We return, apologetic for the delay, with the next part of our investigation into the Weinstein brothers (no, the other ones). This time, it's Eric - mathematician, hedgefund manager, cultural commentator, founder of the Intellectual Dark Web (or at least of the name), and persecuted/suppressed victim of conspiracies (to hear him tell it anyway). We don't always cover Nazis. Sometimes we have to cover people like Eric who, while not Nazis, are part of the current reactionary ecosystem. And what a part he is. More about Eric, particularly his connection to Peter Thiel, next week. Content Warnings, as ever. Notes/Links: Eric Weinstein website: https://ericweinstein.org/ Eric Weinstein YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/nobani88 Eric Weinstein CV: http://www.eric-weinstein.net/CV/Eric_Weinstein_CV_July_17_2003.pdf Eric-Weinstein.net About Page: http://www.eric-weinstein.net/about.html "During my training in pure mathematics, I became equally interested in real world problems. While much of the challenge in research mathematics revolves around the specialized tools needed to attack narrowly defined problems, as a consultant, I sometimes find it more rewarding to find a toolkit that has already been developed elsewhere, and adapt those tools to attack the problem at hand. While I am always open to the idea of using recently developed or highly advanced analytic tools, I have often found that it is often in the partner/client’s best interest to use fundamental results which, while central in another field, may be less familiar in the area at hand." Michael Phillips, "Scholars Facing Joblessness Seek Curbs on Immigration" The Wall Street Journal September 4, 1996. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB84178634524002500 ""We remain a fiercely merit-oriented, antixenophobic community, but the current situation knows no precedent," wrote Harvard-trained mathematician Eric Weinstein and 20 other scholars in a recent plea to Capitol Hill. [...] "The U.S. mathematicians allege that foreign scholars take many of the best research jobs, reducing salaries and forcing Americans into non-tenure-track positions or lower-quality schools. Since 1976, "universities have been using the immigration exemptions to import a labor force of foreign scientists at greatly decreased cost," wrote Mr. Weinstein, who is a non-tenure-track postdoctoral fellow at MIT." " "Eric Weinstein's Harvard Story -- The System Breaks Down in Novel Situations." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgGZMRJ15oY The Verdict With Ted Cruz, "A Portal into the Progressive Mind." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CCde6TAKdw James O'Keefe on the Portal, Episode 26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CvsBlKGYg&t=4514s Eric Weinstein, "Lynching, Police Brutality, BLM and Defunding the Police." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfAumoTIeik Dennis Overbye, "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street," The New York Times March 9, 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10quant.html " “I regard quants to be the good guys,” said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan. “We did try to warn people,” he said. “This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn’t the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn’t understand volatility or correlation.” " Bret Weinstein on The Portal, Episode 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s "Of Mice and Men: Unseen Dangers in Laboratory Protocols" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/of-mice-and-men-unseen-da_b_1352201 r/IntellectualDarkWeb thread on the claims in The Portal 19. https://www.reddit.com/r/IntellectualDarkWeb/comments/erochq/can_we_verify_the_claims_made_in_portal_19/ "Lab Mice Telomeres Do Not Break Them as Disease Models" https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/06/lab-mice-telomeres-do-not-break-them-as-disease-models.html Uberfeminist, "Eric Weinstein is an awful person." http://uberfeminist.blogspot.com/2020/02/eric-weinstein-is-awful-person.html Uberfeminist, "Eric Weinstein's Conspiracy Theories." http://uberfeminist.blogspot.com/2020/03/eric-weinsteins-conspiracy-theories.html Chris Kavanagh livetweet of THe Portal 19: https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1218579021698494464 The Vox interview which so fascinated / annoyed Jack: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/25/15998002/eric-weinstein-capitalism-socialism-revolution Rowan Fortune's very complimentary write-up of IDSG, complete with Rowan's own insights: https://www.timetomutiny.org/post/i-don-t-speak-german-on-fascist-subcultures
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And it's episode 61, the much-delayed, much-belated episode 61 of I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham.
He-him, in case I used the wrong intro.
And I'm here, as usual, with my cohort, my co-host, the actual star of the show, of course, Daniel Harper.
Also he, him.
Hi, Daniel.
Hi, I'm doing well.
And yes, this was much delayed.
I had a lot of people kind of asking in both my personal Twitter and the podcast Twitter, you know, where's the episode?
They thought something had happened to us, I suppose.
And I do think This one has been much delayed, it is going to be split into a two-parter, and unfortunately, any discussion of Hulk Hogan's penis has been moved into part two.
So, that will be even more delayed than you already think it is.
I just wanted to highlight that at the beginning, because I did tease Hulk Hogan's penis, but we're not going to do that this time.
We're going to do it next time.
Also, I'm Daniel, he him.
Yes, talk about luring people in with false pretenses.
There's going to be loads of people tuning in just to hear the Hulk Hogan's penis material.
Indeed.
And you're letting them down!
Well, I'm letting them know that I'm letting them down now, so that they don't wait for the whole time and never really get into that particular very important topic.
I mean, you come to this show not for the in-depth analysis of fascist subcultures online, but really for the talk of a 70-year-old's cock.
I think that's really what people come here for.
I'm sure it is.
I love the fact that we have actual respectable people who listen to this show and I'm so embarrassed for them.
Anyway, we should move on.
Yeah, it's like when really great people follow you on Twitter.
It's so embarrassing.
I mean, it's incredibly gratifying, you know, when one of these, you look at it, followed by, really?
He followed me?
And then you think, oh my god!
He's going to be getting my crap come up on his feed!
So yeah, stop listening is really what I'm saying, everybody.
Definitely, definitely.
Yeah, but... So, we've done our... I've got a list here.
Inside Baseball, letting you in behind the scenes, listeners.
Before we start, I ask Daniel, you know, what are we doing?
And I make a list, and I've ticked off apology.
There we go.
You might have heard my pen.
Go across the page there.
Ticked off the apology for missing two weeks.
Because we are sorry.
We don't like to miss weeks.
But it just... It's just... Eric fucking Weinstein.
Honestly.
None of us... Neither of us really want to talk about this guy.
I mean, it's important that we talk about him and sort of the world around him.
And then the minute you start kind of trying to organize an episode, it just balloons.
Because there's a clear beginning that we're going to get to momentarily.
But there's no end, because there's no, wait a minute, there's no end to the bullshit that this man creates around himself.
Anyway, we should actually dig into it.
Yeah, this bitch is tiring, that's what we're saying.
So, yes, but before we get on to Eric Weinstein, a couple of follow-up items on stuff we've covered in previous episodes.
To start with, we need to touch upon the subject of Mr. Heimbach, I believe.
Yeah, there's been some stuff that's kind of come out since we last recorded.
I wish I knew what Heimbach meant, but I don't speak German.
No, there's no way to find that out either.
The internet doesn't exist.
You cannot Google things in languages other than English.
If only!
No, I kind of got some pushback just for talking to him, honestly.
Um, from people who, you know, were, I think, reasonably kind of asking, like, of all the, of all the best uses of your time, why is talking to, like, fascist dickhead Matt Heimbach, you know, worth your time?
Um, and, uh, I did just want to respond, like, we are going to be kind of covering some of that in an episode in two or three weeks, I think.
About why that was necessary and kind of what you know kind of deradicalization means and we're gonna do that finally gonna do that American history X Discussion and kind of like roll that all up into one episode But I did just want to let people know that I was aware of that Criticism and aware, you know, and I'm aware that it's certainly like it's a complicated issue.
It's like, you know, well What is the what is the proper response?
and really the reason that I gave him so much of my time and have given him so much of my time is because I I offered on the show, you know, I actually said, please reach out to me.
I would love to, you know, have some kind of dialogue.
And, you know, you can't do that and then not actually, like, if he has the courage to respond, you can't, like, brush him off.
And I think it has been certainly enlightening in ways that I think we will get to here in a couple episodes.
But that was, I just wanted to respond to that criticism and let people know that I am aware of it.
I'd ask for a little bit of, a little bit of forbearance with me on that.
So that's something I think, as you say, we're going to be coming back to, that subject.
Before, as I say, we get on to Mr. Weinstein, well, we need to sort of skip back to the subject of a different Mr. Weinstein and his antics, because we need to touch upon the previously covered in the last episode subject of Evergreen College, don't we?
And the events thereon.
The Evergreen State College is the name of the university.
We are so.
