationships you've had with people from diverse backgrounds and the successful supervision or whatever that you've done with different backgrounds.
Is it?
Yeah, that wouldn't be great.
That wouldn't be great because that's like saying, oh, I'm not racist.
Oh, my friends.
I've got some black friends.
You know, what you need to do is talk to the more theoretical, dare I say, jargony aspects of that.
Commitment to address insist.
Dematic racism and so on and so forth.
Yeah, there's a special kind of language that someone who's been enculturated in this world, as you and I are, finds quite easy.
But it might not necessarily be easy for someone who's coming from Taiwan, say, or India.
They might get it wrong.
Bodhu, Bodhu, Bodhu may have referred to it as habitus, Matt, that we have the appropriate habitus.
Yes, yes, yes.
Like a good old Victorian old boys club.
You know, you've got to be sound.
You've got to be sound.
You've got to have the right opinions.
Now, even if you disagree with that perspective and you think they actually are good at encouraging people to think about the issues, even on a relatively superficial issue, and that it's only a small gesture about the values that you want academics to promote or that kind of thing,
that's fine.
But the point is, y 'all's...
Like, Joel is not a Jordan Peterson-esque figure.
He's not.
He leans heterodox in certain respects, but in most respects, he's a fairly standard, liberal, left-wing, academic-y type person, right?
And the view painted of him in that letter, if you just read the letter that the students wrote, you would potentially view him as a Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro.
Or James Lindsay type person.
And that's not who he is.
He's much more measured and reasonable about these kind of topics.
So it is a shame if he's regarded by a significant portion of students as being beyond appeal.
Because I think that does speak to the potential for...
A roller-specific political monoculture to be developing, right?
Now, it's not across all universities.
There's conservative colleges.
It's probably more restricted to Ivy League universities.
It's not all the students who signed the letter.
There was a counter letter sent by other people.
There's been some criticisms that the letter was sent apparently at like 1:00 AM and people had to sign it by the next day before it was sent.
And most people wouldn't have had the time to do a deep dive on Yole's past episodes
So there's issues like that in terms of criticisms for the students writing the letter, but also in terms of not really regarding it as the collapse of the academic edifice.
But I just saw online, Matt, that there was the predictable divide where, you know, it's just kind of knee-jerk taken.
That you must be a baddie, right?
Like, if he starts to be promoted by one wing of the culture war, you know, Reason magazine put out stuff or FAIR are commenting on them, then for one group, he automatically becomes a baddie, right?
And the students are immediately victims being unfairly maligned by the crushing right-wing media that's going to target them and their families.
And then, on the flip side, You have, in the heterodox space, it being presented as evidence that all of their claims are vindicated.
Brett Weinstein was completely justified.
Joe Rogan is right.
You know, academia has fallen.
Now you can't even voice slight disagreements without being cast out.
And, yeah, in both cases, there is Yoel, actually, or the Very Bad Wizards podcast.
Much more marshalling in order to take, right?
Just saying, well, they don't think this is a good thing, and it does speak to the kind of political skew in academia, but it, you know, it's not the end of the world.
That's it.
And I bemoan that it has to be all or nothing, you know?
And I just think it doesn't have to be like that.
It's fine to say, I think you all should be perfectly within the Overton window in any reasonable academic field.
But him...
Not getting this position does not mean that all of academia and all educational institutions are now completely captured and you can say nothing without being hunted down by the woke apparatus and strung up.
It's mostly America, to be honest.
Yeah.
Well, surprise, surprise.
The discourse is stupid, once again.
Yeah, it is silly.
Also, I don't like the conflation.
If you say something about...
Not liking DEI statements specifically, then it means that you must be like a threat to students from diverse backgrounds.
It's like saying if you don't like company mission statements, I think that they're kind of like a bit of a waste of time, then it means you must want the business to fail.
That's a non-secondary.
Yeah, but the other thing that they highlighted was that you all kind of suggested that psychology professional organizations shouldn't.
We're taking strong political stances on controversial topics.
You can agree or disagree.
It's all right.
It's a reasonable opinion.
But people have very strong passions.
And I do think there is also this evident context collapse online where people just treat America as the default.
But the hiring procedures that are commonplace in America are not commonplace.
I don't think I've even...
To be honest, sort of partner hires here in Japan, I think is much rarer.
So, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't think we have partner hires here in Australia either.
We certainly do have something similar to DEI statements.
And, you know, it's not such a big deal.
As Yol and the Very Bad Wizards guys said, it's actually not a big deal.
They're quite happy to write them.
Yol did write one for that position.
But you can have an opinion about them.
It's okay.
And there was a thing that I found quite annoying, Matt, where there was a thread posted by an account that won't...
I didn't mention the name of, but it basically was saying, you know, I was a student who was there.
I saw you all making inappropriate comments and complaining the fact that it would be about problematic students and so on and so forth.
And this thread was shared around saying, look, there are other perspectives available.
You know, don't take you all's account for granted, which fair enough.
But then it turned out that that thread was written by someone who wasn't actually.
At the meetings, they clarified that when they said I was there, they just meant they attend the university and they had heard second-hand accounts or whatever.
And then a lot of people, you know, just kind of skid over that and said, well, it doesn't really matter.
You know, the point is just that you should be critical.
I'm like, come on, come on.
It's okay to just say, no, that's...
You know, they made it clear, which was a lie, in essence.
And it's okay to say, that's right.
Even if you still disagree with y 'all, you could just say, yeah, but somebody claiming to be somewhere and not be there, that's actually bad.
So, yeah, it's not the end of the world.
And just to be clear as well, I want to make this really clear.
We've said this a hundred times, or at least I have, but my position has always been that there is Issues on campuses in academia about a kind of left-wing skew,
especially in certain disciplines.
And it is not the case that all of the campus outrage stories are completely unfounded.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't constant ginning up and hyperbolic catastrophizing about...
What in many cases are fairly marginal protests over a particular speaker or so on.
So like, no, it is not true that none of it is happening, that it's all just a fantasy invention.
But no, it is not true that James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson are completely vindicated.
The two things can be both true.
Don't you think?
Isn't that okay?
Yes, you're right.
Very nuanced.
Is that us out now that we've stated this?
We're going to get this brought up in years to come.
Welcome to the IDW, Chris.
Yeah, well, so there was that unedifying spectacle online.
But Matt, I have another more guru-related topic to discuss with you.
Go ahead.
It concerns...
An old friend of ours, religious icon carver and Jordan Peterson orbiting minor guru, Jonathan Pajot.
You familiar with his work, Matt?
Oh, I always know it's going to be something good when Pajot is mentioned.
Yeah, he's in the demons and he is saying that we need to put stocks into necromancers.
Necromancers are the things that people are...
I'm not discussing enough.
And then that leads to a crisis and monsters.
It leads to giants and monsters and there are all these interesting tech...
Traditions that are not in the Bible, but they talk about how in the time of Cain, they made alliances with these demons and then created hybrids and mixture and all kinds of kind of monstrosities and also necromancy and everything.
Because it's like people better start thinking about necromancy really fast because people think that that's a silly thing.
And necromancy is right on our, it's right there.
It's like standing right in front of us right now.
So we have to start thinking about these old things that nobody wanted to think about anymore.
Anyways, that's a little parenthesis.
So basically, necromancy and all this kind of chaos, and also women putting on makeup.
It all comes together, right?
You talk about Mammon and Aphrodite and all that.
And that leads to the end of the world, right?
It literally leads to the end of the world.
But does he mean conceptual necromancers or literal necromancers?
I'm guessing it's not quite clear.
Matt, what a reductionist point of view.
You reductionist just wants to constantly put things into your...
Is it real or is it not real bracket?
That's so reductionist.
Just enjoy the mystery, okay?
That's all.
But I'm not going to talk about his particular declaration about necromancers.
We'll get to that.
But I want to talk about numerology.
What do you know about numerology, Matt?
How would you describe numerology if I just put you on the spot right now?
Well, I think it's, you know, using...
Patterns and numbers that signify important things.
I guess using numbers like their tarot cards.
Is that basically it?
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
I like that.
Yeah, maybe patterns off numbers or patterns in numbers, numeric patterns.
So here's Jonathan Pazzo, and this is a clip that he promoted on his Twitter feed discussing the number of the beast, 666.
Have a listen to this.
You have to understand the way the ancients thought.
Creation was six days, and then there was the day of rest.
The years of Noah were 600 years, and then there was the flood.
And the whole world lasts 6,000 years, and then it's the end of the world.
So you have to understand it that way.
That is, the six is related to the notion of...
Man.
The sixth day of creation.
That's the key to understanding 666, is to understand it to the sixth day of creation.
The symbolism of six has to do with a kind of fullness of creation.
The fullness of the six days, the complete cycle is seven days, but that completeness includes rest.
Seven represents completeness.
Six represents a kind of perfection of work.
The six is the days of work.
That is why the symbolism of six and the symbol is not a dark symbolism.
It's actually a symbolism of light.
There are reasons why, for example, the devil is represented as an angel of light is because it is the pride of light.
It is the pride of work.
It is the pride of accomplishment of creation.
Okay.
Yep.
That made perfect sense.
Yeah.
So, religious tomfoolery, perhaps, but a particular brand.
And I pointed out that this is numerology.
Almost by definition, it's symbolically interpreting references to numbers in holy texts.
And Peugeot did not respond well to that.
But I wanted to highlight this as an example, Matt, because that...
It's a very dense, symbolic form of numerology, like a religiously inclined type of numerology.
And people get value from it.
Some people get value from it.
But just one point to relate to the actual content there.
I was looking into the number 666, and there's been some discoveries of fragments of earlier versions of...
Parchments or things that reference this particular part of the Bible.
And it seems that in some of the earliest fragments, it looks like the number was 616.
But the thing is, it doesn't actually matter, right?
But just imagine that if the number was off because of a translation and you're waxing lyrical about how it's because it's all the sixes and there has to be three sixes.
And actually, oh, it's just a mistranslation.
So it's unified in one.
Well, that's good because one, right?
One is also unity, right?
One is unity.
It symbolizes the integration of the spirit and the soul and the passion of the Christ.
Yeah.
Hang on.
So 666, the number of the beasts, right?
This is the thing that got invited, right?
And he's sort of pointing out that's kind of a bad thing, maybe, because it's pride, because it's the pride of...
All of the work that you've done in six days.
Yeah, but also it's good because six days of work and then the day of rest is coming.
So, yeah.
I mean, Matt, does it matter?
It doesn't matter.
For the sense maker religious type, this matters a great deal, but it doesn't matter for our purposes because I'm going to show you a different example.
This is from a different source.
It's actually a piece of fiction, Matt.
But as Jordan Peterson often says, is fiction not true?
Is there no truth in fiction?
He might focus on famous texts and philosophical treatises.
I'm going to reference Nicolas Cage's movie National Treasure.
And what you'll hear is like blowing a hairdryer on a document which reveals some numbers.
And let's just listen to this.
It's not a math.
Is it?
More clues.
What a surprise.
Those latitudes and longitudes?
That's why we need the Silence Do Good letters.
That's the key?
The key in silence, undetected.
Tack, can we have the letters now?
Will somebody please explain to me what these magic numbers are?
It's an Ottendorf cipher.
That's right.
Oh, okay.
What's an Ottendorf cipher?
It's just codes.
Each of these three numbers corresponds to a word and a key.
Usually a random book or a newspaper article.
In this case, the Silence Do-Good letters.
So it's like the page number of the key text, the line on the page, and the letter in that line.
So, Dad, where are the letters?
Okay.
So, you know, the Nicolas Cage also there.
You know, it's not as dense with symbology, but trust me, the whole movie, Matt, if you watch the whole movie, there's plenty of symbology to go on.
And the same thing as the Da Vinci Code, right?
The Dan Brown.
Look at the shape of the picture of The Last Supper.
There's a triangle in that.
And if you point the triangle at the top of the pyramid, you'll see that it reflects the light from the moon of Jupiter or whatever.
I remember when The Da Vinci Code came out.
It was a supremely popular book.
And I also remember a lot of people taking it extremely seriously.
Yeah.
That was people...
Learning.
It should have been an introduction to statistics, right?
Because part of the thing about the DaVinci Code was people started looking for Bible codes, which are people taking the texts and looking for patterns in the letters, depending on how you arrange them, or if you count every X amount of letters and stuff.
But what they should learn is if you fish enough, you can find...
Patterns.
Human mind can find patterns in a random assortment of numbers or letters.
And sometimes, this is a confusing thing, it's the thing which confused Michael Shermer.
Sometimes there are actual codes in the world.
People actually use ciphers.
They write things in secret that they don't want other people to know, and they write in lemon juice.
Yeah, so what you're saying is that anything could be a cipher, and we need to take them seriously.
Right, so should we criticize numerology?
Because is it not true that people have disguised messages with numbers?
No, they do do that, but that doesn't mean that numerology is not a problem, just like conspiracy theories are.
A problem.
And I have one final clip that brings it all together.
And sadly, this actually is somebody who just passed away very recently, was in a motorcycle accident and died, the person that we're going to hear.
That's a tragedy.
He, however, was the leader of an exploitative QAnon cult.
So...
Sweet game.
Karma.
Karma.
Yeah, it might be real, I'll just say.
But yes, this is a figure called Negative 48. And the audio quality isn't great, but...
You know, there's this thing that people do where they attribute a number to a letter.
So like A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, right?
And you add up the letters in the word and then equate that to some mystical number.
This is in lots of esoteric religious traditions do this as well, depending on the language.
So this is what they do, but it's with Trump tweets and QAnon.
Statements.
And you'll hear it.
So this is this negative 48 guy doing that for some of his followers.
We're going from 3D to 5D.
Which happens right here.
Weakness, 97. Popcorn, 97. Thank you, 115.
Thank you, 115.
Very much, 115, 345.
Do you have your popcorn ready, 345?
That's not what Donald Trump was really saying.
He said, do you have your weakness ready, 345, for a download?
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's him.
So adding up, making those magic numbers from the words in a Trump tweet, and then because it's got the same number as something else.
It is amazing, isn't it?
What people will do.
Humans are incredible creatures, right?
We're just astounding.
We're astounding.
And I will draw a continuum from what we heard Pajou do at the start to this.
I think Pajot's version is more intellectual and less overtly silly.
But fundamentally, the mechanism underneath is just making these connections between numbers and symbols and symbols and numbers and forging that as if because we can make the connections and there's different numbers connected to different symbols that this creates a kind of cosmic connection when...
Does it?
Or is it just numbers?
Yeah, no, there are some Christian sex cults or whatever that make a whole business out of doing this, this complicated numeric system to determine cross-references within the Bible, which allows them to sort of cut the whole thing up and imagine it as like a choose-your-own-adventure where you have to read it in terms of connections to some other random spot,
essentially, in the Bible.
And, you know, the mechanism is exactly the same.
Have a bit of a system which gives you a huge number of degrees of freedom and then that allows you to turn a text or some sort of stimulus into a happy hunting ground for any kind of story that you like.
And it is tremendously fun, I suppose, in a way.
I can see the appeal of hunting through the thing and trying all the different permutations and then finding one that sort of gels with you and feels like right and going, bingo!
What we like is the image from A Beautiful Mind or from the Dan Brown cinematic version where the symbologist is seeing all these images floating in the sky and connecting them together in his mind and then revealing the hidden truth.
And it's a nice image and it has aspects of truth to it in the way that people can make imaginative.
Which are actually meaningful and think metaphorically and all of these kind of things that we do.
But it is also the thing which people who have mental illnesses do or people who don't have mental illnesses but are just particularly prone to speculative and conspiracy-driven cognition,
right?
Yeah.
It is too genuine intellectual work as a hamster.
Running on a little wheel is to running a marathon.
Yeah, because like our sense makers, the general rule is you don't say no.
You look for the part that you can take some truth from or some validity.
Maybe all of it isn't true, but maybe some part speaks to you.
If the numbers aren't exactly right, what does it matter?
You're just using them as a stimulus for your religious message, your conspiracy theory, or your QAnon cult.
Whatever it is.
Like, yeah, when you look at a cloud, don't you see a cloud?
Maybe you see like a sausage dog made out of balloons.
Or an octopus.
Or an octopus.
Yeah, and if it doesn't quite fit, you know, look a bit more carefully.
Mind you take a different angle, you fucking reductionist bastards.
So, the last thing that I'll mention for this week's short introduction segment, I just have to do an update on my unspecified Green concoction that I've been taking to reduce my coffee consumption.
Now, I just want to mention, Matt, that I suggested that what harm can those things ultimately do?
They're just giving you vitamins and stuff anyway.
So, like, if it's all placebo, what's the issue?
I subsequently became aware, I kind of knew this, I think, from somewhere, but that, like...
I'll learn multivitamin stuff.
These concoctions tend to go a bit overboard in their dosages of the stuff that they put in.
They seem to follow the principle that less is not more.
You want more.
So, the percentage of vitamin E provided, for example, from a single serving, is over 500% the daily recommended intake.
And now, in general, You know, your body can deal with that.
It just passes it out, right?
Although it depends on the type of vitamins because there are some that are less amenable to being passed easily and are stored as fat or whatever.
But in any case, I did start to see when I poked around that there are some concerns about various green drinks, just as there were with multivitamins, that they're potentially causing Liver issues for people,
because as your body is struggling to remove, you know, the excess material, if you had some liver problems or, you know, a genetic inherited propensity towards liver disease or something, this could be just an exacerbating factor.
So I retract my statement that, you know, what's the potential harm?
And I know I'm thinking...
Well, why can't they just stick to 100% the dose, Matt?
Why do they have to go up into these multiples of recommended daily alliances?
Can you explain that for me?
Why do they do that?
I don't understand it, but that's a deal breaker for me, Chris.
If you want to ruin your liver, do it in a more fun way.
Drink whiskey rather than drinking a disgusting green concoction.
Might as well get some benefit out of it.
So I'm just saying, you know, given the amount of people that are taking these drinks and there hasn't been like a massive influx of liver disease or whatever, it's probably, you know, like a relative moderate impact.
But I did see discussions and some papers and some anecdotal accounts on various people reporting about having elevated liver function tests and then stopping supplementation and then going back to normal.
Yeah, that's not what I want, Ma.
I mention all this because I'm somebody with an inherited liver thing.
And it doesn't cause me general problems, but it just means I need to be a little bit careful.
You know, risk factors and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, so the thing I don't want is some daily drink that will feed stress of my fucking liver.
So yeah, be careful out there.
Be careful out there.
Don't take health advice, dietary advice from unlicensed anthropologists.
No!
Put the green drink down, people.
I know you've all been influenced by Chris.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
I'm just going to get back to drinking sweet coffee.
It's going to turn out to be the less lethal concoction that I should be consuming.
Yeah, yeah.
Thanks for the update.
Health advice done.
More interesting than the nuts.
Do you have anything else for us in this introduction, Chris?
I do, Matt, but I want to keep it brief.
I want to keep it tight.
So we'll turn now to the man of the hour, and it's always man, isn't it?
But we have a former guest of the show.
Mick West, a science writer, skeptical investigator, and ex-video game programmer, who we recently had on to talk about UFOs.
And he is having a discussion with a guru we've covered once or twice in the past.
His name has cropped up.
A guy called Eric Weinstein.
That rings a bell.
Yeah, he used to work for Tail Capital.
Does not anymore.
He's like a freelance, freewheeling intellectual.
You might have seen him online, Matt, you know, providing insight.
So, yes, Eric Weinstein in conversation with Mick West for a YouTube channel which was called Theories of Everything with Kurt Jai-Mungle.
That's what it is.
And the topic is UAPs, Evidence, and Skepticism.
So, it's been a while.
Since we've been in the Weinstein Bros backyard, here we are again, ready to kick over the lawn ornaments and poke around the mole holes.
Let's stick it up and see what we can find.
Mole burrows.
Those are things that people have in their garden sometimes, I guess.
In the UK, I think.
Yeah, that's a UK thing.
It's not a UK thing.
I've never seen a mulberry, but I fought them.
Anyway, whatever you've got in your garden.
And according to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, there's scorpions in people's gardens.
So I don't know what's going on in people's gardens.
So let's just keep that in mind.
The metaphor is falling apart.
It's gone.
It's gone too deep.
We need to pull back.
So we're going to look at their two and a half hour, two and a half hour conversation.
Which we've clipped up for you people.
We do this for you, okay?
You wanted it.
The patrons voted on it.
This is what we've got.
And then this is the first in a two-part because we're next going to look at how Brett deals with UFOs.
But first, Eric.
First, Eric.
Okay, let's do it.
So the first clip, Matt, is the host introducing the topic that will be discussed today.
He can probably do a better job than us.
See how this shakes out.
Here's him doing that.
Today's theolocution involves Eric Weinstein and Mick West on the topic of the evidence of UFOs, as well as the relationship between skeptics, debunkers, disclosure, the public perception and scientific inquiry.
Eric Weinstein is the inventor of geometric unity, a proposed theory of everything, as well as being an advocate for UFO disclosure.
Did he say today's theolocation?
Theolocution, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know what that means.
It's a sense-making term.
Anyway, Eric is the inventor of geometric unity, which does claim to be a theory of everything.
So this is all right so far.
And it wouldn't be a proper sense-making environment if you didn't have stuff like this.
Why don't we start with...
Mick, what is it that you respect about Eric?
And then, Eric, what is it that you respect about Mick?
Yeah.
We'll save you guys from having to listen to that.
Imagine that.
I would hate to turn up to a podcast and have to go, okay, now it's like play school.
Now I'm going to talk about the things that I like about you, Chris.
I like your hair.
Say three things that are nice about Matt.
Yeah, it is.
It's like the most cringe team-building corporate exercise.
You can imagine.
Well, but aren't we just cynical bastards, Matt?
Isn't that our problem?
Yes, we are.
We're not built for the sense-making world.
Though, in saying that, I've done many hours talking to sense-makers and they never, you know, they always find me perfectly delightful to deal with.
So, you know, just saying.
Just saying.
Now, Matt, so, after that invitation, we have...
Eric helpfully framing a little bit of the dynamic that we're going to hear reoccurring.
If you don't know who Mick West is, you will hear him crop up in these clips, but you should go listen to the interview we did with him.
That's a good overview of his character.
But he's a pretty...
What's the way to describe Mick?
Straight ahead?
Yeah, yeah.
He's honest.
He is what he says he is.
And he speaks clearly about what he wants to say.
He doesn't...
Speaking riddles or subterfuge.
And he's, you know, he's quite clear about it, what his motivations and interests in the topic are.
And yet, Matt, yet, when Mick introduces himself here and kind of explains why he is moving away a little bit from the debunking title, we'll see that this proves to be extremely confusing for Eric.
I've decided to remove that from my Twitter profile and...
Just focus on being a skeptical investigator who does sometimes end up debunking things.
But debunking isn't a label.
A debunker isn't really a label that I would actively use.
Eric, what's the salutary role for skepticism?
And do you see Mick as being a proponent of that?
I'm confused by Mick.
And I don't understand Mick.
But consider that I really haven't been out here for very long.
In UFO territory.
It's not a region of the world, the intellectual landscape that I expected to visit or spend any time in.
Yeah, that's something that finds him so confusing, because he didn't confuse me.
I felt like I understood what he was doing, why he was doing it, pretty quickly.
Yeah, and you'll notice that that's Eric saying that he finds Mick confusing, right?
So, you know, if we're keeping a little tally here, Of how many people have said slightly disparaging things.
Like, this isn't disparaging yet, necessarily, but it's hinting at Mick's role being perhaps not all that he says it is.
And in any case, you also hear there that two things which are going to recur.
Eric explaining that this is an area he hasn't been interested in.
He's new to it.
He's like a babe in the woods.
He's come into it and he's completely opened all opinions and ideas.
He doesn't come with presuppositions.
So, you know, just treat him as a good thief novice walking around the meadow.
And that simultaneously he's a bit concerned about something, right?
Some things have got him confused and out of shape about what's going on in this space.
So we will see.
Eric adopting the role of something, of a knight in shining armor for the UFO community.
And that's because, Matt.
And this is where I start to get into my issue, which is I really don't like the personal destruction of individuals who are trying to sort out fact from fiction and type 1 versus type 2 error in incredible and preposterous stories that are clearly not true.
And incredible and preposterous stories that are absolutely true.
And the debunking energy of this is fun, it's a hobby, it's a pastime with other people on the other side of this who are not bunco artists, who've come to believe things.
Some of those things may be completely false.
Some of those things may be confusions.
Some of those things may be true, and we're going to call them false because they're actually...
Part of a storyline.
For example, you could easily imagine in the UFO case that we would use a UFO cover story to disguise the testing of stealth technology before anyone knew that we were working on it.
And if so, if I see a giant black wedge in the sky that looks like no airplane ever, you know, and was thin as a pancake, I would be in need of debunking simply because the government had created a bunco story.
Yeah.
So the motivation for this interview is an interesting one.
It seems like, as we'll hear throughout this debate, Eric has a real problem with Mick.
He feels that Mick is part of a community that is ridiculing and attacking.
Good faith people like him that are trying to figure out the difference between the absurd and crazy stories that are definitely untrue and the absurd and crazy stories that are definitely true.
He refers to their interactions on Twitter.
So, with a bit of your help, I searched up those Twitter conversations, Chris, and read through them, read through all of the interactions between Nick West and Eric.
Were they enjoyable?
Yes, I enjoyed them.
Fascinating.
And Nick West, this is an important context, is perfectly civil.
Actually, imagine the opposite of your Twitter behavior, Chris.
Nick West is basically that.
So, yeah, it was just interesting to contrast that with the kind of sense of aggrievement that Eric projects through this debate.
Yeah, in general, there's a fairly consistent double standard applied by Eric in every single thing that he does, but in particular in this conversation.
So let's see a little bit of Eric discussing their interactions and how they've made him feel.
Well, let me ask you a question.
I don't have the sense that there's any real reason for any animosity between you and myself, to be honest, at all.
No.
Why do I have the takeaway of what are you doing in my timeline again?
In other words, I would imagine...
That in a slightly different world, universe A prime rather than A where we live, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic.
Sure.
We're scientists, scientific-type people who have a natural skepticism of things.
Okay, so I didn't come looking for you, and then multiple times you've sort of entered in, and you're talking in specific about Lou Alessandro and...
Somebody who I think I've never mentioned the name Chris Mellon.
I hope I'm...
Yeah, Chris Mellon.
I can't remember everybody's name.
He's a government official who's part of the whole Invisible College type thing.
Okay.
So what is it that you perceive me as doing that needs to be sort of minded?
Well, you make bold declarative statements about this, you know, that this is a huge deal.
So, you heard it there as well, Matt.
Like, for some reason when Eric does these things, it's kind of like a sovereign gentleman sipping on his sweet tea or whatever, saying, you know, I just noticed you, you know, coming across my territory while I was just out here shooting the breeze,
enjoying myself on the porch.
Like, he was on Twitter.
Making these big claims about UFOs.
And Mick, who's somebody who's dedicated years to looking at the topic, you know.
He did to reply to the tweets.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric is a master of passive aggression.
I don't see why we should be enemies.
I mean, why are you attacking me?
Why do I feel unhappy when you're around?
It's like if you're in a relationship with someone who talks like that, then, yeah, you should get out.
It's just that sense of grievance emanating.
It's hard to overstate.
So Mick there explains the reason.
And he also highlights this, I think, very significant point about why, in particular, Eric would be somebody that might get pushed back when they make statements.
I can't remember exactly what you said, but I think you were something along those lines.
And I think at the time, I was basically saying what I am saying now, that it is more complicated than that.
And the reason I interacted with you, and I probably wouldn't with just some random person, is that you have reach.
You've got a lot of followers.
You've got a very popular podcast.
You've written books.
You're quite well known.
And people take what you said, and you become a hero within the UFO community, and they listen to what you said.
So I feel it needs addressing.
Eric's written a book.
I haven't gotten a copy.
It's a secret invisible book.
Sorry.
He explains his motivations pretty well.
And Eric does make extremely strong claims about UFOs, about government conspiracies, about the government is either lying or trying to keep something hidden.
Mick West is someone who's specialized in debunking or skeptical inquiry of UFOs for quite a few years now.
So that's why they've run into each other and that's why Eric has a bit of grievance here because Mick has been bursting his bubble a little bit.
Yeah, and there's an early interaction that I think bears highlighting for the dynamic that we're going to hear.