We just don't want to do this today.
It's been a weird couple of weeks.
But I did put a call out in the most recent episode asking for people to contact me from Evergreen who might have some insight into this story.
And one of the things that happened after that episode was released is this kid, Benjamin Boyce, Who has a YouTube show called The Voice of Reason.
He doesn't, does he?
Does he really?
He does.
Okay.
The Voice of Reason.
Just when I was starting to think life might be worth living after all.
Which should tell you, once you know the name of that podcast, you know exactly what kind of content you're getting from this.
He's the one who made the, currently, as of the last time I checked, 22-part documentary about the Evergreen State College.
In 2017 about that about that series of incidents and he called me out publicly on Twitter because I said in the episode that I watched the first five minutes and found it completely unuseful and didn't have the time to kind of dig into it before recording that most recent episode and then he claimed that it was a very well-made documentary actually and that I should respond to it and so or that I should at least be aware of it because otherwise I'm not looking at the full picture and
This is a 22-part documentary of an average 20-minute length per part, which means that the total running time is something like 8 hours.
And I spent that time, actually, I did watch the entire 22-part documentary.
Um, because I hate myself apparently.
Um, it is, it is, it was very enlightening in, in some ways.
Um, it's completely bullshit in terms of as a documentary.
Um, and really all that it did was it put this kid, Benjamin Boyce, much more on my radar.
Um, once I got, uh, two parts into this documentary, I immediately created a folder on my external hard drive called Benjamin Boyce and archived his channel.
So, look forward to a full episode at some point in the future.
Okay.
In which we will cover this in more detail.
More positively, I got a number of... I love that my moment is like, I had to create a folder.
I had to, yeah.
No, we're going to archive this channel now.
It is time, you know.
As I say, inside baseball again, that's a big thing.
The folder creation.
That's a significant moment in the process.
When you're not even a Nazi, when you're just that much of a dipshit, then I'm like, okay, I need to save this.
This needs to go into the hard drive.
Anyway.
Yeah, right.
Create folder, file under dipshits rather than Nazis.
Yes, indeed.
No, but more positively, I got a number of responses from people who knew Brett and Heather, who some of them were students and some of them were not.
And I am still kind of reaching out to people and looking to get information.
There is definitely more of a story to the Evergreen State College story than has kind of been Indicated previously I did get two kind of points of criticism or just things that I think people wanted me to clarify and the first thing is that like unlike all the all the right-wing journalists journalists in quote who are who have covered the story in the past
This series of events and Brett's activities have actively hurt Evergreen in terms of its enrollment, in terms of the funding it receives, it's being attacked by state officials in the state of Washington, and it has really gotten a big black eye over this that it's still recovering from, and I am not a part of that.
I have no desire to, like, if I were to find things that are, like, that I can be critical of at Evergreen, I'm happy to discuss those.
You know, that's my own, like, journalistic integrity, but I certainly have no desire to destroy the university and every, or harm the university.
And nearly every person that I've spoken to about it has spoken very positively about the Evergreen State College and its sort of place in the world, in the sense that it is providing a high-end liberal arts education at public school, public university prices, like a seventh of the cost of another university of its quality.
So that is something that I felt we needed to highlight here, is that I am cognizant of the larger social context, and that's exactly why I'm interested in this story, frankly.
And also, people are worried about their identities being protected, and reaching out to me that I'm not going to fly off the handle and share info that I shouldn't be sharing.
I track neo-Nazis, believe me, I am aware of people's need for safety.
And I have ways of doing that and so if you do reach out to me, trust me, your identity is safe and I will not communicate in any way about you without your permission.
The only other kind of big thing that kind of came up a couple of times is that it was not clear enough in our last episode that these students who were protesting Brett Weinstein were not his students.
They were kind of outside students from his classes.
Like none of them, to my knowledge, had ever taken a class from Brett or Heather for that matter.
And that these were not his students.
And I think that that, I thought that was pretty clear, at least by implication in the previous podcast.
But that was something that was really important to a lot of people, even people who were critical of Brett and Heather, that it was important that those were not his students who were actually protesting him.
They were outside students.
And so I did just want to clarify that right here before we go any further, that if that was important to people, I wanted to make sure that was highlighted.
Okay, so on to the main subject of the episode, Mr. Eric Weinstein.
So, Daniel, who is, I wish I genuinely didn't know, who is Eric Weinstein?
Well, funny you asked that question, Jack.
It turns out Eric Weinstein is a pretty interesting individual.
Someone like his brother Brett, he has serious academic credentials.
In fact, his academic credentials are significantly better than those of his brother.
He has a PhD in mathematical physics.
He has kind of an extended academic background.
Well, actually, the best way to do this, he's the founder of the Intellectual Dark Web.
He's the guy who coined the term.
He is, in many ways, Mr. IDW, even more so than, like, a Sam Harris figure, or, you know, any of those other guys, Jordan Peterson, or David Shapiro, or whatever.
He is kind of the face.
He is the voice of the IDW.
He also, spoiler alert, currently works for Teal Capital.
He's basically Peter Teal's money man.
We'll mostly get to that in the next episode.
This time we're really just going to cover the details of his personal background and some of his online activities and get into Teal a little bit more next time.
But I do actually have his CV from his, not his current website, but his previous website.
This is a CV that is dated July 2003.
And so you can tell Eric Weinstein's old website and his new website because all you have to do is take a glance at them and it will be obvious which one is the old one.
But also, this one is eric-weinstein.net, whereas his current one is ericweinsteinwithnodash.org.
And on the old one, it's, well, I've got his, again, I've got his CV here.
He was, he entered college, University of Pennsylvania in 1982 at the age of 16.
Graduated with his magna cum laude with a combined degree in mathematics in 1985 after three years.
Moves immediately on to Harvard.
Skips the master's degree entirely.
And has his PhD by 1992, by the time he's 26 or 27.
His dissertation title is The Extinction of Self-Dual Yangsmehl Equations Across the Eighth Dimension.
His fields of specialization are Mathematical Physics, Gauge Theory, Differential Geometry, and Exceptional Algebra.
I will say, I know more math than about 95% of people.
I minored in math.
I have no idea what that refers to.
So, um, That's kind of one of those things of like the dividing line between people who are like good at math and people who are like really good at math.
It's a pretty clear distinction.
So this is someone with, again, serious academic credentials there.
He has his full PhD by the time he's 26.
He does a couple of fellowships, one at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, MIT.
He's working at MIT for about five years.
He does some post-doctoral work.
He goes and works for the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard.
And then he kind of does some professional experience.
He basically moves out of academia and into the finance world around sometime in the late 90s.
And one of the things that I found was interesting was that he referenced this in one of his Portal episodes.
It's this apparently longstanding feud he has.
Portal is his podcast, isn't it?
Yes, the Portal is his current podcast, yes, and that's his YouTube show.
I've put links to that, we will get into the Portal very shortly here.
But in one episode of his podcast, he talks about this guy Michael Phillips, who was a journalist that apparently he still has a beef with.
And so I went and looked for this piece.
Michael Phillips wrote one piece about him, quoting a thing that he wrote twice in this article in the Wall Street Journal on September 4th, 1996.
He's been nursing this grudge for 23, 24 years.
The title of this piece is Scholars Facing Joblessness Seek Curbs on Immigration.
I'm going to just highlight the two quotes from Weinstein in this.
The piece is about what was then this new phenomenon of major tech universities and tech schools bringing in foreign students into high-tech programs.
In a real way.
And universities have a big, they have major incentives to do this because those students pay the full freight of the cost of their education as opposed to getting scholarships or in-state tuition, etc, etc.
And so you can basically just pump a lot of money out of these students.
So universities definitely like having these students around.
Which is no, for me, I mean I work with people who are from all over the world in my work.
I don't have a problem with that, but there is this kind of weird incentive structure, which Eric Weinstein was very adamant about back in 1996.
He apparently wrote something for Congress in a plea to Capitol Hill.
Now, I could not find the full text of this, but here's what's quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
We remain a fiercely merit-oriented, anti-xenophobic community, but the current situation knows no precedent, wrote Harvard-trained mathematician Eric Weinstein and 20 other scholars on a recent plea to Capitol Hill.
And then, uh, some time later.
The U.S.
mathematicians allege that foreign scholars take many of the best research jobs, reducing salaries and forcing Americans into non-tenure-track positions or lower-quality schools.