Play over and over again in the clips.
And it's when Mick is describing his kind of interest in this topic and why he is involved with it.
And he describes it vastly.
I kind of settled down, in a way, on this UFO thing because it's so...
Interesting in terms of the mathematics, the geometry, and the physics.
Very simple physics, just simple Newtonian stuff, linear algebra and things like that.
It's nothing complicated, but it's stuff that I used in my previous career.
And so I kind of enjoy flexing those muscles.
And recently I've been enjoying flexing my muscles programming simulations.
And I do also enjoy the interactions with people.
I like talking to people.
I like talking to people who believe, and people who used to believe, and to a certain degree, talking to skeptics.
Okay.
So there, Mark.
Any problem with anything Mick said there?
I feel like Mick was pretty clear there.
He described it just like he described it to us, which is, you know, it's a hobby.
It's an intriguing hobby, which is a mental challenge and allows him to explore all the technical issues involved in cameras.
Perspective and physics of light and all of that stuff.
Get a mental workout, as he described.
I think you missed something, Mark.
Eric's going to...
Trying to figure out who's active in trying to bunk things that needs to be debunked, who's confused, who needs to be made unconfused, and who is saying that they're seeing something that needs to be followed up and not necessarily having their reputation destroyed because somebody wants to,
in your own words, flex.
I don't find the flexing fun.
I didn't say flex.
You did say flex.
I don't...
Well, it's not a word I actually use, so...
Did you not say something about flexing your own...
Oh, flexing my muscles, but it's not like flex, as in like, you know, showboating, flexing.
You did say flexing.
Yes, I know, but for me, flexing actually means the same thing as stretching or exercising.
Okay, but right now, I just went through exactly one of these moments where I tried to remember something you'd said, and then you told me that you don't use that as a phrase, and I happened to be able to recall it.
Yes, but in the sense that you meant...
I understand.
No?
Yeah.
I think you did say it in the original sense, from which the internet term flex comes from.
So I don't think that's even correct.
So my point to you is I don't enjoy the feeling in my body right now, which is I've just contradicted you.
You assured me that that's not a term that you use.
We had perhaps at most a misunderstanding.
But the feeling of somebody saying, no, you're wrong, and thinking that that's fun, your initial description of your activities is a hobby.
I don't much care for this as a hobby.
If it's a duty, because the world is going to be filled up with nonsense, I actually appreciate that.
I want to be very clear about that.
But the fun of interacting with people, many of whom are scared.
I've seen people.
Close to and filled with tears.
I've seen people who feel that their lives have been destroyed because they have made contact with something that they can't talk about.
Yeah.
There's so much there, Matt.
You're such a gaslighting little freak.
I'm sorry, but that's so annoying.
Yeah.
It's just so duplicitous to pretend that Mick meant flexing, as in if people are not familiar with...
I flex on you.
Weird flex.
Yeah, the weird flex.
This is internet lingo for showing off and big noting yourself and making yourself out to be special.
That is clearly not the way in which Mick meant it.
Eric is smart enough to know the difference between that and he pretends to take it differently and feels like he's scored a hit on Mick.
And then when Mick sort of doesn't...
Doesn't associate those two meanings, which is quite an easy mistake to make.
He feels like he's pinned Mick, and Mick has made another error.
He's got him because he's denied the truth that Eric has so rightly pointed out.
It's such an example of bad faith argumentation.
It's exactly the kind of thing that...
Eric and all of his friends accuse others of doing, right?
Of like leaping on incidental points that are actually irrelevant to what's been made.
And to be clear, like you said, Mick said, I don't use flex.
It's not a term I use because he doesn't use the internet lingo version of it.
So he didn't recognize.
And then when Eric pointed the example, he says, oh yeah, well, but I meant like stretching, you know, like using my muscle.
And Eric acknowledges it.
Half and says, but that is still the word from which the internet version derives from.
So you were.
And like, no, that's wrong, Eric.
He was using it in a different context and without that meaning.
That's why I didn't recognize it.
And then Eric's shift to my bodily sensation of discomfort at you correcting me when I know.
That I'm saying something that is true.
And like, no, Eric, you're not saying something that is true.
That's the problem.
You're misinterpreting.
And then you're getting all upset because Mick doesn't immediately defer to you and your interpretation.
And he kind of saying, yes, we do have a disagreement.
That's fine.
And move on.
But Eric just takes it as such a, like, well, this has revealed your true colors, hasn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, we'll hear more examples of this, but Eric's approach throughout this interview is very much a textbook case of manipulative passive aggression, where he'll flip between, you know, we could be friends, you know, we could get on well together if, you know, I want to believe that we can get along,
but you are doing wrong.
You need to shape up and do better.
It's very manipulative.
And yeah, Mick, to his credit, by the way, we don't play too many clips from Mick on this because we're decoding Eric, not Mick.
He doesn't respond to it.
He deals with it as well as any normal person can, I think, which is to mainly ignore it.
But he is ultimately a person who is trying to speak honestly and straightforwardly to someone like Eric.
And it does come across like a person grappling with a python.
That's the image that I have.
A big bullet jelly.
And also, again, you hear the reference to Eric just as concerned about the people who've had their lives destroyed over simply talking about their UFO experiences.
And the heavy implication throughout, although he, as usual, does not have the guts to come out and say it straightforwardly, is that Mick West is personally responsible for this destruction.
Of individuals, for ridiculing them and destroying their lives.
And he'll sometimes kind of imply that that's related to Mick or he'll say that it's other people in the community and so on.
But it's just the constant framing of himself as the representative of victims who are being attacked while he, in this interview, is being constantly passive-aggressive and insulting.
So anyway, let's play another example and you can hear more of it.
When I'm talking about fun, I'm talking about things like geometry and programming and figuring out what's in this video.
And those things should be things that are essentially neutral from a personal perspective.
I know some people don't like it.
But I try to always keep that personal aspect of it separate.
I enjoy talking to people just simply from the interactions with people, but I'm always very sensitive to people's feelings.
I haven't enjoyed our interactions.
Well, that's perhaps, you know, my interaction style could do with some improvement.
But, you know, when I said...
Undoubtedly, mine could as well, and I look forward to improving.
I haven't blocked you.
I'm just saying that the feeling I've had...
Is I was effectively lied to, that there was absolutely no there there.
I believed it.
What are you referring to?
The idea...
I thought that, in essence, the entire UFO story could just be dismissed with the back of a hand that this was complete nonsense.
Yeah, again, the implication, Eric hasn't enjoyed their interactions, and the implication is this is something for Mick to fix.
Yeah, and there's a half-hearted, well, maybe, yeah, I could improve too, but Eric doesn't in any part emphasize that, right?
It's not about him.
He is the consummate gentleman.
Mick is the one ruining his day with his skepticism.
And that other thing about...
Eric presenting it as, he dismissed UFOs out of hand for so long, and now he's realized there's something to it.
I'm very curious about that framing, because as long as I've heard Eric in public commentary in the couple of years since he's been around, I have never heard him.
Offhand, dismiss UFOs.
He's always framed that, Building 7, various other conspiracy theories, as things that are too readily dismissed.
So, like, I'm wondering when was this period of dismissal that he had?
Because it doesn't seem to have been when he was in the public eye.
Yeah, I think this is a valuable debate, interview, whatever, to analyze because it's more than just pointing out.
The kind of person that Eric is.
Because when you look at what he says and how he says it, almost everything is geared towards self-presentation.
How he frames things and how he presents himself in the role.
Whereas you take when a relatively normal person like Mick is talking about a topic, he's interested in the topic, right?
He'll make a bunch of factual statements.
He'll be talking about UFOs, a bunch of details.
He knows an awful lot about it and he's very interested in it and is ready to talk about it.
Eric actually has far less interest in the actual details of the evidence for and against this particular UFO thing or that one.
He's got a great deal of interest.
In self-presentation.
And I think this is a way in which Eric is in many ways a consummate internet guru.
If you want to see an example of him, what I think is a good example of the kind of just asking questions but also leaving yourself enough room to present it as you're not actually endorsing anything,
right?
It's all...
You've just noticed patterns, and isn't there a reason to be suspicious here?
Eric's very good at that, so listen to this.
I don't think I have any particular history of, oh, didn't you understand in the Go Fast video this, but on the Nimitz video, such and such, and Fravor said this, but Lazar said that.
This whole world, I'm just not even a part of.
I know that there's somebody with the last name of Greer.
I couldn't tell you the first name.
I don't know whether they're pro or anti.
I'm really not part of this world.
What I have learned is that the amount of indirect evidence that something is up, and something I have to say, when I say something, I don't mean little green men, and I mean little green men not as little or green or men,
but just as the phrase to aliens.
Yeah.
It's like, what could be up could easily be just a disinformation campaign.
It could be a cover for a stealth program.
There's something up.
And I don't need to please you to tell you what weights are on the branches of the decision tree.
I simply need to say, boy, was I confused.
Confused, Matt.
He's very confused.
Very confused.
On one hand, he's very interested in this topic.
He's got very strong opinions about...
What Mick should and shouldn't be doing and has come to some strong conclusions that definitely something is up, right?
It's a disinformation campaign.
There's some kind of gaslighting by the government.
All of these technologies and physics beyond our ken.
Something is up.
That's right.
But he doesn't know anything about it.
He's just a newcomer.
He doesn't know any of these people.
Actually, I believe him.
That's the one thing that I do believe him.
He actually doesn't know a great deal of the details of this topic.
But that doesn't stop him from having a very strong stance.
I think the mention of those names and stuff, it's kind of starting the dual purpose of being like, well, I don't know the details, but he's mentioning names that illustrate that he isn't a complete...
He has no idea, right?
Because it would be like saying, you know, I'm an amateur of psychology.
Sure, you know, I've heard of Jung and Freud and Milgram, and I could talk about Zimbardo, but I don't know how they...
But just doing that already implies that you actually have a bit of knowledge about the topic, right?
That you can read off psychologists' names.
Yeah, as always, there's just a kind of...
A cloud.
A melange, yeah.
And a cloud of ideas.
And in any case, that cloud might have sounded like, as Eric said, there's something there, but he can't quite pick out the contours.
Like, something is afoot, but what is it?
But at other times, it does seem like he's suggesting the...
The weights on the various branches of the trees are pushing down towards certain conclusions.
The thing that goes in the other direction, though, is just how much indirect evidence there is that something has been going on and how willing we've been to destroy people who've been willing to poke at this.
And if you believe that the direct evidence argument is effectively A pretty good argument that nothing's here because so many of us have cameras.
It's kind of amazing that nobody ever captures something that's really, really convincing.
That doesn't make sense to me.
If you believe that story, you've got a big problem with the level of indirect evidence.
If you believe the indirect evidence, you have the reverse problem.
For God's sakes, why is there no absolutely crystal clear data set that has slipped into the public's hands?
Whatever your resolution to that puzzle is, I'm usually in the position where I come up with too many explanations.
This is one of the only topics I've ever met where a creative brain can't come up with a single explanation to fit all these data.
So Eric returns to this line of thinking a few times in the interview.
So Chris, help me summarize it.
It's his point of view.
Yes, it acknowledges that there is very little firm, direct evidence of UFOs.
On the other hand, there is reams of indirect evidence.
Now, the indirect evidence is people who have claimed to have had an experience with UFOs or people that have claimed to have had access to documents that...
show that the US government has alien vessels or something like that.
That's, I think, what he means by indirect evidence.
And he can't marry these things up.
There has to be a stunning, a non-mundane explanation for this.
He doesn't consider the possibility that actually the weak or the indirect evidence is simply unreliable.
That seems to be his epistemic here.
Yes, and we get to hear quite a lot of How his epistemics function, like how he decides what's good information and compelling.
And personal testimony will feature heavily, also known as anecdotal evidence.
And here's him introducing some of that.
This is going to come up a lot.
I have been told by multiple people who do not strike me as charlatans.
I only wish you'd seen what we have because we're wasting time in this conversation.
So Vic's telling, yeah, the idea there was because he recognizes this gambit, right?
The people always saying, if you could see the evidence that we've seen, you would have no doubts about diversity.
Eric's frequently repeated, I guess, defense of this point of view is that these people don't seem crazy to me.
And I don't believe that they're lying.
They don't seem to me like they're lying.
In other words, they're not wearing their underpants on their head and ranting and raving.
They are speaking in a way that conveys a high degree of conviction.
And for Eric, this is pretty sufficient.
Let's hear a little bit more of Eric on the importance of hearsay.
One of the things that I did was consult with some people about the safety issues of This UFO stuff.
And they said things that I wasn't really prepared for.
One of which a particular individual said to me, there is absolute tissue damage that we can record that comes out of stories of encounters.
And you make what you want of the encounter story, but it is completely consistent with Our biopsies and our understanding of what cell death has occurred,
which I found really interesting.
Someone told them there was irrefutable biological evidence that is highly consistent with their interpretations.
This actual evidence isn't available?
No, it is not.
It is available.
They've done it, and they have it, and their analyses said that it's there, you know?
So I'm sure there are people that have done, because, you know, when Mick was talking to us, he was talking about, you know, little shards of metal.
Yeah, isotopes and so on.
Yeah, somebody's done the analysis somewhere and they told someone else about the results.
And maybe you actually do have material, but it's just all these, you know, it's like the same thing as the friggin' Shroud of Turin or the cloth of Padre Pio, right?
Whatever the case might be.
But that's the thing, Chris.
I mean, sorry to butt in with a bit of...
Analysis, such judgment here.
But in case it's not obvious to people, that framing that Eric puts forward in support of giving a lot of credence to these UFO stories, you would have to apply exactly the same logic to, like you said, people seeing the face of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, or people seeing ghosts.
There are at least as many personal first-hand experiences of people seeing ghosts, and I'm sure many of them will recount their experience.
In a very sober way, they won't be wearing their underpants on their head, and they will tell you in very clear, in no uncertain terms, that they absolutely had a personal close-up contact with a bona fide ghost.
Well, you know, Matt, it's not just Eric that finds those kind of accounts convincing.
As we know, philosophers also are prone to be swayed by the way of eyewitness accounts with similar features, Matt.
They're similar features in all different cultures.
So, you know, there's no real compelling alternative explanation for that.
So Eric finds that kind of stuff.
There are alternative complaint explanations, by the way.
And like you said, but in large part, it relates to the status of the people that Eric has spoken to.
I have heard many of these stories now from pretty sober people.
And I would never have heard any of these stories until I was willing to make myself stupidly vulnerable.
To this topic, saying, geez, I thought this was all BS.
Having now opened myself to that, I cannot explain how many highly conserved stories I've heard from various people that don't show any interest in being public, don't seem to be happy about the fact that they have pieces of information that distress them.
There's a few things to unpack there.
First of all, the self-presentation thing, another example of this.
Bravely exposed himself to reputational destruction by taking this stuff seriously, which is very brave of him.
Good on you, Eric.
The other thing is, you know, people that are long-time listeners will know that Eric will never choose a simple way of saying something when a fancy way of saying it is available.
He even made Little Green Man complicated earlier, right?
Mac was like, Elliot's Elliot's act.
Because things sound less stupid when you beat around the bush and abstractify a bit.
What does highly conserved mean?
Like if you said a highly conserved story.
I understand.
Yeah, it means transmitted with elements that are consistent or that don't change.
So degradation.
The story isn't changing.
Though that's not true.
The stories often can be documented to change over time and also elements that are conserved across accounts.
There are.
Alternative explanations for that, which are that there's an entire culture around UFO sightings and motifs that we're talking about here are ones that you would usually recognize in the, you know, standard UFO movies.
It's weird, yeah.
People keep seeing the, what is it?
The greys and the saucers.
What's the Aryan type ones?
The blondes or something?
There are the blondes, yes.
The Anunnaki or whatever they're called.
Weird how people keep seeing those.
And weird how that latest story about the Pope facilitating the transfer of an alien craft from Italy to the...
There's a Pope up to that?
This Pope or an old Pope?
An old Pope.
Remember the story?
So that's a highly conserved story.
Because it's a recycled trope, of course.
Yeah, so that notion about the people being attacked that you mentioned, Matt, right?
That there's a danger to these people.
And also, Eric's saying that the people don't want to share their stories.
They're reluctant.
I'm curious.
How did Eric read them?
Eric doesn't and other people in his neck of the woods never seem to account for the fact that there are actually positive attentional aspects to coming forward with stories.
like your media presence is often much larger after you claim to see a UFO compared to when you were just a random person or a random US serviceman, right?
So I'm not saying they're all out to make a buck or that kind of thing, but it's more like there actually is an ecosystem which treats you quite well whenever you endorse
I don't know enough about secret weapons or geology or who knows what.
I do know that I've been warned that bad things happen to people who get too close to some of this stuff.
No, he's not saying bad things do happen, Matt.
He's just saying he's been warned that bad things could happen, right?
We'll come back to the issue about personal testimony, but there is one more little story that I think illustrates this quite...
Neatly, which Eric provided.
And it's one where he was at dinner.
He was at one of these legendary IDW dinner parties, right?
Or I don't know, maybe it was a Teal Capital event, whatever the case.
There was somebody there who told a personal story about an abduction or some experience with a UFO slash alien.
And Eric is a bit perplexed by people's reaction afterwards.
He told that story at a dinner I was at.
Maybe there were 12, 15 people at the dinner.
At the end of the dinner, we walk out, and I'm standing around with maybe 10 of those people.
Brandon is not in evidence.
And we talked about many things.
And I said, well, what did you guys think of the dinner?
And nobody brought up the fact that a businessman who seems to be ostensibly normal, Oriented towards family and real estate and all these things just described an unfakeable encounter.
So he finds this baffling and I guess an indication of the kind of culture of silence that hangs around UFO reporting.
So a guy at a dinner party...
It recounts an incredible sort of thing, probably a little bit strange and embarrassing, and people kind of raise their eyebrows, and there's probably a bit of an embarrassed silence, and then somebody changes the topic, and then they don't talk about it afterwards.
Or even they find it interesting and just like, is it somebody telling a story?
Oh, I've seen a ghost once, or that kind of thing.
It's not this life transformative experience, but Eric is like, he's a businessman, for God's sake, people.
He's describing, see, to your phone, did you not hear what he said?
And it's like, Eric, maybe, what if he is being honest and he's just wrong?
Or what if, you know, humans are fallible, right?
Like, even rich people are fallible.
Even people that are successful are fallible.
Even Elon Musk.
Sometimes gets things wrong.
Like, Eric has this weird heuristic where he tells people off for looking down at people in manual labor or various things, but yet he's constantly, at the same time, appealing to people's status to say,
well, we have to take this seriously because this guy is, you know, a businessman and a respected guy.
Well, as well as that, Eric makes these weird dichotomies, and he's not the only one who does this, which is that if somebody recounts a weird experience, an experience with a ghost or how they saw a UFO or something like that, in Eric's mind, there are like three possibilities.
One is that they are describing something that absolutely happened exactly the way that they're telling it.
Two, that they are deliberately lying to you.
They're liars.
They're liars.
They're deceiving you.
Or three...
They're absolutely insane, like absolutely crazy.
So what he does is he kind of goes, well, they're a businessman.
They're clearly not crazy.
And why would he lie to me?
There's no reason for him to lie to me.
So he shifts to that third explanation.
And obviously, you don't need to...
I have a higher degree in psychology to understand that there is a broad spectrum of confusions, misperceptions, odd, ambiguous experiences that people interpret in a certain way, all kinds of things going on.
And a lot of people who believe they've experienced very strange things are perfectly normal in many other respects.
Yeah.
And so, Mick tries to...
Explain to Eric why we can't just take eyewitness reports as the be-all and end-all and give some possible explanations for things that people might report.
Seagulls, mile-out balloons, plastic bags and drones are the things that were in the airborne clutter thing by the government.
That does not explain everything.
I think there's even categories that they haven't listed there, like distant planes, which are a huge source.
Of UFOs.
My sense of it is just from people coming forth out of the woodwork to me, the stories I have now heard of encounters are so far beyond plastic bags and seagulls.
Yeah.
And again, if you told me that there was a huge theatre troupe that was out to convince us that this stuff was real, sure.
But I can't process...
I don't think there's enough Mylar balloon in the world to explain all the weird stuff going on.
So that illustrates exactly the bad heuristics, it seems, that Eric applies to this.
So it's interesting, though, isn't it, Chris?
I mean, he's meant to be very, very clever, understands...
So he says.
Yeah, quantum mechanics and things like that.
But this seems like a very elementary confusion, the fact that he finds it baffling, You know, a reasonable percentage of people, still probably in the single digits, the single percentages, can believe that they've experienced weird things that didn't happen.
Correct.
And you will hear Mick constantly trying to be reasonable about this.
He's trying to explain, well, you know, we shouldn't dismiss these things, we should take them seriously, but we also shouldn't be credulous.
And look at the way that Eric responds here.
I think eyewitness testimony, whilst it's an important part of the equation, you really have to take that with the possibility that a lot of it, if not, I wouldn't say all of it, but it depends on what we're talking about,
isn't really very reliable evidence.
And the fact that it's not backed up with hard evidence, with data, with recordings, is a problem.
The major point in favor of the debunkers is the fact that we've never gotten good evidence.
I've ceded that to you from the beginning.
Now, the thing that I'm surprised by is it feels to me like you're trying to take a twin-size fitted sheet of explanation and fit it over a king-size mystery, and the corner keeps popping off,
and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners.
And my claim is that I think that that ship sort of sailed.
And I don't need to be rude about it.
Wait, wait, wait.
I think that we're still in range of some serious disinformation.
Was that clear?
You get that?
You considered that, yes, we're lacking any hard evidence, but something about sheets and the boats have sailed and dot, dot, dot.
So we're in a situation of serious disinformation.
Did you catch the rebuttal there?
Because I got lost in the Eric cloud.
Yeah, it was just Eric was just like, he used a metaphor.
He just said, you've got a big explanation sheet and it doesn't fit the evidence bad.
But nothing actually supports that beyond Eric's assertion.
And Mick could instead say, actually, we've got a very huge sheet of expeditions.
We've tucked in all the corners.
And there's a tiny bed and there are lots of cases where we can't be exactly sure what that bump is under.
But it's clear that it's under the expedition blanket.
So Eric just is reasoning from metaphor.
To his preferred conclusion.
And again, there's that reference to, let me just continue on my point here.
And I don't mean to be rude, but here's the thing that you're missing, Mick, right?
How many times has Mick said, I don't mean to be rude in the conversation?
It's just double standards.
It's kind of annoying.
Yeah, but I think it's helpful for people to pay attention to this kind of stuff because you'll...
Look, even though you're very rarely going to meet someone in real life who is that passive-aggressive and is that rhetorical in their approach, it's good to pay attention to this because when you make a point and their response to it is not to reply.
But to spiral around some loosely related analogies, but then delivers it with a great deal of confidence and gives a strong impression that they have actually replied.
They have made a rejoinder to the point.
Just pay attention because often they have not.
But, you know, a casual listener could think that Eric did actually reply to a mixed point there.
Agreed.
And you mentioned some surprise that Eric isn't getting this point.
There is a point where Mick references some statistical elements, and Eric also seems to glide past that.
So here's this one.
What we see is this cohort of people, this large group of people, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, who are really just a minuscule tip of the spear of all these possible sightings.
These are the best ones.
We've got these 144 sightings from the Navy.
These are just the ones that have risen to the top.
And it looks like a lot.
You say, oh, we've got 144 cases.
It's 144 cases out of millions of hours of pilot training.
But if I ask you to just live inside your own construct, what are the five that have risen to the top of Mick West's, that is a puzzling, disturbing story for which I do not have an explanation?
Yeah.
So once again, one needs to pay attention to what's actually been said and whether or not there's been a reply to it at all.
Mick makes a pretty good point about a statistical one, as you said, Chris.
There's millions and millions of hours, hundreds of thousands of people who are flying planes, making all kinds of observations.
It's a big world, and you're going to have, even if these things are incredibly rare as a function of some combination of people's psychology and ambiguous phenomena and pre-existing cultural things, whatever, it's still going to seem like a lot because you're going to have 100 or so.
And Eric does not reply to that point.
He just moves on to say, okay, well, you talked about crazy experiences.
Now you tell me about the ones that you think are the most crazy.
At no point does Eric actually really respond to any of the points that Mick makes in this.
No.
And so you've got there Mick referencing a kind of statistical pattern about the distribution of cases that we've seen and what the underlying amount of...
Cases that we should infer, right?
And what would be some mistakes?
This is a valid point about potential errors and inference that we might make based on just a superficial look at the evidence.
I want to contrast that to the way that Eric uses statistical terms and references to scientific theory.
So here's one example of him talking about superpositions.
Let's get back to your superposition argument.
We all agree that it's going to be a superposition.
That's not the interesting, you know, if it could be Iran or it could be China, that's a superposition of different explanations.
No one says that all drones have to come from one country.
The key issue isn't superpositions of different mundane categories.
Was that helpful?
Yeah.
Did that clarify?
Superposition is one of those words that Eric...
I think Brett, too, really, really loves.
He's just referring to that there's multiple different explanations for something.
Oh, you wouldn't be saying he's using jargon to make it sound more complex than it is, Matt.
I mean, look at this.
This would be him doing that and dropping references at the same time.
You know, very often in science experiments, I've watched people throw out the outliers because they have a feeling that you're allowed to throw out the outliers.
And sometimes the outliers are bad pieces of information.
This occurs in, you know, the tau-theta puzzle story that Richard Feynman tells about the asymmetry of the weak force.
And sometimes, you know, sometimes it's real information.
Sometimes it's an artifact of the environmental setup.
What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere?
What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere?
We don't have, like, amazing videos that are just being thrown out because they're...
Well, I think you and I are disagreeing about something more fundamental.
My feeling is that there's a sort of debunking energy versus a scientific energy.
Yeah.
Did you notice that, guys?
A couple of things.
Well, first of all, Chris, before we forget.
What experiments has Eric been involved with where he's seen outlier data points being disrupted?
And he's had to work out how to deal with it.
Yeah, he's very involved with science, you know, Matt.
He's involved in science generally.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
He's around when the experiments are happening.
He's around.
He's around.
But it was funny how, like, when he's actually pinned, Nick quite reasonably says, well...
Okay, you're saying that we're throwing away outliers, discounting things that don't fit our preconceptions.
What specifically do you mean?
What's an example?
Eric doesn't have one.
He doesn't have one, so he needs to change the topic.
No, no, no, no, no.
Let's step back a few.
We disagree about something more fundamental.
Oh, dear.
Yeah, yeah.
Matt, can you decode this reference for me, by the way?
This is a statement that Eric...
He uses a bit later to return to a point that he wants to make, and he says...
So, Mick, I stand by my statement.
This is a huge, big deal.
And I don't mean this UFOs.
I mean, this decision tree has no boring branch.
What's a boring branch?
Well, I can decode this well because I remember the decision trees.
Do you remember the decision trees from classic DTG, Eric and Brett, talking about superpositions and the ability to hold a multiple explanatory...
Are they spinning up 70 paradigms all at once, rotating them?
That's right.
The trick is to hold them all in your head at once and weight all of those nodes of the decision tree.
And Eric thinks we're in a position where there is not.
There cannot be a mundane explanation.
Oh, boring.
I see.
I was thinking of boring, like drilling, you know, a boring.
There's no boring.
I was like, I got lost in this metaphor.
I was like, he's a woodpecker?
That's a foul on your part, mate.
I'm the Eric Whisperer.
I understand what he's talking about.
Yeah, well, that makes sense a little bit more than of that particular one.
And just in passing, Matt, because the clip happens to be nearby.
Just noting, this could be like guru bingo.
Whenever you hear one of them make a reference to this, you just have to bear in mind that this could be a sign that you're listening to a heterodox guru.
And the basic attitude towards people who engage in this kind of gaslighting is F you.
Science has your back.
These people don't belong in our community, and they have to be driven out.
Peter Daszak is in a very serious position trying to orchestrate the idea that only racists entertain the lab leak hypothesis.
Everybody should want to know what the hell he was doing in the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Defense Department funding.
Ah, there's so much packed into that.
And it's not like they were talking.
About Dasik and any of that context, right?
That is just Eric launching into lab-like minutiae to spin off into heterodox bonus points, right?
Oh, it's all...
Dasik is the one that is actually responsible for the lab and the diffuse proposal, Matt.
It wasn't funded, sure, but was it not?