Since 1976, quote, Universities have been using the immigration exemptions to import labor force of foreign scientists at greatly decreased costs, wrote Mr. Weinstein, who is a non-tenure-track postdoctoral fellow at MIT.
Those are the quotes from Eric Weinstein in this piece, which is overall, you know, I did manage to track this down.
It is behind a paywall.
It's overall a very balanced piece, really just describing the fact that mathematics PhDs in the United States are competing with foreign labor and that they wrote this thing not being not particularly happy about that.
It is a publication from a business magazine.
I don't really understand what Weinstein expected from that.
But it tells me that, A, again, that Weinstein is holding a grudge from 24 years ago from a place where he feels he was misquoted.
he doesn't like clarify exactly what his issues were like but he does say that he had to go to all the way up to the editor in terms of like getting some things corrected and i'm not sure exactly what he's referring to because he doesn't describe it anywhere that i found but also that he's been on this sort of like immigration issue for that long as well and that yeah um well let's just start off and we're going to play a clip here i want to start i want to play this clip um and we're going to kind of play two clips here
pretty back to back and i think this gives you a sense of i really want you to get from eric how eric feels about uh what his academic career is and so um we're going to start here this is from a uh interview he did uh from this guy who works at mit and it's called eric weinstein's harvard story the system breaks down a novel situation so And this is pretty near the beginning of that episode, or at least of that clip.
And the interviewer is asking Eric about his university background.
So we're going to play this and then move right into another clip.
And again, that's going to give us a sense of who Eric actually is.
This is, like all of our other clips, we are, I have increased this to 1.5x speed.
It is still three minutes long, so I apologize.
But it's worth kind of getting, again, getting it in his own words.
So we're gonna kind of play this right now and move on.
Without naming names, can you tell the story of your struggle during your time at Harvard?
Maybe in a way that tells the bigger story of the struggle of young, bright minds that are trying to come up with big, bold ideas within the institutions that we're talking about.
You can start.
I mean, in part, it starts with coffee with a couple of Croatians in the math department at MIT.
And we used to talk about music and dance and math and physics and love and all this kind of stuff, as Eastern Europeans love to, and I ate it up.
And my friend Gordana, who was an instructor in the MIT math department when I was a graduate student at Harvard, said to me, I'm probably gonna do a bad version of her accent, but here we go.
Eric, will I see you tomorrow at the secret seminar?
And I said, what secret seminar?
Eric, don't joke.
And I said, I'm not used to this style of humor, Gordon.
She said, Eric, the secret seminar that your advisor is running.
I said, what are you talking about?
Ha ha ha.
You know, your advisor is running a secret seminar on this aspect.
I think it was like the Chern-Simons invariant.
I'm not sure what the topic was again, but she gave me the room number and the time and she was like not cracking a smile.
I've never known her to make this kind of a joke.
And I thought this was crazy, and I was trying to have an advisor.
I didn't want an advisor, but people said you have to have one, so I took one.
And I went to this room, like 15 minutes early, and there was not a soul inside it.
It was outside of the math department.
And I was still in the same building, the Science Center at Harvard.
And I sat there and let five minutes go by, let seven minutes go by, ten minutes go by, there's nobody.
I thought, okay, so this was all an elaborate joke.
And then like three minutes to the hour, this graduate student walks in and like sees me and does a double take.
And then I start to see the professors in geometry and topology start to file in.
And everybody's like very disconcerted that I'm in this room.
And finally, the person who was supposed to be my advisor walks in to the seminar and sees me and goes wide as it goes.
And I realized that the secret seminar is true, that the department is conducting a secret seminar on the exact topic that I'm interested in, not telling me about it, and that these are the reindeer games that the Rudolphs of the department are not invited to.
So then I realized, okay, I did not understand it.
There's a parallel department.
And that became the beginning of an incredible odyssey in which I came to understand that the game that I had been sold about publication, about blind refereeing, about openness and scientific transmission of information was all a lie.
I came to understand that at the very top, there's a second system that's about closed meetings and private communications and agreements about citation and publication that the rest of us don't understand.
And that in large measure, that is the thing that I won't submit to.
And so when you ask me questions like, well, why wouldn't you feel good about talking to your critics?
The answer is, oh, you don't know.
Like if you stay in a nice hotel, you don't realize that there's an entire second structure inside of that hotel.
Where, like, there's usually a worker's cafe in a resort complex that isn't available to the people who are staying in the hotel.
And then there are private hallways inside the same hotel that are parallel structures.
So that's what I found, which was, in essence, just the way you can stay hotels your whole life and not realize that inside of every hotel is a second structure that you're not supposed to see as the guest.
There is a second structure inside of academics that behaves totally differently with respect to how people get dinged, how people get their grants taken away, how this person comes to have that thing named after them.
And so, apologies for playing such an extended clip there, but I think it's really important to understand who Eric Weinstein is and what his perspective on his own life is.
That clip encapsulates it very, very well.
So, first of all, I just read you his qualifications.
He graduated with a full PhD at like 26 or 27 years old in mathematical physics.
And he admits that he was a fairly poor student in the sense that he had troubles with symbology, which if you're trying to be a mathematician and you have issues with symbology, you're going to have a hard time.
I mean, he does appear to have non-neurotypical traits, and that is one of his sort of pet issues that he brings up on a fairly regular basis that I actually agree with him on, that like helping non-neurotypical students to like find a better education that is better suited to them than traditional classroom education.
I agree with that.
Of course, Eric Weinstein thinks that it should be used to pluck out the truly bright students who do not do well in normal school, as opposed to being something that should be available to everyone, regardless of whether they're going to become the next Albert Einstein.
And that's where he and I would disagree.
That will come back up again shortly, I think.
But there's a lot there.
I mean, I guess what jumps out at you from that?
Well, it's on two tracks.
Firstly, I don't want to have a go at the guy, or sound as if I'm having a go at the guy, if in fact he is neuroatypical.
But it does sound to me like he's paranoid, like he has a persecution complex, like he has a victim complex.
And it also strikes me as rather childish, to be honest, that somebody who's so clever And he's clearly a very bright man, you know, very bright man, clearly.
And a grown-up, you know, should sort of have this...
Blazing revelation, you know, like a Damascene conversion, because there's a meeting that he wasn't invited to, that he crashes, and people are surprised to see him there.
That apparently causes the scales to fall from his eyes, and he suddenly realizes, which he didn't realize before, that, you know, there's backscratching, and stuff like that, and, you know, deals going on behind the scenes, and maybe even a bit of bitchiness in academia.
It's a bit odd to me that he's just figuring this out.
I'm sorry to use a gendered insult, but it's the perfect word to describe what I mean.
Sure, sure.
No, I think, I think, I think we can, we can glide past that.
I mean, you know, I find also, I mean, just more, more subtly, sort of, he does kind of go back to doing, like, he has a real affinity for doing accents on his shows and for, you know, kind of Eastern European cultures, etc, etc.
And so the fact that he has this sort of, like, this kind of bit at the beginning, that's why I left that in, he does do that sort of thing a lot.
But I think you're, you're absolutely right in the sense that You know, the scales fall from his eyes when, like, he finds out there was a seminar I wasn't invited to, and therefore there's this secret university that it's all backscratching, and that it's all this thing, and that I wasn't invited to this, and therefore it's all, like, a big conspiracy against me.
And who knows what the real story behind this is?
I mean, even if we accept the story is, like, completely legit, I mean, he himself says, you know, I didn't want to have an advisor, but they made me have an advisor, so you were kind of Being a dick and not going about things the way that, you know, people expected you to, to begin with.
Who knows if there was something going on with his advisor and he wasn't being, you know, sort of invited to this based on that.
But also, you're already sitting in like a PhD program for mathematical physics at Harvard.
Yeah.
You know... How many... Do you know how many other people didn't get invited to that seminar?
Like all 7 billion of us.
I guess this would have been in the late 90s so it would have been like something short of 6 billion at that point.
But...
You are already among the most elite of the elite anywhere and the fact that like there are also like secret wheels within wheels and that like there are people who are going to like it's just it's it's it's it's absurd that to think that like because you were not invited to this one seminar that this indicates this giant secret society that is out to just exclude you personally, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I've actually found a website which has a fair bit of coverage on Mr. Weinstein, and there's actually one of the posts on this blog.
It's called Uberfeminist, this blog.
I have two links to Uberfeminist in the show notes.
Yes, please go ahead.
Our researches are run on parallel lines, and on one of the blog posts... No, it's a secret seminar.
Uberfeminist is a secret seminar that only you and I are invited to today.
Indeed.
So we shouldn't do this sort of Masonic hook-up thing on the podcast.
We should keep this private.
Yeah, one of the posts is called Eric Weinstein's Conspiracy Theories and there's quite a lengthy transcript from one of Weinstein's podcast episodes and there's actually a section which I think is related to what certainly the Michael Phillips thing you were talking about before.
He says, in the 1980s and 1990s I became very active in believing the so-called STEM shortage of scientists and engineers that was claimed by the Policy Research and Analysis Division of the NSF, don't know what that is, was in fact a conspiracy.
Fine.
...was in fact a conspiracy in order to make life easier for employers who would be facing American scientists with an ability to bargain and make higher wage demands and that the National Academy of Sciences and NSF interceded on behalf of employers which was tampering in the labor market in an absolutely vital sector resulting in the Immigration Act of 1990 or IMACT 90 as it was called.
At that point, I also became aware of what I have termed Borjas Rectangle Theory.
That is, employers generally in the free market economies, when they are complaining about labour shortages, they are actually trying to transfer wealth from labour to capital, complaining instead that there is a small inefficiency that needs to be rectified, which we might call the Harberger Triangle.
So that is it and etc etc and I'm just I'm so tickled by this guy sort of suddenly discovering this vast Conspiracy which is employers want to try to pay you less He's the main victim of that Right, and they will increase labor supply in order to do so, you know.
And I mean, this also comes up, I mean, you know, on one level this is like... And he's giving it all these special names and everything.
It's quite delightful.
Yes, yes.
Well, he's got to make it sound smarter than it is by giving it a, like a mathematical, by essentially describing some mathematical or pseudo-mathematical function.
That will describe this phenomenon that he's trying to indicate.
And, you know, ultimately kind of reinventing the wheel quite a bit.
No, I actually already had that in the show notes, so I'm very glad that you found it as well.
This is actually an episode of The Portal in which he did it solo, in which he describes a very interesting conspiracy around Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh yes!
I wondered if we'd be getting to that.
Like it's it's very much like the uh there's just so much here that I really didn't kind of cover this in so it's like last time when we talked about the you know Brett having this like kind of idea that the COVID-19 virus was generated in a Chinese lab and we just had to brush by that.
I almost was just gonna brush by this because like It's so, as you know from reading that little bit, the conspiracy is so complicated and yet it reveals so much about him.
The ultimate thing that he's suggesting is that he actually met Jeffrey Epstein at some point.
He says about 15 years ago and that he always considered Epstein a construct and this construct it's sort of like this like CIA intelligence tool by which like there is no like person named Jeffrey Epstein or if there is a person named Jeffrey Epstein that the
person that we know as Jeffrey Epstein was ultimately sort of a Front by the CIA like a character created by the CIA to run intelligence operations And then he and it's pretty I think it's pretty uncontroversial that Jeffrey Epstein had intelligence Contacts There are people kind of looking looking into that question.
Oh yeah, I mean there's all sorts of shady stuff going on with Epstein.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely.
But then he goes on to a like the fact that you were sitting and you had a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein really kind of tells us a little bit about.
Your own background, right?
He claims that he's been trying to call this out quietly so as to not be, you know, to come into problems with the powers that be for the last 15 years or so, and I can't find any evidence that that's true, that he's done anything of the sort to, like, there's no one who's come out and said, yes, Eric Weinstein told me In 2007 that he believed Jeffrey Epstein was a construct.
There's no one who... I can't find anything that backs up that claim, first of all.
That's a recurring theme with many of Mr. Weinstein's claims.
Oh yes.
The conspiracy theory revolves around the fact that Epstein, in addition to being this venture capital guy and doing all the horrifying sexual things that we know that he did, he was also a big funder of science and math technology, of STEM people that he knew.
A lot of people within the scientific community, kind of big names within the scientific community, and some of those people seem to have a relationship with the underage, with the child rape, we'll just call it what it is, and some people seem to just kind of be people who got money for doing financial stuff.
But Weinstein sort of connects that together and says that this is part of an ongoing effort by some foreign agent to Control the brightest minds and stem so as to get the fruits of that of that developing technology For like the CIA or whatever as opposed to kind of sharing it with the larger world It's unclear to me exactly what he claims and I didn't have a chance to go back and re-listen to that this week
Um, but it's a total, it's a, it's a really kind of like, it's, it's a conspiracy theory that's built around a lot of, like, real things that were happening, but the dots are connected in these, like, absolutely absurd ways that even if, like, even if it's true that there's some element of thing, even if that's true, like, it doesn't, it's kind of banal, right?
Like, the CIA funds programs, the CIA funds all kinds of, like, science and tech efforts in an effort to, like, build spy technology for themselves.
Duh!
What's the implication?
Why do you need Jeffrey Epstein to do it?
It's like, you know, there's an hour and a half podcast where he goes through this whole thing and just kind of adds up to like, well, yeah, this is something that we knew from four years ago.
I don't know.
What are we arguing about?
Well, it's like these ideas he has, Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
Right, the DISC.
And there's another one, there's a phrase he uses, you know, he uses it sort of like, this is an example of what I call gated institutional narrative.
Right.
And he's talking, I mean, when you actually look at the claims he's making, he's just giving a sort of vulgar conspiratorial account.
Of something that basically everybody knows.
Everybody knows that there are official narratives, and there are mainstream narratives, and that, you know, people in the media keep them going and keep alternative narratives out of the media.
Everybody knows that, you know?
Right.
Well, it's banal, as you say.
And the thing with the GIN, the G-I-N, the Gated Institutional Narrative, is that there's a story that is being told by the New York Times.
The New York Times and other organizations like it are telling this sort of like, are keeping certain things out of the narrative.
And that those things are things that are going to lead to sort of greater innovation.
And that instead all of this is being sort of like captured by the left, the sort of nebulous left.
And that like true geniuses like me, Eric Weinstein, and my brother, Brett Weinstein, are being kept out of the GIN because our ideas are just too radical and too upsetting to the established order, right?
That's right, yeah.
He's claimed to have unified field theory, basically.
With this scientific theory of his which he apparently doesn't want to divulge to anybody because he won't publish anything.
And he's kind of done the equivalent thing in economics as well.
He keeps on hinting at this world-shaking, revelatory new theory of economics that apparently he won't publish it.
But it's because there's this conspiracy to keep this, and another recurring theme I think in Eric's, you know, statements about the world is that there's just this creative, brilliant, genius elite, you know, and we have to free them.
We have to free their potential and their ability, and of course he's in that elite, because people who talk about elites always think they're in the elite they're talking about.
And it's being suppressed by the gated institutional narrative and the distributed whatever the fuck.
Distributed idea suppression complex.
And I've spent a lot of time with this guy at this point and if you ask me to differentiate between those two ideas.
In a consistent way it's it's it's kind of nonsense like the idea is like they sort of the gated institutional narrative is like the story that's being told versus the disc is like this sort of network of people who are like like it's it's not a it's less like sort of a small group of people in a room somewhere as much as it is
a lot of people in sort of various levels of society that exist to sort of keep ideas suppressed that would go against the established order right yeah they're all doing it secret seminars presumably right and they're just secret seminars everywhere and that these things exist throughout our society and like no one is claiming
i'm certainly not claiming that there is not a that there are not people conspiring in back rooms to prevent positive things from happening in the world to prevent uh uh Social movements from gaining traction, etc.
Dude, you work for Peter Thiel.
We're going to leave most of that off until the next episode, but I do want to kind of come back to Eric's background just a little bit and play another clip.
I apologize for this, but I regret to inform you that Ted Cruz has a podcast.
First of all, yes, Senator Ted Cruz has a podcast.
And Eric Weinstein appeared on that podcast.
Ted Cruz's podcast is called The Verdict.
This is the title of the episode.
I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
It's a portal into the progressive mind, so fun times there.
They open up the episode by congratulating themselves for bringing a progressive like Eric Weinstein onto the show as opposed to a conservative thinker.
Well, after a couple minutes you get this lovely little segment, so we're going to play that here right now.
And again, this is more of Eric talking about his academic career and his frustrations with his academic career.
Alright, and this is about a minute and 43 seconds long.
And again, this is at 1.5x speed.