See our episode with the three experts where we cover this in detail.
For more information.
And Eric certainly isn't the only one.
There is a strong crossover between the people that are taking the current UFO craze extremely seriously and the people that are rolling on the lab leak hypothesis as well.
Before we move on to one of the other points, I think we should finish off the one about personal testimony because there's two things that Mick brings up at the end that I think are very good.
Here's him talking about The limitations of eyewitness testimony again, Matt.
A point that can't be stressed enough.
A lot of what I'm doing in my just day-to-day stuff isn't, like, questioning people's eyewitness accounts.
I very rarely actually take cases where it's just an eyewitness account, simply because there's not a lot you can do with it, and often it gets very contentious because people are very emotional about their things.
So a lot of what I do is just simply the nuts and bolts type thing of looking at individual videos and photos and things like that.
So if I could do something that was better in terms of outreach to people who have had experiences, yes.
But I think it's really more about kind of, in a way, avoiding.
That type of confrontation?
Because there's not a lot you can do with someone who just has an eyewitness experience.
Someone who tells you, I saw this black triangle.
I talked to quite a few of them online, on Twitter.
And there's only so far you can go.
Yeah, very sensible.
I mean, there's obviously a plethora of eyewitness first-hand experiences with UFOs that exist out there.
And they span the gamut from a sober military...
Pilot who saw something unusual in their gimbal camera versus someone who claims that the UFOs stopped their car and strutted about going beep-bop-beep-bop and then handily probed them.
The whole spectrum is there.
And Nick is quite correct in steering away from investigating those because...
But isn't it very...
How Eric presents him as, you know, somebody that wants to just debunk an attack, eyewitness accounts, but he's actually trying to tell him here, look, I actually don't spend much time on that topic.
I'm mostly about technical videos and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, that's right.
He enjoys the technical aspects of investigating them.
There's nothing for him to do with an anecdotal narrative.
But yeah, I just keep going back to the fact where even Eric would totally accept, concede the point, that...
That the vast majority, or at least more than 50%, of claims about experiences with UFOs and aliens are bullshit.
I don't think Eric would defend the anal probing types of noise.
Yet those stories do exist, right?
And you can find people that will relate those stories with a high degree of conviction and will not necessarily be that they'll hold down a job, then might appear to be a perfectly normal person in all respects.
Yet...
They are giving what even Eric would concede is a story that cannot possibly be true.
So, if Eric can concede that a very large number of these first-hand anecdotal experiences are false, but he can't seem to accept that maybe all of them are.
Or, you know, are false in the sense that they made a mistake.
They misinterpreted some ambiguous phenomena.
Again, I think it bears emphasizing that Mick is very moderate.
And empathetic to the people, right?
Here's a little bit more of him, like, kind of expanding on that point of dealing with people, you know, with eyewitness testimonies.
You can listen to their explanations and you can ask them questions about, you know, what angular size do you think it would be?
Like, how many hand widths would it be?
And, you know, what time it was and where were you?
But at some point, you know, you enter the low information zone and there's not much further you can go.
And I generally just say, well, I can't really help you.
I don't mock them.
I don't, like, make fun of them.
And in general, I don't mock people.
So I'm sure there are things I can do to improve, but I don't really accept your characterization of me being part of this very dangerous community.
I think you described it as an abomination that we need to get rid of, the debunking community in your last thing.
So the way Eric would portray it is that he is a victim here of ridicule.
Of personal attack.
That he's defending other poor people that have been traumatized by these experiences.
And this debunking community, aka Mick West, because it's not clear who this community is, is mocking them, disparaging them, ridiculing them, drumming them out of polite society.
Yet, the only thing you hear in this interview is Eric...
Being the one who is being aggressive and disparaging towards Nick West and people like him.
So we'll hear a little bit more about that.
But just to remember, Matt, whenever Eric was talking about how his interactions with Mick had an unpleasant taste to them, a flavor of disagreement.
There's a role for debunking.
And then there's the problem of the debunkers.
And I think we have to actually talk about debunking as kind of an anti-social negative movement.
Sorry, let me know.
I think that's ridiculous, though.
Frankly, I think it's ridiculous because I identify as a debunker.
I've said there are problems with that term.
So unless you're talking about somebody else, I assume you're talking about me.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about there's a movement of people.
All right, so do you see me as being part of that movement?
Well, you've been curious in my mind.
You're certainly, and again, I'm not angling for anything in particular.
I'm not a takedown artist.
I don't love interpersonal conflict.
It feels to me like in the world of debunkers, and I've now met them in multiple fields, you are one of the most disciplined, and to be honest, one of the most charitable that I've met.
Now, so this isn't principally about Mick West.
So much there, so much.
Eric calls debunkers an antisocial negative movement.
And he's talking to Mick, who, you know, is identified as a debunker.
And Mick says, well, hold on.
You know, I don't like that characterization.
And Eric is first of like, well, what?
You know, let me finish my point, please.
And secondly, it's not even about you, Mick.
Maybe it's not about you.
Maybe it's about other people.
And if Mick had referred to UFO advocates as an antisocial negative group, how immediate would Eric's heart palpitations have been?
So it's like this double standard where he gets to be insulting and then when somebody pushes back and then he says, well, you know, You, Mick, I'm not sure whether you fit into that negative group.
Like, you could be one of the good ones.
You're disciplined, you know, starts praising them and trying to get them on the side.
So this is how you do passive aggression, right?
You have a bit of sunshine.
You offer people a route.
To please you and to stop you from being unhappy with them and get them to bend the knee and do what you want.
So, with Eric, the passive aggression, the emphasis is on the passive.
Like, as soon as somebody says, hang on, are you talking about me?
He'll go, no, no, no, no, I'm not talking about you.
You know, you see him retreat and he'll go back in the car.
But he'll be back.
He'll be back to stick the knife in or claim some sort of grievance very shortly.
It's the little two-step there.
It's very unpleasant.
Yes, that's true.
And there's quite a lot more clips that speak to this.
So here's him again, like you said, you know, like the shark, he circles back after swimming away.
No, no, I'm not going to attack you.
Then you get into this problem, which is you have to spice up your skepticism because it's not really tremendously entertaining.
So that's when you typically get snark, you get condescension, you get stigma.
And all of those things tend to chase good people out of these discussions.
Is it Mick that's doing that, Matt?
No, right?
He's not saying it could be Mick, but it's the debunkers.
Is Mick a debunker?
Well, look, if he's referring to snarkiness and cynicism, he could be referring to us, and it would be very justly...
Yeah!
That would be fine.
Well, he does have a bit, Matt, where he, in essence, does refer to us.
Although, I don't think it's specifically us.
It's more Eric's collective people that criticize him.
And in particular, he says...
I understand that.
One of the things that's very interesting...
To some of us who do commentary on social issues is that people who are employed by legacy media outfits react to anybody who makes a living as an individual, not attached to a legacy media outfit.
They refer to these people as grifters in order to give the idea that you can trust Harper's in the Atlantic, but if somebody is telling you something on the internet, then it's probably nonsense.
I think that what you have to understand is that bunk, And Bunko and the idea of fooling people.
I appreciate that you're moving away from it, but maybe a repudiation of the energy around that is really necessary because it's one thing to say, yeah, I'm trying to use that less.
A lot of the fun that comes from skepticism is mixing in this dunking and dragging.
And whether or not one is actually doing the dunking and dragging, just let me get to the end of this.
Whether one is actually doing the dunking and dragging, or whether one is painting a bullseye on a target for someone else to execute, I think is really kind of the issue.
I feel like we've got a shout out there.
That's almost a shout out.
But you notice the self-presentation there, that Eric is an aggrieved party.
He's been the victim of a lot of unfair treatment.
Nick West is somehow implicated in this.
And I've got to emphasize to people, all that Mick has done in relation to Eric is to reply with quite factual, on-topic comments on some of his more flagrant conspiratorial UFO claims.
This, in Eric's mind, is enough to put Mick into a position where Mick needs to distance himself from this other nebulous group of people that are Eric's enemies.
Peeking inside Eric's brain is not pretty.
The mainstream legacy media got kicked there and then people being snarky and dunking and dragging on him, right?
But also, Matt, Eric's thing about, you know, you can be just someone who paints targets but doesn't do it yourself.
Eric does that constantly.
Constantly with his audience.
He's even done it with us.
He has hinted that there are people that are out to get me and I might have to stop the portal if they can't be taken down and blah, blah, blah.
He is constantly trying to paint targets on other people, on Peter Hotez, on Peter Daszak.
Well, the thing, the other aspect which we haven't emphasised so much is just the blatant hypocrisy of Eric doing exactly the thing that he is insinuating that Mick is doing.
This idea that Eric doesn't want to make this into a personal drama.
He's not about this kind of fracas and stuff like that.
He's above the fray.
That's completely the opposite of the dynamic here.
Mick came to this discussion thinking they'd be talking about factual evidence-based stuff relating to his principal interest of UFOs.
And Eric throughout has been far less interested in talking about the details of UFOs, which he doesn't know anything about.
He's just wandered into this thing.
Yeah, it's just what he's really interested in is having an interpersonal drama with Mick West.
It's so funny.
About other interpersonal dramas that he's not involved with.
He doesn't even know about them.
He doesn't know the characters involved or any of that.
Poor old Mick is just totally confused by Lewis because he's got no idea what nonsense is going on in Eric's brain.
Yeah, I don't think he's used to dealing with someone like Eric.
So here's Eric making that point rather directly.
I don't do many of these.
Look, I really hate interpersonal drama.
And so, in general, I avoid these, like, imagined dust-ups, because I was never looking for a dust-up with you, which we share too much in common.
I'm worried that you're screwing up the Overton window.
Oh, we share, look, Mick, I'm worried, you know, we share so much in common, don't we?
But I'm worried about you, Mick.
I'm worried you're screwing up the Overton window.
You know what I mean?
That back and forth.
You know, people would be sensitive to this because this is just classic blatant attempts at manipulation, which Mick is absolutely immune to.
I absolutely love to see all of these things just bounce off him.
Yeah, we will move on to reference some of the responses that Mick gives to these tactics, but it's just that underhand thing of it's somebody looking you right in the face and saying,
I'm not doing what I'm doing right now, which you can see them doing.
Like, I'm not into interpersonal drama.
This is a massive two and a half hour long interpersonal drama episode.
And Eric is all about interpersonal drama.
He's constantly inserting himself to whatever drama is going on.
And he's trying to get involved in the background of any rising heterodox thinker or that kind of thing.
But yeah.
He likes to portray himself as the elder statesman above the fray.
You know, he would prefer to be at home drinking a nice glass of wine, not having to deal with any of this.
But he just sees so many good people getting hurt.
So he's forced.
And he loves you.
Like, he really wants to get along with you because he respects you.
But you make him so angry.
And he feels a bad...
And you're so good.
I mean, you've got such insight, such value that you could...
Have, if you were just a bit more agreeable.
Yeah, yeah.
We've had this, Matt.
We've had people talk to us.
I won't...
Should I name names?
I'll just say that, like, you know, were you to listen to the episode we recorded with JV Wheel towards the end, you may hear him insinuate that we would be welcome.
It's a sense-making table if we were just like a little bit less aggressive in our criticism and that kind of thing.
And that is not the only person who makes those kind of comments consistently to me.
Particularly sense-makers are prone to saying, you know, Chris, if you would just be nice to you, you could sit down and talk with such and such.
And this person, I'm like...
I don't care!
That's my goal.
I don't care about your dinner parties.
I've got very nice food over here in Japan.
You know what, listening?
He's never going to be more agreeable.
This is it.
I'm not.
I'm set.
This is it.
Look, people can have different values.
People can value the interpersonal aspect.
The thing that we constantly bump into in the guru sphere and with the Weinsteins is front and center is their personal grievance narratives, the narcissism, and the focus on the interpersonal as kind of almost all that matters.
And it's a very one-way thing.
If they don't feel good from interacting with you, you've done something.
To upset them.
Never mind what Eric has claimed about, like, something that you've worked on for years, or never mind what he's insinuating about virologists or that kind of thing.
It's how Eric feels that matters.
And, you know, if you contradict him, he doesn't like it.
So, isn't that a problem?
Narcissism, manipulation, and passive aggression.
What a trifecta.
On the subject of manipulation and rhetoric and all the things we usually talk about, but particularly on this episode, Eric is or was a member of the intellectual dark web, right, who used to pride themselves about being above identity politics.
Now, we're well aware that that golden rule was frequently...
Flaunced?
No, what's the word?
Frequently ignored?
Yeah, observed more in the...
Oh, how does that saying go?
It's not flaunced.
Observed more in the absence.
Abstract?
Yeah, it's more, as they said in Pirates of the Caribbean, it's more of a guideline than a code because they seem to be willing to use identity politics when it suits.
And Eric, I would say, is doing this here.
Let me just play this clip of him trying to think a little bit more about the broader impact of what he's up to.
Let me try to put a different sheen on it.
So, last attempt to make the point.
I am very much more careful.
I want to figure out how to phrase this.
I am much more careful.
When I hear somebody talking about chemtrails, for example, if they come from the black American community, then if they don't.
And I'm much more understanding if somebody comes from a radical progressive family that went through the McCarthy era and they don't trust the government.
So, in other words, when particular groups of people are repeatedly lied to, And manipulated and have a different history than the rest of the country.
I tend to take their fears much more seriously.
If you went through the Tuskegee medical experiment, it's not that crazy to worry about what's in a vaccine.
If you didn't go through the Tuskegee medical experiment, if your community wasn't subjected to that, you may have a very different sense that You know, something's going on.
Or if you're aware that we've experimented with biological agents involuntarily against people in subway stations.
There's all sorts of weird stuff that we've gotten up to.
Well, there's a reasonable version of that.
As you'd know, Chris, conspiracy theories and Gantivac stuff is extremely widespread in Africa.
And there is like a trope in Africa and a fair amount of distrust of, you know, when an international organization like the UNHCR or whatever is out there setting up a medical station wanting to vaccinate people or whatever, there's some degree of skepticism,
suspicion of these white people coming in from overseas, these international organizations.
So that's the reasonable version.
But it is interesting how throughout this...
Eric has played a kind of a social justice card repeatedly, hasn't he?
I mean, he's used that kind of language.
The way you're interacting with me, it gives me a bad feeling in my body.