Anyone with a podcast can't really comment on other people talking a lot and liking the sound of their own voice.
I know a few people who love the sound of their voice as much as Eric Weinstein does.
The Peter Principle really doesn't function because what you right now have is an insane situation whereby people like myself, who are 55 years old, 54 technically, have never even started our careers because of the holding pattern that we find having to do with a tremendous number of people in the silent and boomer generations.
And given that we, you know, holding the important chairs and at least in, for example, in academics, when we get rid of things like mandatory retirement, You have a very interesting situation whereby lots of talented people never had the chance to come up.
And so in terms of progressivism, one of the things that's really important to understand is that in many ways the market is not actually functioning to promote talent and that there's a great deal of skepticism about whether meritocracy can continue to be a part of the American story.
And then what we're finding is that in the absence of a functioning meritocracy, Maoism is becoming incredibly important as being embraced by one of our two major parties.
And I think Maoism is very distinct from progressivism.
So I definitely want to get there, but I actually want to pause on something you said because it's interesting.
So you've had an extraordinary academic career.
You have a PhD in mathematics.
I haven't had an extraordinary academic career.
Your credentials are quite acceptable.
And you're now a managing partner at Teal Capital in at least most external worlds.
So you said you had not yet started your career.
I'm fascinated what that You're descended from mathematicians and computer programmers, am I correct?
I am.
Both my parents are mathematicians.
Your mother was a mathematician from Rice, if I'm not mistaken.
Class of 56 from Rice, my dad class of 61 from Texas.
They both became computer programmers at really the dawn of the computer age.
Until I was about 15, I thought the path I was going to go was electrical engineering and computer science.
So as interesting as making money and getting to advise one of the world's most brilliant venture capitalists and investors is, I really still think of myself as an academician.
And I happen to find myself in the business world, like many people who come from academics and found that the university system was absolutely unworkable, as we're currently seeing.
And so effectively, I'm always interested in getting back to mathematics, physics, and economics, finance, risk, at a theoretical level.
And there simply really isn't a career path I'm just going to highlight here, when Ted Cruz is telling you that you're full of shit, No, you, hold on, hold on, wait a minute.
You have like this, you had your PhD by 26 in mathematical physics.
You went on, you did several postdocs.
You then moved on to get a ton of money in the hedge fund industry.
You currently work for a billionaire who has advised Donald Trump.
And he asks, you know, like the man, like, what else do you want for your career?
Well, I was not able to ascend in the way that I wanted to.
Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
That is demented.
And as you say, when you're talking to Ted Cruz and he's the one pulling you up on your bullshit, that is a very bad sign.
I think I must have misheard.
Did he say Maoism?
Yes, he did.
He did.
I didn't mishear that.
So this is something I actually, like, highlighted, I mentioned in the last episode and then just sort of forgot to describe exactly what the malwaste insurrection quote-unquote at the Evergreen State College was supposed to be in Brent Weinstein's mind.
And at first I thought like, well clearly this is just a sort of a kind of a clumsy attempt to just sort of like equate basic people asking for their identities to be respected with No, they have a much more specific meaning for this.
He's equating pronouns with the Cultural Revolution.
Exactly.
He's actually referring to these struggle sessions that were done that were elements of state torture.
In Maoist China and that being asked to respect people's pronouns and being asked to consider your own place, your own like possibly racial attitudes you might be harboring in your own life that are unexamined is exactly the same thing.
It's just the new version of like Maoist.
So when they say Maoist insurrection, when they use Mao in this way, that's what they mean.
Yeah.
That's literally what they mean.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually thinking about it, I can see, well I was going to say I can see the logic, I can't see the logic, but I can see the chain of associations because of course the Cultural Revolution was, I mean to simplify incredibly, it was Mao setting a load of students on reactionaries, wasn't it?
So if Brett Weinstein feels that he was attacked by students for being a reactionary, then wow, Case closed!
It's Maoism!
And so, you know, the authoritarian leader, Kamala Harris, that far left Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket, are going to come in and sick students on reactionaries to force them to commit their to confess their racial sins and presumably bury under the university like repave the university quad with the administrators of the universities
that's that's what's that's what's going to happen in 2021 or 2022 according to this logic right and And we need to pay attention to this sort of like Maoist insurrection, this kind of struggle session terminology and logic because one thing that I've noticed even in the last like couple of months I've been working on the Weinstein Brothers in a serious way is that you're starting to see that kind of leach out into the broader kind of like
Radical centrist Quillette rationalists like community you're starting to see that language More and more and from my understanding it started in 2017 at the Evergreen State College with Bret Weinstein He was using it in the I believe he used it in the Joe Rogan interview Etc.
So on the fact that this is kind of spreading more widely indicates that These these people have like enormous influence, you know to some degree like we have to kind of keep that in mind, you know Yeah, absolutely.
That's why we did the podcast about them, right?
Yeah.
Just kind of talking about, there is another kind of piece of journalism by Dennis Overbye at the New York Times.
This was from March 9th, 2009.
And I'm just going to highlight this here.
I'm just going to kind of point it out.
More Weinstein getting angry at the press covering him badly.
This is right in the height of the financial crash of 2008-2009.
And it's an article about the quants, and what the quants are were basically people like Eric Weinstein who came out of mathematics and physics and technology, came out of academia from top-tier universities and joined hedge funds and started, instead of modeling mathematics, they started modeling statistical universes in order to make money on Wall Street.
There were a bunch of people who did this.
This is the quote from Eric.
I regard quants to be the good guys, said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan.
We did try to warn people, he said.
This is a crisis caused by business decisions.
This isn't the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn't understand volatility or correlation.
There was a moment in which sort of the quants got blamed for a lot of shit, that like these financial instruments were super complicated because these people using like quantitative mathematics instead of hunches were sort of designing these like super complicated financial instruments.
I actually did, you know this, but the audience may not, I actually did quite a bit of research into the kind of the financial crash and the history behind it a couple of years ago for another podcast that you and I did.
But I did quite a bit of research into this.
At the time.
And so like, I'll tell you that like the quants did, like there was an element of that and that they were able to create these kind of complicated instruments and that, you know, to some degree they were trusted in ways they weren't.
But there's also sort of a backlash that came about from that where like, oh, it wasn't like the hedge funds and the rating agencies and everyone involved with the actual financial incentive to keep drawing as many fees as they could who weren't at fault.
No, it was the fact that the models are just too complicated.
Nobody can understand them, and let's blame the nerds in the corner.
And in a lot of cases, the nerds in the corner were the ones who were actually saying, no, this is actually going to collapse on everyone if we don't do something about this, and they were basically told to shut up.
So I think the article itself is fairly balanced.
I don't think that it's really kind of blaming Eric Weinstein or people like him for the financial crash, but it is not wildly adulatory towards him, and therefore it's him, again, being mistreated by the mainstream press for not being treated being mistreated by the mainstream press for not being treated in the way that he expects to be treated.
Absolutely.
I found a fascinating, I don't want to derail us, but I just want to gesture towards this, I found a fascinating article on Vox where he's interviewed by a guy called Sean Illing and it's called Why Capitalism Won't Survive Without Socialism.
Please link that, yes I read that one, yeah please.
It's every bit as bad as you would think it is from that title.
And, I don't know, I kind of want to do an entire podcast just about this article, which is just me going through it line by line.
I would absolutely do.
We could cover... The thing with Eric is, like, I feel like we've gone an hour at this point, and we've really barely scratched the surface here.
And the reason is because it's, again, not difficult to summarize this guy.
Like, that little clip that I played at the beginning, And the kind of the paranoia and this sort of idea that there is a secret society that's keeping all the smart people from being able to actually like reach their full potential, et cetera, et cetera.
This is Eric Weinstein.
Like once you understand that, you kind of understand who this guy is, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But when you start to actually examine what are the details of this, you just keep digging deeper and deeper into these absolutely absurd narratives.
You start to find the devil is in the details, and it's just sort of fractally weird.
Even if you accept a lot of his premises, he's making connections that don't make sense.
And like figuring out why they make sense often only makes sense if you sort of understand the bigger picture of like where his brain is coming from.
And so like I find it really kind of disoriented, disorienting being like following this guy online and trying to sort of like track exactly what, because it would be very easy for me to kind of just call him, oh like he's a nut, like oh he's out to lunch or whatever.
He's not.
He's reasoning in ways that make perfect sense if you accept his premises.