And he talks about standing up and defending this vulnerable, marginalized community of UFO believers who have been traumatized by their experiences and then being marginalized and ignored by the establishment.
Yeah, more directly.
It comes up a lot, Matt, and this might seem a little bit pedantic, but I just want to mention when people reference the Tuskegee syphilis study, which was a shameful medical experiment done on people in America,
but they usually represent it as they were given something secretly, the substance of which was not divulged to them.
And they want to say that the vaccines are being tested on people without their knowledge.
But the actual issue with the Tuskegee syphilis study was that for a bunch of people, give them stuff that was disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and so on, because they want to see the progress of
the disease.
So it's pretending to treat people differently.
So it's a bad thing.
It could make people distrusting.
But it's slightly different than the way that a lot of anti-vaccine people portray it.
I just want to mention that in passing.
But I think that anybody can use social justice rhetoric to...
It should be something that people know because it can be.
There's lots of people that we see from all different groups that understand how to adopt the language and the rhetoric to argue, you know, whatever it is.
And in this case, it happens to be arguing for UFO.
UFO people.
Yeah.
It's very flexible.
You can pretty much adopt the mantle of the marginalized, ostracized community and adopt the role of somebody who is standing up for these people.
And that's exactly what Eric is doing in this conversation.
I mean, the problem is that I don't believe him.
He's got no track record at all, for instance.
I doubt that he's ever interacted with anyone who's had anything to do.
With the Tuskegee syphilis thing.
No, he's a dilaton.
He's wading into this UFO thing because, as I think we'll hear with some clips, he has his own reasons for being interested in it and it's got something to do with geometric unity.
Yes, that's right.
So maybe that's a good place to turn.
But I think we have to do some due diligence for Mick because most of the clips we're...
You know, he's pushing back, he's trying to explain himself, but he has been a bit browbeat by Eric.
But I think we have to show that Mick does not just accept all of Eric's streaming.
So I have a couple of clips to highlight that.
This is Mick pushing back against the kind of passive aggressiveness that we've heard so much of.
Conversely, when we turn over to the UFO community...
You know, the issue is I don't want people who've seen something or who have data scared anymore.
And it's very important.
Who are you scared of?
I mean, you keep talking about this debunking community, but who exactly are you referring to?
I mean, I'm not a person who mocks people.
So that just comes across to me as playing, I'll be blunt, that comes across to me as playing dumb.
No, I think that lots of people are...
No, no, it's a genuine question.
It's a genuine question because there's not very many UFO debunkers out there.
I think it's a really disingenuous sounding question.
I may have you wrong, Mick, but...
Are you including me as part of this debunking community?
I can tell you that I find your interaction unpleasant.
Oh, my God.
That is so annoying.
Because Mick directly asked him, right?
Who are you talking about, Eric?
There are not many debunkers.
Who is it?
And Eric's like, well, aren't we playing the fool, right?
Yeah, I find that question disingenuous.
But Mick says, why?
Yeah, it's not disingenuous.
It's a very plain question because, as we said at the beginning, we've looked at the sum total of the interactions between Mick and Eric.
There is no community.
There's no community involved.
It's just Nick had the temerity to disagree with Eric in public.
Eric's got a problem with that.
Eric is accusing him of these nebulous things, but doing it in that sort of backhanded way where he can't really be held to it.
And Nick, to his credit, says, hang on.
Put up or shut up.
Tell me exactly what you're referring to.
Are you referring to me?
What exactly is your problem?
And because Eric has nothing to support this, apart from a generalized feeling of grievance because somebody contradicted him in public, he does this kind of thing.
Well, he focuses on his feeling.
I feel unpleasant interacting with you.
Well, sorry, Eric.
But, you know, I'm sure tons of people feel unpleasant interacting with you when you're promoting conspiracy theories and stuff as well.
But the world does not revolve around anybody's individual internal sense of the pleasantness of a conversation.
So it's just that's frustrating.
And especially because Eric is framing it as a general point.
But then when Mick is saying, is it referring to me?
He's unclear.
But then he moves to saying, I find interaction with you unpleasant.
So that is him showing that it actually is the levels that he's jumping around from.
And Eric does this so much with so many arguments to just keep a hears about who specifically he's referring to.
And the main thing is that all of his enemies and people that he's disagreeing with are kind of put together into this cheesy, nefarious group.
And some of them are doing very bad things.
Are you saying I'm doing that?
No, I didn't say that.
Yeah, well, it's disingenuous even to ask, really.
Well, so, you know, there's a good thing where you can hear, you can just really hear that Mick isn't lying, he's not putting it on.
Just listen to the way that he is talking about the UFO community and how he sees them.
Almost nobody I know who's not independently wealthy can afford to say, oh, that was interesting.
Would you want a surgeon operating on your child if the surgeon had had lots of discussions with aliens?
Sure.
I mean, yeah, I would.
It's a perfectly normal thing for someone to see something in the sky and think it's this weird thing.
This happens all the time.
If somebody told me that they were abducted by aliens and that they wanted to operate on my kid, I'll be honest.
That would tutor my prior to say, I don't want to take that risk that this person...
There might be a line.
Yeah.
Yeah, but simply seeing craft in the sky, that's a different thing entirely.
I think that's a very understandable thing to happen to people, and there will be inevitably some people who have some kind of misperception or illusion that doesn't deserve mockery.
Certainly not.
It's a perfectly understandable thing.
And, you know, I tell people this when I talk to them.
Yeah, I can see how this might have happened.
Even that is a very sensitive thing.
Even that, they see that as being dismissive.
So it's difficult.
And like I say, I try to stay away from that type of thing.
Yeah, Eric is looking to, you know, continue this argument around stigma.
It's impossible to even talk about this thing without being someone like, you know.
Even you, even I, we wouldn't want somebody like this operating on us or anything.
And again, Nick Turi's credit says, no, it's perfectly understandable.
It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you or you're insane if you see something weird in the sky and you potentially make an error about what you see.
So, yeah, Eric doesn't really know what to do with that.
Yeah, and again, towards the end, he also emphasized this point more strongly, pointing out that You know, there's lots of people that believe in aliens or see UFOs, and some of them are people with impressive careers, some of them are just, you know, ordinary people,
and they're not a bizarre collection of freaks, right?
That's not what he's saying.
Most of them are not.
There are a few crazy people in there, but, you know, there are crazy people everywhere.
Everywhere.
Crazy people outside.
I say that with the chemtrail community, it's like, you know, there's all kinds of people in there.
There's people with PhDs who believe in.
There's people with PhDs who believe in UFOs.
So it's not like it's a group of ne 'er-do-well idiots.
It's just a cross-section of society who happens to believe in a certain thing.
And that should be respected.
Well said.
Well said.
Given how moderate Mick comes across, and it's not just in this conversation, this is generally his tone in his material, right?
He's not like us, for example.
He wouldn't be as sarcastic or as pointed in his critiques.
So it's funny to see that he's considered at the vanguard.
Yeah, well, I realize I'm just fogging a dead horse here, but you have to really keep in mind that Mick has committed the single cardinal sin of...
Contradicting Eric in public.
That's all it needed.
And then Eric frames it into this entire, you know, he builds a castle of grievance and tries to put Mick in the box of part of this nebulous, sneering, nasty community which is trying to destroy good,
honest people that just want to investigate this topic.
And the problem is that, you know, Eric's thing is a pure fantasy.
It just doesn't work with Mick.
Yeah, and so you heard Mick being charitable there, being friendly.
But then, I'm just going to play the thing which contrasts, like, that's what Mick sounds like when he's talking about these people.
And this is the way that Eric presents that.
The pressure not to question these things because it's a conspiracy theory.
Really bothers me because we have a group that is simultaneously engaging in conspiracies and not clearing up things that they could clear up, which does feel that personal destruction is a good way to keep secrets.
And I guess what I'm asking you is, can you be a bit more charitable to people who've been lied to?
Okay.
That's a perfectly reasonable request, I think.
And yes.
Yes, I think I can.
And, you know, I'd like to invite other people who are watching this to give me feedback on, you know, whether they, like, you know, not necessarily just agree or disagree, but, like, in what way could I do better?
In what way could the debunking community do better?
And what specifically should we do?
Because I interview people who have had experiences.
You know, a number of people like, you know, say, Kevin Day, one of the guys off the Nimitz.
And Gary Voorhees, another guy from the Nimitz Encounter, it was a different ship.
But I'm nice of them.
I'm not mocking them.
Eric's attempted jabs there just don't land.
I don't think he knows much about Mick or what he does.
The only thing Eric has done is make these sort of nebulous, sweeping accusations about being lied to and how you have to be more charitable.
But yeah, Eric is just not familiar with this topic.
He's not familiar with...
All of the investigations that Mick has done, and he doesn't know the way that Mick does them.
So, yeah.
Yeah, or I think that's possibly true that he hasn't looked into depth, but I think Eric has a very low tolerance for people pushing back on ideas.
So it is likely, I mean, you can hear it in this conversation, right?
He sometimes says...
Your comment makes me feel unpleasant.
What should I do about that?
So I think in that respect, he does see this dark energy around the kind of interactions which Mick has, because he's not signing off on the experiences, or he's not saying, well, these are very unusual,
and there's a lot of...
Like, he's basically not agreeing with the narrative of the people, and to Eric, that seems like being cruel.
Because you'll notice he keeps using this language, extreme language.
People have been lied to.
They've had their lives destroyed.
Personal destruction.
It's always up to 11. It's not just they've been criticized.
People have disagreed with their account or that kind of thing.
It's so emotion-laden.
Yeah, somebody's investigated a video of this and it turns out it was just some stars in the sky and some blur on the camera lens.
That is a personal attack to Eric.
Eric's always about the framing.
He doesn't ever get into the specifics, but in his framing just there, the framing is that we've all been lied to.
There's a cover-up going on.
Well, again, that particular thing about being lied to, and this is often how Eric frames issues that he has around mainstream media or science.
There's conspiracies, right?
To frame people outside of the mainstream is crazy.
You can see how personal it gets whenever, like, examples like this.
In the case of UFOs, I've been lied to.
It is very clear that a lot of very smart people feel that they have had their lives destroyed over taking this seriously as a topic.
Not by me, though.
What?
Not by me.
Perhaps by their colleagues and perhaps by the government.
Why do I have the impression that you...
Police UFOs.
Eric's language is amazing.
Like, why do I have a bad feeling in my body?
Why do I feel like I've been lied to?
Yeah, maybe you're overly sensitive.
I don't know, Eric.
That's not my problem.
That's the truth, but Mick is polite.
But again, you know, just wrapping it into the personal whenever Mick is like, are you talking about me?
And he's like...
Why do I feel like you police UFOs?
We have to come back again to say, remember that Eric's, again, his framing at the beginning, which is that he's not interested in interpersonal drama.
He's interested in this as a scientific discussion.
As you can clearly see.
As you can clearly see.
Yet, during this whole interview...
It's actually quite an interesting interview to listen to because Mick is a wealth of information.
He's got lots of interesting details.
He knows all the different stories and what happened here and what this person said to that person.
So he's actually a wealth of information.
Eric doesn't do anything in the entire interview except try to litigate this personal grievance, this personal drama that he's got with Mick.
And it just...
It just hurts me, Chris, because his framing is that he's not about that.
He doesn't care about personal dramas.
He doesn't want anything to do with it.
Whereas it's him.
It's just him.
And Mick is not playing along with it.
Yeah.
And so you mentioned that part of the issue here might be that it's tied into the grander Weinsteinian narrative around the new physics escaping planet Earth and geometric unity as the key driver to these.
Future technologies being harnessed.
I have some clip that speak to that connection.
So here's Eric explaining why he wants to keep his mind open on this topic.
We don't have.
Yes.
Not technology, because people keep freezing Einstein in, which has become very distressing to me.
You cannot go faster than the speed of light within Einstein's construct.
But Einstein's construct is the map, not the territory.
We don't know whether a better map allows us to do things that are prohibited on this map, but not necessarily with a better understanding of reality.
So if this were technology based on new science held by some civilization that we don't know anything about, could be us from the future, could be somebody from neighboring galaxies, who knows what.
It's hugely consequential scientifically.
And one of the things that causes me to, despite wanting to get on with you and understand each other better, also sort of push back relatively forcefully, is I don't want that window stigmatized anymore.
He wants to get on, Matt.
He wants to get on.
Yeah, but it's difficult because Mick is standing in the way of potentially understanding a new kind of science.
A new kind of science that is being brought to us, Chris, from maybe people from the future.
So, they've traveled back in time and their planes are crashing in Area 51. Or it could be aliens from another galaxy.
So, yeah, I mean, this is connected to Eric's principal interest.
And I think this is...
Informed by a lot of his tweets and a lot of the stuff that he says, Chris, I think you'll agree, is that the thing that really makes him want to believe in UFOs is that for him, this could be the proof that there is this new kind of science,
like a new kind of non-Einsteinian physics.
That is probably somehow related to his own geometric unity.
And this is the thing that allows you to travel faster than light and means that aliens can come here from a different galaxy.
Kind of amazing, really.
I mean, I have to hand it to him, Chris.
This is a bespoke reason for being into UFOs, right?
Like a lot of people are into UFOs for a lot of different reasons.
Eric's motivations, you know, that's not everyone.
That's like one in a thousand.
Yeah, that's true.
And, you know, just to highlight what kind of gains we could be missing out on by poo-pooing this area.
So it's very important to me to prop the window open to, is it possible to leave this place?
And the chief reason that we are unlikely to be able to leave this place, and thus we are likely to die in relatively short order due to our technological prowess and our lack of wisdom, is the Einsteinian limit.
On travel.
So this map, you know, the speed of light as a hard limit, if true, means that we're trapped in a little pocket of the universe and doomed not to encounter other species and intelligences unless they find a way to break that.
But Eric does think that he's got round that with his geometric unity and he's talked about it in all our conversations that...
You know, he's on board with Elon Musk's need to spread consciousness across the universe.
But Elon doesn't seem that interested in geometric unity.
That's the limiting factor of Elon.
Yeah, Elon's thinking in terms of these chemical-powered rockets, which is, that's small change, right?
Pre-Weinsteinian physics.
Pre-Weinsteinian, yes.
Yeah, so elsewhere in this conversation, Eric, and, you know, he just makes these, like, U-turns.