But, like, having to accept his premises is, you know, figuring out what his premises are from his conclusions is often very difficult.
And it's something that I kind of ran into, like, years ago when I first started following Nazis around.
Now I just understand all the Nazi lodging well enough that it doesn't, like, it just kind of flows over me.
But Weinstein has been, like, much more challenging just because he's got this whole other set of, like, I was just going to say, like a red thread running through everything I've read about Eric Weinstein, and everything I've read of him that he's written, or heard that he's said, is this thing where he doesn't define his terms.
And it's almost impossible to follow his chain of reasoning and work out what he actually means because he won't define his terms.
Like the Vox article I was talking about, he says loads of stuff.
Most of it, I think, is just verbiage.
It's just drivel, frankly, about how capitalism is changing.
Like, it opens with this declaration that the capitalism of the future has to be hyper-capitalism, which is more capitalistic than the capitalism we have now, while also at the same time being more socialistic than the communism of the past.
And it's just impossible to hack your way through this to the meaning, because he doesn't define what capitalism means, what he's talking about.
What is capitalism here?
Let alone hyper-capitalism.
And you get through... I mean, I think the core of this article, just to try your patience for a bit, is when you get to a bit where he says... The guy who's interviewing actually asks him what it will look like, this version of hyper-capitalism that is actually capitalism plus communism or something in the future.
And he says, I don't think we know what it looks like, okay?
I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered.
Ah, okay, right.
So, certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation.
Right, so we are just talking about deregulation, okay?
And next bit.
In order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, As they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.
Well, that is just drivel.
That is worshipping the mega-rich as a superior class of being and saying that capitalism needs to be even more deregulated than it already is so that they can do what the hell they like.
And then the next bit is just some bromides about how capitalism needs to also become more humanitarian.
And about how we're going to have to augment the hyper-capitalism, again, no idea what that is, which will provide the growth of the hyper-socialism, again, no idea what that is, based on both dignity and need.
I can put this apart for you, but please go ahead.
I'm just going to say, I strongly suspect that if you hack your way through this empty verbiage, what it means is, deregulate everything, free up markets so that Peter Thiel can do whatever the hell he likes, and at the meantime, maybe UBI so that the plebs don't murder us.
I think that's what it ultimately boils down to.
That's exactly what he's referring to.
Automation is coming.
I mean, does it surprise you that both of these men absolutely worship the altar of Andrew Yang?
Not really.
No, like, in fact, Andrew Yang appeared on an early episode of The Portal, if you want to go and listen to that.
And it was actually, it's actually one of the, like, better, like, kind of more humane episodes, because it is, like, Andrew Yang has an autistic son and they talk about the challenges of raising autistic children.
There is a bit of humanity.
If you want to like Eric Weinstein, you could do worse than listening to that one.
Almost all of them are much worse than that one.
I have not listened to all of them, believe me.
I just don't have the time to dig into every one of them.
I kind of picked the ones that were interesting to me.
Um, but yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
I mean, that's essentially what he's saying is like they need hyper capitalism and like a hyper socialism or a hyper communism, whatever.
I forget exactly the term that he uses, but I think it's a hyper capitalism, hyper socialism.
And essentially what he's saying is automation is coming.
The tech industry is going to just remake the entire world.
Um, and a lot of people are just not going to have, Anything to do with themselves in order to be like productive in society and so what they need is some version of UBI something that's going to allow them to you know kind of Absorb and consume and to and to be comfortable and happy and to have dignity in their lives while the Titans the tech titans the brilliant scientists the philosopher-scientist kings of the future like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Andrew Yang and Eric Weinstein can go off and create a
Yeah, that's what I thought it meant, really.
the spoils, the spoils of that activity will eventually rain down upon the population if they are allowed to just go about their work unfettered.
Yeah.
May I introduce you?
I mean, that's what I thought it meant, really.
You know, loads of discursive nonsense and ill-defined terms and just basically posturing and pseudo-intellectual wank.
You end up with, you know, deregulation, UBI to cope with the people that are otherwise going to starve.
And we wait for Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, etc., to invent Star Trek for us.
it Exactly.
I mean, that's exactly what it is.
And may I recommend the Kurt Vonnegut novel from, I believe, 1951 called Player Piano, which points out the central problem with all of this.
Definitely, the more I research these guys, the more I'm like, I need to go back and re-read Player Piano.
Agreed.
70 years ago.
Kurt Vonnegut had his issues, but 70 years ago he was definitely on the pulse of that one.
And again, as if this has never been suggested before, and this has never been... There's a long history in science fiction of examining these ideas.
I just want to say, this guy Sean Illing, who's interviewing him in this article, he absolutely fucking slurps Weinstein's butt.
It's disgusting.
You can't do that while I'm having a drink.
Please continue.
I nearly spit take at that one.
Yes, continue.
It's absolutely disgusting how he absolutely licks this guy's arsehole.
And this guy's coming out with absolute fucking bromides and platitudes and banalities.
Like automation is going to change the economy.
Well, fuck me.
Right, and this is exactly the kind of automation that we fund over at Deal Capital, where I work.
And again, like, Asimov, Isaac Asimov, another problematic figure, etc., etc., was writing about this in, like, the 40s.
This is not new ideas, right?
There's a long history of this, and he doesn't...
Marx was writing about it in the 1840s.
Right, exactly.
I mean, but he doesn't even, like, examine the pop culture versions of this, that, like, any human being who's conscious of the world should know, like... Okay.
Meanwhile, just one last thing.
Meanwhile, he's getting this absolutely servile, cringing blowjob in Vox, right?
And he's got The Guardian giving him another blowjob about how he's basically solved the disjunction between relativity and quantum theory.
He hasn't published anything or told anybody what it is.
What's the guy's name?
Marcus de Sautoy.
In the Guardian saying, oh yeah, he's basically solved the big problem in physics.
And apparently this guy is being silenced by the disc and the djinn.
Come on.
Well, and the problem that you run into, and this actually is going to lead into, I've got two more points I'm going to make, one of which is going to be a teaser for the next episode.
But we're going to, we really have to talk about a particular episode of the Portal.
And this is episode 19, Brent Weinstein's episode of The Portal.
Eric and Brett, together at last, talking about how Brett was horribly mistreated by the scientific community.
And so I linked to, um, there are a lot of people online, there are a lot of people on Twitter who sort of, like, interact with, like, Brett and Eric, and who sort of interact with this sort of, like, rationalist, quote-unquote rationalist community, and there's a thread by this guy Chris Kavanaugh who, I don't think he would agree with our politics, or, you know, You and I don't agree on 100% of our politics, Sarah, but I think I think this guy's more of a sort of like progressive liberal type than you know, where you and I are.
But he's pretty good on these issues.
In fact, he's very good at kind of like pointing at puncturing some of the nonsense of these things.
And he actually live tweeted this episode of The Portal when it came out in January.
And I put a link to that.
That's worth your time.
I'm not going to read that out.
We're not going to get...
God, there's so much detail here.
But I actually did speak to some people with backgrounds in biology about this.
And the basic idea is that Brett claims that when he was a grad student in the late 90s, he had...
First of all, Eric puffs up Brett's academic background and says, You were the top student of one of the top-rated people in your field in the entire world, etc., etc., And he, he reads off a section of a recommendation letter he got from someone who seems to have been a legit, like was one of like Brett's, uh, uh, advisors and who was a, who was a, who was a teacher who was, who was someone very well-placed to kind of help Brett along in his career.
Um, and who wrote him a very effusive, a recommendation letter.
Um, what you, uh, have, what I've learned from other people just sort of commenting on this issue is like, yeah, a lot of people have really nice, like that's what recommendation They make you sound like you're the greatest single human being to ever have a thought in this field, because that's what, like, gets you at least a look.
In a job, right?
This is not unusual.
I have letters just that effusive, and believe me, I am not the genius, right?
Not me, but other people kind of commenting on this issue.
But the idea is that Brett has this idea about the length of telomeres, and telomeres are parts of chromosomes that are related to aging.
And then the longer the telomere the more times that your like cells can divide and the more like you can repair yourself but then this also comes with a certain degree of a certain degree of like resistance to cancer and so it's actually like if your telomeres are too long and then you can like it can actually Like cause cancer, but if it's not I don't I'm not like an expert in the molecular biology here.
I don't I know enough to sort of follow it and I am not summarizing it well.
But essentially, Brett claims he has this brilliant idea and he has this idea about telomere length and about the way that it exists in the mice that are being used in preclinical drug trials, right?
And he suggests this in an email To someone named Carol Greider.
Now, Carol Greider, even at the time, was one of the top researchers in the field of senescence and cancer research, and one of the top biologists in the world.
She later went on to win a Nobel Prize for work that she had done in the mid-80s.
But she later went on to win a Nobel Prize, in part based on work that's related to telomere length, etc., etc.
Um, he emails Carol Greider.
Carol Greider responds like, oh, that's interesting, I'll have somebody look into it.
They kind of go back and forth, and then eventually Carol Greider produces a paper that Brett says includes a lot of his, some of his insights, or work that was done based on his insights, and then, but he was not, Brett is not, like, even acknowledged in the paper, and that later on in Brett's career,
When he wants to sort of publish on these matters and wants to get like credit for it, he believes that the peer review process has been stacked against him by that like Carol Greeter herself or someone related to her is being given his papers to review and that they are unfairly marking them as bad papers and that should not be accepted for publication.
Based on this sort of personal animosity.
And so this is one of the ways that the the disc operates, right?
And that like truly original novel work and the truly great work is being suppressed because it's not politically comfortable.
It's not politically satisfactory to those already comfortable.
That's the essential idea.
Right, okay.
Presented, of course, without any evidence whatsoever.
Right, and so I have here... I'm wondering why mice telomeres are so dangerous to the status quo, really.
Right, well, because there's a lot of money, and look, there is a sort of realistic sort of question about, you know, if the mouse model is not Good for the way that we sort of study cancer drugs.
Are we either letting unsafe drugs through because the model doesn't match appropriately, or are we not letting drugs through that might otherwise go through that might serve if the mice telomere length, you know, it's essentially like a sort of matching problem.
Now, first of all, The way that drug development works is you start off with doing like simple like toxicity studies and you work off in like toxicokinetic studies where you're kind of tracking how much of the drug remains in the animal.
You go through like it's about a 10 to 20 year process from design a molecule on a blackboard to finished drug on the market.
And of course this all goes through clinical trials and preclinical trials.
This is a much more complicated thing.
The mouse model is sort of the beginning thing that we use to get a general idea of how toxic the fucking drug is, and to do some very basic research.
If the mouse model is bad that does have like implications and there is there was a piece in 2012 that quotes Brett Weinstein I'm kind of talking about this and you know kind of from the Huffington Post and it's a kind of very positive Discussion like hey if this guy's right then maybe we need to think about this model Unfortunately, I'm confused.
I thought they were being kept out of the discussion Yeah, I mean the Huffington Post is not the New York Times, right?
So, you know like clearly I put this Huffington Post link in the show notes so you can go look at that.
What's interesting is that even in places where Brett and Eric are widely respected, In the reddit r intellectual dark web.
I found a thread talking about these claims from people who are, you know, at least claim to be, you know, kind of working, like grad students in biology, who point out, like, all kinds of problems with this, you know.
You know, one quote here, and again, this is in the show notes, you know.
That said, if I were to make a major scientific discovery, someone would have steal my ideas, discoveries, and go and win a Nobel Prize, I would go to the ends of the earth to see if the situation is rectified and I get my due credit for my discovery.
As far as the emails, you can instantly verify the story.
Didn't Brett say his major mistake that he had made in his contact to Carol via the phone rather than email?
If that's the case, he has an uphill battle in which the burden of proof is on him.
And then people are kind of pointing out, like, well, yeah, he says this is from 1998.
He claims to have, like, you know, notes in what would presumably be her handwriting on his, like, papers that he submitted at the time.
In ink.
He claims to have all this documentation, and yet he's made none of it public.
And so all we have is his claim here.
And look, if Carol Grider stole his work, I have no problem admitting that.
There's no, like, it doesn't matter.
I mean, it matters to me in the sense of, like, honesty back and forth.
But when you're unwilling to publish any of your work, when you're unwilling to actually let people see it and judge for themselves, then you're not even You're just bullshitting.
You've got to actually put it out there and let people see it if you want to get the credit for the work that you've done.
They claim, both Brett and Eric claim, well we can't go through the peer review process because it's unfair, it's biased against our ideas, etc.
etc.
etc.
This isn't, like, there are plenty of, like, people have talked about this, about the problems of peer review, and there are very real problems with peer review.
There are very real problems with scientific peer review.
There are open access journals.
You can publish these things and put them out there for anyone to look at.
This is completely anodyne.
In the year 2020.
This is easy to do.
Anyone can do it.
You have a huge audience.
You could put this on a webpage.
You could email it to everybody.
You know, you could mass email it.
Like, you have so many options to actually give us this information so that we can make an actual judgment.
And the fact that you don't do that really says a lot about whether or not I believe you actually have the credibility that you claim to have.
I don't know what else to say about that.
You've both got podcasts with much bigger audiences than this one.
Exactly.
You do live streams and people just give you huge amounts of money.
They love you that much.
Show them on your podcast.
Show them the evidence on YouTube.
Right.
He also... Along with your revelatory theories about physics and economics.
Right, yeah.
Again, this applies... I really wanted to kind of go through this to that degree of detail just to sort of indicate, you know, what the... like that this is a recurring pattern.
Both of these guys kind of do this over and over again, you know, and so Brett also apparently described this kind of idea in a more truncated form on Joe Rogan's podcast.
And there are all kinds of I found that there's an article on next big future that describes like fundamental errors and Brett's argument Which seemed very very convincing to me, you know Yeah, there's another blog post at uber feminists about this episode of the podcast Eric Weinstein is an awful person That's said by that's it by uber feminist.
I'm not personally saying that although, you know Not one to get sued by Peter Thiel.
It sounds like Eric Watson is kind of an awful person.
Um, but again walks through the details of like like the claims that Brett makes on the podcast and And then, uh, consistently, like, refutes them.
In order.
You know?
Brett Weinstein has had over two decades to be more specific, but the best he can manage is incoherent rambling on Eric's podcast.
Regardless, Eric Weinstein would suggest that the distributed idea suppression complex has squashed Brett's work and has robbed Brett of an exciting career and even a Nobel Prize.
Meanwhile, Weinstein's fan continued to harass Carol Greeter over wrongdoings they cannot really identify with any consistency, as Brett Weinstein is never specific.
The super feminist link is definitely worth your time.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we're going to play one more clip, and this will whet our appetite for the next episode.
And it turns out that James O'Keefe did an episode of The Portal with Eric Weinstein.
Are you familiar with James O'Keefe?
Vaguely.
I know roughly who this person is.
He's the man behind Project Veritas and a more aptly misnamed project, Project Truth.
It is basically impossible to find.
James O'Keefe is known for, he was, back in 2009, 2010, he put out a bunch of sting videos around ACORN, which is a community organizing organization, claiming that they were breaking the law.
None of that was true.
He had selectively edited the videos, like highly, highly selectively edited videos.
And essentially forced the organization to shut down.
He has received funding from Peter Thiel.
We know that for a fact that he has received funding.
Thiel claims it was only $10,000 back early, early in O'Keefe's career.
But really, we don't know one way or the other.
We don't really have a lot of ideas about where O'Keefe's money is actually coming from.
Well, O'Keefe and Weinstein actually addressed this issue briefly, and I think it's a great place to end this on a big question mark, because I think this is worth mentioning.
A cliffhanger ending.
A cliffhanger ending, which we will discuss in more detail next time.
And just to lead you into this, I think that it's important to note that during this entire conversation, the question of James O'Keefe's ethics in terms of what he does and the way he does it.
And let's keep in mind, O'Keefe is a convicted felon.
O'Keefe has tried to He has wiretapped the office of, I believe, Mary Landrieu, who was, I believe, at the time, governor of Louisiana.
There's a ton of great... Like, James O'Keefe is a hilarious figure because he is, like, this much of a dipshit.
During Roy Moore's run for Senate in Alabama, he attempted to, during the time when his accusers Of sexual misconduct of, again, child rape when he was Attorney General of Alabama, when he was in his 30s, he was apparently touching girls as young as 14.
James O'Keefe believed he could punk the New York Times, pardon me, the Washington Post, by sending someone to claim to be an accuser of Roy Moore.
Yes.
And they found him out immediately by basic journalistic techniques that James O'Keefe didn't think anyone could use.
This is only a smattering of the bullshit that James O'Keefe has been involved with over the years.