Like, one minute they're talking about UFOs and evidence for UFOs and whether or not Mick is a bad person or not, and then suddenly he launches into this non-Einsteinian physics.
But it is linked because he talks about this episode where apparently, I don't know.
It's all very vague.
Antigravity?
Yeah, antigravity.
Eric himself says he doesn't know much about it, but he thinks it's very revealing.
There was some sort of program run through a couple of individuals named Babson and Bainson, which is extremely confusing, to bring a small cadre of leading scientists to discuss something that sounds like antigravity in the guise of discussing general relativity anew.
Right.
And I would dearly like to know what that program actually was.
Yeah.
And I would like more of us to be talking openly because we know, for example, that Solomon Lefschetz was affiliated with this crazy Gravity Research Foundation.
Is there a bunch of classified documents about that that people have been trying to get?
Or is there just nothing there?
Because it seems to me like...
David Kaiser at MIT, the physicist and historian, would probably be the best person to answer that.
I've never gotten at this, nor have I put in the time or the energy.
He hasn't put in the time.
Of course you haven't, Eric.
But it sounds good, doesn't it?
There was some secret group that were talking about anti-gravity and it might have been something to do with going faster than life.
But maybe it was all hushed up and it was all hidden.
But, you know, do a bit of name dropping.
You know, you should look into it.
You should look into it.
Yeah, so it's all like hints.
And wasn't Operation Condor or Paperclip?
You know, those were real.
And, you know, you have all these insinuations.
And I like that you can hear Mick saying, uh-huh, right.
Because he knows what's coming.
He's just trying to get to some solid ground.
And actually, Mick's reaction to this, I think, is pretty nice.
Because you can contrast them.
You can see how Mick...
I mean, no technology that we know of is anti-gravity.
Nothing apparently came from it, unless there's this weird parallel track of science that is going on.
Anti-gravity may be a head fake, which means that it's really just post-spacetime physics.
It's now become very fashionable in theoretical physics to say that space-time is the problem and that it's doomed as a concept and that what we're looking for is the successor to Einstein's sort of fabric for reality.
It may be that antigravity is a really bad name for something, to make it sound junky.
But what we're really talking about, and particularly the presence of Lefschetz, is very interesting here.
That what we may be discussing is a post-Romanian or pseudo-Romanian understanding of space-time.
Just a geometric replacement.
Oh, geometric.
That's surprising.
Who do you know that has a geometric theory?
You notice in Eric's cosmology, like it can't just be, you know, he heard about something and it means nothing.
It was just a totally mundane explanation.
That's not an option.
It's either a head fake.
Or it's been given a junkie label of being, you know, anti-gravity or whatever to make people think that there's nothing in it.
For him, there is no mundane explanations.
There's always stuff going on.
There was a meeting that he wasn't invited to where they were talking about these things and there's secret documents and he hasn't seen them.
But, I mean, Eric's brain.
And Mick West, by the way, is just doing normal critical thinking here.
He's saying, hey, if there was some...
Actual research program, if what you're saying is true, there's actually a research program that had some kind of legs where, you know, they've created anti-gravity, they've got new kind of physics.
Well, wouldn't we have seen some evidence of this at some point in the last 50 years?
And of course we haven't.
We haven't seen any of it.
But Eric just glides over those sorts of quibbles.
No, it's all secret.
It's all happening in DARPA somewhere at Area 51. And he very much gives the impression that if you are not questioning the narrative, what kind of fool are you?
Because you think the government doesn't lie to you, Matt?
And that if you have a situation in which...
The government is alleged to keep a secret.
Somebody now says, oh, I don't believe three people can keep a secret, much less thousands, as if D-Day was never planned.
I mean, this is just, it's sort of this willful playing dumb that I don't understand.
It doesn't seem like, to be honest, it doesn't seem like you.
Come on, Matt.
We know conspiracies are real.
We know governments are not completely transparent.
Are you trying to tell me?
You think there are no secret projects?
That the government is telling you all the technology that they've developed?
Yes.
Don't play dumb.
You know they can and will do these things.
Just to be clear, in case anybody doesn't read between our size and eye rolls, it's perfectly reasonable and good even to be critical and to not accept that the government is automatically telling you the truth.
But that does not entail that all...
Of the conspiracies or ways that projects are presented in the alternative media or the UFO community are therefore accurate.
No.
It can be that the government has secret projects that they did look into psychics that they were trying to do remote viewing and that those things were bullshit as well.
Yeah, they do investigate weird and wacky things because, you know, the people running these organizations aren't...
I mean, there are totally normal secret conspiracies going on all the time.
Like, I would be absolutely shocked if the CIA and the various American intelligence organizations weren't assisting Ukraine with various types of intelligence assets and weren't communicating information that would be useful to them.
And they're certainly not broadcasting this on the media.
I'd be shocked if that wasn't happening.
That's a normal conspiracy.
That's something that actually happens in the world.
That's different from, like, back in the 1950s, they collected together some of the top scientists who were looking into new types of physics and they figured out that they could actually do, you know, anti-gravity research and maybe even get faster than light travel.
And then they've kept all of this a secret for the last 60 years.
Well, you know, I was thinking, Matt, that, you know, you have that movie coming out now, Oppenheimer, and there's so much interest about the Manhattan Project.
And that was a secret project at the time.
And we now know so many details about what happened there, about the personalities involved and the scientific efforts and how they were undertaken.
And it's an example that those things do occur, but...
When they produce something like the atomic bomb, when they produce revolutionary physics or products of science that can be applied, you do learn about it.
And you see them applied in various domains.
And you see people become interested in them.
And government programs exist.
And, of course, the nuclear bomb is a very dramatic example of that.
But there was so much that came out of those collaborations of those scientists.
In that area, you know.
But what Eric is proposing is those similar kind of programs and that have made similar huge breakthroughs and it's all kept under the table for decades.
But the technology is out there flying around the skies, but it's just not in public knowledge.
Like, that's the interpretation.
That's the worldview he's seriously considering.
What can you say?
It's just not plausible.
It's such a boring take, but it's just the things that he believes just aren't plausible.
And he finds them easy to believe because he's got a conspiratorial worldview, and he wants to believe them because he thinks that they'll vindicate him and his unrecognized genius.
Yeah, and, you know, I might be banging the nails into the coffin, but, you know, one of the other things that you often hear in Weinsteinian content is about That they need to get good people in, experts,
to deal with this topic.
And why don't they have them, right?
And often it's left unstated who these world-leading experts are.
But we know who the Weinsteins are thinking about because they sometimes do enumerate them.
But just listen.
Here, Matt, about something that Eric finds confusing.
One of my questions is, why do we not have our best people on this?
And this was my point, I think, where you and I came in contact in some sense in Twitter, where I was saying, if somebody is claiming that we cannot control airspace that is sensitive from a military perspective...
Is that what they're claiming there?
I mean, they're not claiming we can't control it.
They're claiming that we occasionally see things in there that we can't identify.
And we haven't determined that they are...
That was just questioning the supposition that was presented there.
But you can hear Eric saying, why don't we have our best people on this topic?
That's the suspicion.
Yeah.
Our best people on what?
There's nothing.
There is no topic apart from...
Just your normal UFO sightings.
What are the best people meant to be doing?
Oh, you say that, Matt?
I've got the answer for you.
Okay.
There is this stigma in science, but I think that stigma is largely well-founded because of all the ridiculous stuff that comes along with UFOs.
And I think if there was some good evidence, then people like the UAP Task Force would have actually...
Brought it forward and actually done something with it.
Where are our top physicists?
I don't know.
You're a top physicist.
Well, you're a physicist.
I don't know where you are in the world rankings, but...
I'm actually a mathematician, but I don't know anybody in the top physics community who knows what the hell's going on here.
He doesn't know anyone in the top physics community.
I mean, did you notice the little...
Underhanded self-aggrandizement there, Chris.
Like the implication that Eric is in personal touch with everybody in the top physics community, our top men.
Yeah.
He's not.
He's not in the physics community.
He's not.
He's a podcaster.
He's worked for Teal Capital.
He's a crank.
He has talked to physics people, but it's, you know, Roger Penrose and...
He's had interviews with some people like Sabine Hossenfelder and there's a couple of other pop physics people.
Yeah.
No offense to these people, but they're not the top physics community, right?
Anyway.
There's that, but also, you know, I noticed that Mick was somewhat kind to Eric, right?
Because he said, you know, you're a tough physicist.
He does clarify well.
I don't know where you're in the world ranking, but I think he generally is regarding Eric as, you know, a pretty...
Mainstream expert on stuff, which is not exactly accurate.
Very generous of him, yeah.
Yeah, a lot of people do make that judgment of Perixx.
Yeah, and it's not like he doesn't try to drive that interpretation home.
So, you know, I think I've got a nice thing that can round us off on this.
And this takes us back to the sense-making inclined host, Kurt.
So you can see the kind of plea that I think the host and Eric both share about what they think is the important thing to take from this conversation.
What's it practically that we can get rid of and get away from the stigma?
So what would it require?
Mick, I understand that you don't see yourself as contributing to the stigma, but do you see that you could contribute to the removing of the stigma by, let's say...
Tweeting a repudiation of the stigma.
No, I think I'm a small fish and I think very few people are going to listen to me and millions of people out there, very few people are going to see what I say.
I think it has to come from a higher level and I think we've already started to see it.
That same thing about, you know, removing the stigma from the topic and if Mick were to tweet out and tell people to stop being...
Debunkers or poking fun at UFO people, that this would be very helpful.
And Mick's reluctance there is because he doesn't think it will prevent people from making fun of UFO people, which he wouldn't because most people don't know who Mick West is.
Well, Mick was rubbing up against that sort of very common thing in podcast land where the implicit assumption is that the stuff that is talked about, the decisions that are made in this conversation, I'm going to change the world.
And Mick being a relatively normal person is like, no.
Yeah, my tweet isn't going to do anything.
I just have a hobby investigating UFOs.
We're just talking.
It's not going to change anything.
There is a stigma towards UFOs because there's a lot of crazy, crazy stuff associated with UFOs.
Just have a look on the internet, people.
You'll find it.
Of course, there's a stigma.
Mick is quite, not to put words in his mouth, but he quite honestly, I think, would prefer there was less stigma because he would like people to just share whatever evidence they have and that way he can analyze it and we can get to the bottom of it.
So he's quite happy to be on board with this.
But yeah, in Eric's framing, what we really need to do is to...
Reduce the stigma.
Let's have these conversations.
We're going to bust this thing wide open.
We're going to find out what's really going on up there in the skies.
Yeah, and so I have an example of this, just a very short one, where you can hear him specifically saying it's good that the Navy has a new policy that reduces the stigma about reporting UFOs.
That is a happy accident, yeah, but the Navy thing was a specific response to the UFO.
It was something that they recognized that there was this stigma, and they tried to remove the stigma.
And that's a laudable thing, and I think that was showing results.
So he's on board with the stigma being removed.
But, oh, one other thing, Matt.
Before they get to the final closing statements, there is one bit where the host notices that they haven't talked about I don't think people would stop,
but I think a large set of people would...
By the way, just as there's excoriation to the people who come out as experiencers or people who investigate this topic, there is also fulmination directed at you and generally people who are skeptics.
And I don't like that personally.
I think that should stop.
I think that that's something we haven't discussed not even a single bit today.
And I hope people would do that less.
And I imagine that if Eric, that if you said something, we're not trying to make this all into let's make public politics.
I'm just hypothetically saying, Eric, if you were to say something like, hey, please don't gang up on Mick.
Mick has a role to play for.
Then people would be less insane with Mick.
No, but Kurt, the problem that we have...
Yeah, I mean, okay, so a few little ingredients there.
Hey, Chris, like one is the, you know, the discourse, you know, the discourse rules that we need more love and understanding.
There shouldn't be any personal attacks.
Yeah, no ad hominems.
There should be more love.
We all disagree and we all discuss things.
Of course, they're into that kind of thing.
Mick doesn't care.
It's like, whatever.
I like the fact that if you listen carefully, when he's like, you know, people shouldn't attack you, Mick says, I don't mind.
And then when he's like, you know, and Eric, if you came out and said, and Mick says, don't worry about it.
So his response is just, you know, it's not a big deal, people being mean online.
You know, it is what it is.
And then Eric as well.
Whenever the host is like, he's suggesting that Eric tweet out.
And Eric would do that, by the way.
I don't think that would be a big cause for him to appear to take the higher ground.
But even then, he immediately wants to go back to reframing.
But Kurt, that's not really the issue, right?
The issue is blah, blah, blah.
But Kurt says they haven't spent any time in this conversation for two and a half hours about the attacks on...
Mick, or skeptics, right?
Yeah, because Mick is a grown man that doesn't have paper-thin skin.
Matt, Matt.
Yeah, that might be something to do with it.
So there was that, which was something.
But the last thing is that the host invites Eric and Mick to give a summation about things that they would like to see or whatever in this area.
And I think it's very interesting to contrast.
I want our top quantum field theorists, general relativists, and differential geometers read in to what data we have.
And I would like them to be the representatives that actually go through whatever data may exist as to whether anything is moving in ways that are inconsistent with our physics.
I would like to figure out whether this is a physics issue.
Or whether this is a defense, security, technology, public policy issue.
If it's physics, I want this turned over to the people who actually understand where the cutting edge of theoretical physics is and what's possible under the twin theories of the standard model in quantum field theory and general relativity and gravity theory.
I would like to know whether or not we are seeing anything that is indicative of
Science beyond the science we have.
That said, I think there's a small probability that something like that would be true.
The other basic ask is that we stop destroying people through our skepticism, through our fears of bunk, through our fears of a conversation run out of control.
It's really important to me.
That we recognize that gaslit people are everywhere and that we need to do as much as we can to restore that.
And whether the end of, you know, Blue Book or something ushered in an era where we poo-pooed all of this, even if it's nonsense or a cover story, that we start treating people who take this decision tree seriously and not force them to either say it's UFOs or a PSYOP,
but recognize the possibility that we may be looking at a Confluence of many different things.
And to allow people the freedom to behave as scientists and invite anecdote, data, and disclosure so that the government really has to realize it's not their effing information.
It belongs to all of us.
That's Eric's mission statement.
One thing that I'd highlight from that, Matt, is the constant presentation of, is this a physics?
A new physics issue?
Or is it a security, defense, public policy issue?
Is it a PSYOP?
Or is it, you know...
Or is it a new kind of evidence of a new kind of science happening?
Right.
And then there's one line or two lines where...
Well, I think it's a small possibility that that could be true.
Or, you know, or it might be just nonsense, right?
But it's...
It's never, Eric never takes that possibility seriously.
It's always one of the more dramatic things that it has to be.
Yeah, he spoke for like five minutes there, say.
It was two minutes, but it was very long.
It felt like five.
Anyway, but he spent 90% of the time, 95% of the time, talking seriously about these two alternatives.
And it could be both, right?
It could be a PSYOP.
It could be a confluence of things.
It could be a PSYOP and...
These amazing new technologies, either created by aliens or in some secret DARPA lab.
But what we know for sure is that we've been lied to.
It's something.
It's something.
But as you say, he never forgets to get the little disclaimer in.
All of that stuff that he talks about in the most weighty...
It's just a small possibility.
Most likely, Mick is right.
And now to contrast that with what Mick wants to happen, like what he wants, right?
It's a bit shorter, thank God, but just see if you can detect the difference here.
What I want is to figure out what's going on, and I think the best way to do that is to refine the evidence.
And I think the best way to refine the evidence is, one, like what Eric proposed is to read in experts on various subject matters.
But also, that doesn't always work.
There's been lots of examples historically where experts have studied UFO cases and they've come up with completely erroneous interpretations of those things.
There's the famous Chilean case, which anybody can look up.
Where a huge panel of experts couldn't figure it out.
But what happened was that they released the data, they released the video, and then people on the internet, myself included, figured out what it was.
So what I would like is for as much data as possible to be declassified.
And I think that is something that's...
It's not an insurmountable thing.
I don't think there's good reason for the classification of a large amount of this data.
When something comes out like this green triangle video, which was classified as something that shouldn't have been released, there's nothing that's harmful to US interests except perhaps a little embarrassment where they couldn't identify stars.
Yeah, very reasonable.
It's interesting though, isn't it?
Like for Eric, the fact that some...
Data on the green triangles, the stars, right?
The fact that that was classified is almost proof that the government knows there's something going on and, you know, whatever.
There's something serious going on.
But, you know, what Mick knows and what normal people know is that they just classify things, like, automatically.
It's just automatic.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something amazing going on there.
And Mick wants to investigate them, wants to get to the bottom of them, so he can completely agree with Eric on that point, which is that, yeah, you don't need to classify it.
Let's open it up to the community of investigators and figure out what's going on.
Often the answer will be mundane, but...
For Mick, that's interesting.
It's still interesting to figure out what's going on.
For Eric, of course, Eric never talks about specifics.
He never talks about the details.
I don't think he really knows what they are.
He gesticulates broadly and knows that there's something going on.
Yeah, and I just like that Mick's request is similar to Eric's in the grounds of wanting things to be declassified and for more transparency to be there.
He can do that without adding in the component of this being like, that it means that there's necessarily something there.
And the fact that he's focused on the data, he's not focused on the interpersonal aspect of it.
Yes, he agrees, you know, good if people don't do those things.
And Matt, just to make this clear, there's this aspect where people like Eric present themselves as sceptical.
Of experts.
But as he highlighted when he was talking about, we need to get all these expert physicists in to sort this out.
Mick is the one who actually says, well, hold on.
Even experts get things wrong, right?
There's a particular set of skills that you would need to look at this, and it's not necessarily being a great physicist.
Being a great physicist might actually be an obstacle to you just considering mundane, you know, lens flare.
Explanations, right?
So there is a skepticism of expertise in Mick's worldview.
There is a lack of acceptance of the government narrative as automatically true.
But he doesn't need to constantly hammer that.
He just does it automatically.
Yeah, no, in Eric's worldview, Eric is resentful and suspicious of the government.
These organizations, in his mind, they are bad people.
He's alluded to that quite a few times.
Even if it's just that they're keeping secrets and that they're holding the data for themselves instead of sharing it with the people.
But yeah, Eric does believe in experts because we need to get our top people, probably people that are his friends, people in his club, people like him.
And those people will figure it out, those experts.
So yeah, the nuts and bolts of...
Their opinions don't fit with the framing Eric has set up from the beginning.
Yeah, well, so I think we've probably hit all of the major points about this content a million times.
And, you know, you kind of listener will have the condensed diamond of a tightly edited, non-repetitive episode where, you know, we only meet the points exactly as many times as they need to be.
In order for it to stay.
It's a very precise psychological science that we practice here, but I think everybody's probably got the main points by now, and it will be interesting to contrast this Weinstein with his brother, who has a separate episode with a non-skeptical,
pro-UFO, pro-alien advocate, and see how their reasoning differs and converges.
That would be interesting to look at.
This was a fun interview to listen to for both positive and negative reasons.
On the positive side, I mean, I don't really have much of a prior interest in UFOs, but I do genuinely find Mick West interesting just because he knows a lot of details and cites a lot of interesting things.
Like on his side of the equation, he's just, yeah, he's interesting because he can talk to a lot of specific facts.
And on the negative side, it wasn't an amazing...
Tour de force, in a way, on Eric's side, who had really nothing to bring to the table in terms of, you know, he said himself many times, he doesn't know much about it.
He's just wandered in.
He's got a lot of strong opinions, but he doesn't actually know much.
This debate, this interview, whatever you want to call it, was set up because Eric had a problem with Nick.
Mick disagreed with him in public.
And it was a really interesting exercise for people to see how someone like Eric will undertake this kind of conversation, to attempt to manipulate, conduct that kind of passive aggression, do a lot of vague insinuations.
But it was just amazing the way that...
Eric did not respond to any of Mick's direct questions.
When Mick directly said, these are the reasons why this is implausible, Eric will change the topic.
When Mick says, well, what exactly is your problem with me?
Like, in what ways have I been bad or disrespectful or something?
Eric will change the topic.
It is an amazing little two-step, and I think people probably run into people like Eric from time to time in their daily lives, maybe not to that extreme.
But I've met people like that who do these things.
And it's good to be aware of what they're doing so you know how to handle them.
Matt, to put the postnote on this episode, I'm just going to play a final clip.
But I'm not going to commentate on it afterwards.
We'll move on to the reviews and whatnot.
But we can allow the listeners to practice their own decoding here.
So listen to this clip of Eric.
Talking to Mick about what he's getting wrong and what he's doing right.
And you'll hear that kind of appeals to how he could be better or how, you know, if he just were to change his approach a little bit, that things would go much better for everyone.
The way I see it is what Mick is doing, and I said this at the beginning, is a lot of it is yeoman's work.
A lot of it is thankless.
The skepticism is not that well rewarded.
And it has to be done because we need people to come up with prosaic explanations in order, even if it's true, you'd want somebody doing exactly what Mick is doing to say, you know, this isn't evidence of speed.
If you drag your finger over a picture of the Grand Canyon, that doesn't mean it's going hundreds of miles an hour, right?
There's all sorts of stuff that is thankless that has to do with understanding photography and parallax and things that are not that much fun.
The issue is when Mick is doing that, it's very important that people not go into, are you calling me a liar mode?
Because that's the inverse of that, and that's harassing Mick.
And again, I think Mick gets energy out of this from what I can tell.
But it's not pleasant to be called names.
And I've seen name-calling directed at Mick, and that's not right.
I think where Mick mistakes his importance is it really matters.
You're not that famous, except in this community.
In this community, everybody knows who you are.
And if you say something, it will be heard much differently than if you were to say something about food rationing.
There we go.
Homework for everyone to enjoy.
What was a play there?
Was that genuine Prius for Mick along with just something else?
Or, you know, you decide.
You decide.
That's our good note, our positive note to end the episode on.
Yep, that's left as an exercise for the listener.
Yes, Matt.
So...
We've got to thank our patrons, but before that, we have to respond to some reviews or review them, say how good or bad they are, that kind of thing.
Are you down with that?
Do you oppose this endeavor?
I fully support this endeavor, Chris.
I'm up for it.
Let's do it.
Okay.
So, negative or positive?
Which would you like, Matt?
Negative.
Start with negative?
It's a topical one.
Needs a more balanced discussion.
One out of five stars.
It would be easier to give more credibility to Mick's opinions about UFOs if you had someone else on the program balancing out his views.
David Grush, undeniably, has far better credentials than a retired game programmer who knows a lot about cameras.
In brackets, Mick.
Just to make clear, we know he's referring to Mick there.
Get David on your program along with Mick.
That would be an interesting listen.
I'm sure most agree that if something is there, let's just get on with getting that info out there.
Doesn't mean Mick is the expert to go on this.
As if now Mick is just a guy putting his own opinions out there without the veracity being challenged.
Littlebirds92.
Yes, yes, yes.
We're not going to have David Grishon.
No, sorry.
We had Eric on in a way.
So that counts in this episode.
There you go.
You had your advocate for UFOs pushing back against Mick and you got to hear that.
So there you go.
That's it.
And why do you give us one out of five?
Just because you don't like Big Quest.
People with the reviews, Matt, what can you do?
At least it had a clear theme.
This isn't like a both sides podcast.
This isn't that kind of podcast.
We're not having anti-vaxxers on.
Let's hear the anti-vax perspective.
No.
Sorry.
Another one.
This is by Dr. Sexington.
And it's five out of five stars.
Yep.
It says, enter the matrix.
Come for the pre-show banter.
Tolerate the decodings.
Stay for the post-show banter.
I do generally appreciate these two waterboarding themselves with hours of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and IDW content, so I don't have to.
I just wish the podcast came more frequently.
Perhaps Chris could quit assisting professors and focus on the real-world work, long-form podcasting.
Is that what you do?
Do you assist professors?
Yeah, I just get them coffee.
Give them a lift-up, a massage at the end of the day after their long sessions.
That's what associate...
Oh, I'm an associate professor.
Yeah, I just associate professors.
Yeah, I've been doing it all wrong.
You associate with professors.
Yes.
You just hang around.
Who's that guy?
I don't know.
Should we meet my full professor?
Nah, not yet.
So, yeah, but that was a good review, wasn't it?
Matrix.
Yes.
The Matrix.
People have a real issue with my pronunciation.
Because it's not how you pronounce that word.
That's why they have an issue.
It would be if I kept saying, what about Chris-mas?
Look, I get to say Matrix any way that I like.
I was inverting mattresses while you were still in short pants, Chris.
Wow.
You guys don't get to tell me how it should be said.
How to pronounce words correctly.
No, no.
Look, I appreciated the vote of confidence for the intro banter and the outro banter.
So did I. You know, not everyone appreciates it, but, you know, this guy does.
And it's a science.
What was his name?
Sex fiend?
Dr. Saxington.
What was his name?
Sex fiend?
Not sex fiend.
Sex pest.
Thank you, Dr. Saxington.
We're going to keep bantering for you and for everyone like you.
And thank you, LittleBird92.
For providing the contrasting opinion.
Yep.
Yeah, we'll take it under advisement.
Let's see.
Maybe we'll get the UFO guy.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
But, you know, you can never tell, right?
So we've got one last thing to do.
It's shout-outs, Matt.
Yep.
Shout-outs.
Shout-outs.
Okay, so I'm going to start with conspiracy hypothesizers because we've got a few.
We have Isaac, Ben Raff, Chris Saville, Linz, Michael DeSantis, Justin Brisley, Cole, Adrian Horbus, misanthropic Cockney Wanker,
whose seemingly constant existential dread is served by the banter and exposing of right-wing shittery.
Nice.
That's a username.
Yes.
Correct.
Callan Inman, Corey Nemkov, Angie Vroom, Matthew Cox, Alan Fortin, Kieran Mullen, Emmett Nelson Porter, Patrick Lang, and Emily Baucom.
That is our conspiracy hypothesizers.
Yay!
Thanks, guys.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
They will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Now, yes, as Eric was doing just now.
Correct.
So, revolutionary thinkers, Matt, we've got Gordon Sweeney, Rod Hodges, Lucy Greaves, Cullen McGill, Richard Fairbanks, Star Shark and Michael John and Ryan Booker.
How was that?
Good.
Good.
That was brilliant.
Very quick.
Very quick.
Very quick and efficient of you.
Thank you all, you revolutionary thinkers slash geniuses.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher.
A thinker.
That the world doesn't know.
Now, the last category.
You know what that is, Matt?
The last category, as I scroll frantically.
The theoretical geniuses.
Galaxy Green Gurus.
That's correct, Matt.
It's Galaxy Green Gurus.
And there we have not so many.
Looking sparse.
They're always hard to find.
Not as many as they could be.
We could stand a few more.
Connor Drury, Jake Lawrence, Ryan Taylor, Desi, and Linda Sears.
Linda Sears.
Oh, and Scott Hilton and Roland Weber.
How about them?
Those beautiful few.
Yeah.
Thank you, one and all, you Galaxy Brain people.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
Plenty of room.
There's still room in the C-suite.
There's still room at the top tier if anyone is looking for a ticket.
Yeah, I'm with that level of energy.
You can tell by how.
Who wouldn't?
Who wouldn't be?
Look, it's been a long decoding session.
We've run the course.
We're done with the Weinsteins for the minute.
And look, if you want to get to us, there's a Patreon where we have bonus stuff, you know, that kind of thing.
There's decoding academia episodes.
There's grometer episodes.
If you want to email us, decodingthegurus at gmail.com.
Just think again.
Think again.
No, don't think again.
We apparently don't tell people the email, so it's decodingthegurus at gmail.com.
There's a subreddit.
What else is it?
There's a Twitter account.
There's an Instagram.
There's a meal order catalog.
There's a whiskey Tumblr.
There's a Facebook page.
There's a Facebook page.
There's none of those actual physical products that I've mentioned, but, you know, a man can dream, a man can dream.
And to be honest, do you really want something branded with us on it?
Not really.
That's not going to be, you know.
And last thing I'll say to people is, you know, be careful with your green drink.
It might destroy your liver if you're not careful.
Let's just keep an eye on it, despite what Lex Friedman and Huberman will tell you.
Get your diet advice from...
Qualified professional, not from an anthropologist.
I think that's the lesson to be drawn from that one.
Also true.
Also true.
Well, Matt, it's very important after this content to keep an eye out for the distributed idea suppression complex, which we are a part of, and protect the gated institutional narrative, which we worship and love.