Somebody once called him the thinking man's Jacob Wall, which I thought was very funny.
Jacob Wall wishes!
James O'Keefe, oh man, we don't need to get into that.
So this is James O'Keefe, and none of that comes up.
Eric Weinstein's real complaints about O'Keefe's ethics are that while he has valuable information That needs to kind of be out there and needs to be explored about the fundamental problems with the media and the fundamental problems in our society and about how these news organizations are just far, far too far left.
and are colluding with one another to suppress even mainstream conservative and nuanced conversation about important issues.
Yeah.
That O'Keefe uses secret cameras and uses secret recordings, and that it's just kind of sleazy in the way that he pursues this.
And so, the ethics are the fact that, like, your sleaziness makes it to where I can't reference you to my liberal friends, or else they just kind of dismiss you outright.
And not like, you actually have, like, horrifying journalistic ethics.
You actively manipulate the facts to fit a perceived narrative.
And pretend that what you're doing is showing an unvarnished truth.
See, that's the real criticism of James O'Keefe, but that never comes up.
That never comes up.
That's not a part of this conversation.
And so we're gonna spend two and a half hours talking, giving O'Keefe a pride of place, a pride of, as a journalist, kind of going out there and doing real important gods of journalism, getting at these really important issues.
And I may not always agree with your politics, but I do agree that you're doing important work, and I just wish you thought harder, in public, About the way that your ethics, about the way that your optics are perceived by people who are not kind of on your end of the aisle.
They spent two and a half hours spinning their reels over this.
But there is this, and again I did speed this up to 1.5x speed, so this 42 second clip, which I think is really important, and I actually highlighted this, I mentioned this when Corey Pine was on this show a few months ago.
Um, but I thought it was important to play this sort of audio because, uh, well, you'll hear, you'll hear.
That may be so.
I think in light of the recent exposés though, Eric, there have been a couple of reporters, Paul Fari, the Washington Post, a guy named Grove at the Daily Beast, have actually talked to me.
I've never actually, and you're frankly, this is Manifest Destiny, I'm sitting with you here.
You wouldn't be sitting with me, but not for the events of the last six months.
Why is that?
I've been aware of you for a long time.
Well I think because I think because of the the that I'm continuing to do this that I'm getting and tell me if I'm wrong but I'm getting reactions from these institutions that they're forced.
You've been an interesting person to me for a long time.
Okay I did not know that.
Yeah um so.
By the way I should just say people will assume that you and I are connected somehow through Peter Thiel and it's completely untrue.
I know I just had my first conversation with Peter about you ever.
The New York Times on a front page story association between Peter Thiel and the substance will be it's unclear exactly what relationship and then they'll run that and do that whole thing.
It is, in fact, unclear what the relationship between James O'Keefe and Peter Thiel is.
Yes, it is.
Isn't it interesting?
That's the entirety of that conversation.
It's like, and then they just move on to talk about other things.
Like, you could clarify this.
Peter Thiel could clarify this.
Eric Weinstein, James O'Keefe could clarify the nature of this relationship.
And be very and really kind of highlight these questions and the reason that like we are sort of forced to speculate although doing so responsibly and clarify that this is what we're doing in many cases is because there seems to be A lot of fishy stuff kind of going on behind the scenes, almost as if there's like a secret society of people making deals behind the scenes where the public is not able to view it, and while even other people who are supposedly in the know do not have access to that.
Geez, I can't imagine where I would have found someone who had a problem with that.
It's also important to note, and we will talk about this in much more detail in the next episode, Peter Thiel, among the many things that he's done, something that he's very open about doing, is he funded a lawsuit which crushed the website Gawker.
And Gawker, again, we will go into a deeper discussion of this.
This is really interesting and I really do want to kind of cover this for real.
But Gawker actually did the kind of muckraking journalism that James O'Keefe claims he does.
In the sense of it was kind of gossipy inside baseball stuff that other like journalistic outlets wouldn't touch because it's, you know, it's spicy, it's difficult, it's maybe a little bit sleazy, but also got to some really important things and used that to fund some really great other like Gizmodo was part of the Gawker Network.
Deadspin, which is like the one sports blog that people who don't watch sports would ever read.
It's like the one sports blog I ever read.
Did a lot of great journalism.
Got crushed by Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel described Gawker as a Manhattan-based terrorist organization.
And I just want to highlight that.
I want to just kind of like funded James O'Keefe years later called Gawker Manhattan-based terrorist organization because he didn't like some of their coverage.
And we will cover that in much more detail next time and we will get much more into some of the other episodes of the portal and who else has been on this show.
Because there is kind of the deeper questions around the intellectual dark web and some of these relationships are really, really important.
And the truth is that they are unclear.
And so it is difficult to kind of talk about them with any kind of like solidity.
With any kind of ability to really kind of know really what's what's going on, but Yeah, we don't want to be a sued by a billionaire So I'm just gonna put a big word allegedly over like everything that we've discussed so far That is not like, you know I try to stay very close to like publicly available facts here right and we will do that again in the next episode and I've got I've got a lot of material about this and I
Lord help me, I think I'm actually going to read Peter Thiel's book, or his first book, called The Diversity Myth, before we record that.
So, fingers crossed for my brain.
Yeah, that's all I got.
Sorry, I'm kind of trying to wrap up here.
Do you have any particular comment about our little clip from James O'Keefe, or anything else?
Nothing that isn't completely obvious, really.
I mean, the absolute hypocrisy of Eric Weinstein being the founder of the intellectual dark web, you know, the crusaders for freedom of speech, working for Peter Thiel, a man who crushed a news organisation using libel laws.
And then having, you know, him and James O'Keefe having the absolute fucking temerity to whinge about, you know, the biased left-wing media because they say that a manifestly unclear financial relationship that could be cleared up if it was completely, you know, straightforward, is unclear.
Or daring to report on the fact that the governor of Alabama creeped on teens in the mall.
But no, that's, you know, crushing Gawker.
That's a victory for free speech, apparently.
Exactly.
But I feel like I'm not being very original.
I feel like these things have been said.
That's the problem with kind of covering these people who have like kind of a bigger like public persona is that, you know, we're kind of going over well-trodden ground.
But I thought it was important for us to do it because I really do want to connect it.
And again, I didn't want to claim that none of these people that we've discussed over the last couple of episodes are actually Nazis.
That should be very, very clear.
I'm not claiming they're Nazis.
I'm not claiming they're fascists.
I'm not claiming they're part of the same, like, network that includes, you know, Mike Enoch and, you know, Vic Mackey, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a different kind of thing.
But they share many of the same enemies, and the thieves have, like, an enormous...
Bully pulpin and they have this enormous sort of online community that's literally funding them they actually are and a lot of these ideas Seek down into those kind of darker crevices and Fascinating ways and I think it's really important to highlight that within this context and to sort of like use this as a way to talk about the way that Some of this stuff does get mirrored within these kind of overtly fascistic online spaces.
I Well look, there is an IDW2 fash pipeline.
I can't remember which site it's on, but there is a pretty good article about it.
The IDW2 alt-right pipeline.
And another article on Uberfeminist is about Eric Weinstein's sources, and it goes through people he follows and retweets.
And, you know, again, not Nazis as such, but you've got loads of right-wing propagandists on that list.
You've got Ben Shapiro, you've got... And you've got... I mean, we didn't even... There's so much we didn't touch upon.
We didn't touch upon Weinstein's wacky statements about coronavirus, and the fact that he's getting loads of this shit from people like Candace Owens and Michelle Malkin.
You know, so it is an ecology.
They might not be Nazis, these people are talking about, but they are part of the ecology of the far right, and they propagate this shit.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And no, we will talk about some more of that next time, and we will highlight some of the fun stuff, and we're going to highlight some of the Peter Thiele stuff as well.
And so, I promise next time we will talk at least briefly about Hulk Hogan's penis.
And about whether that is different than Terry Biloa's penis.
Terry Biloa, in case you don't know, is Hulk Hogan's real name.
And apparently, this distinction is part of what crushed Gawker.
So, we will have that discussion.
Fantastic.
As I say, there's so much we didn't touch upon.
We didn't touch upon Eric having a hissy fit when Twitter shut down Zero Hedge's Twitter account.
Zero Hedge is a website he's tremendously fond of that's a conspiracy website.
He's a bit of a 9-11 truther.
It's like a right-wing libertarian, like, econ blog thing.
I mean, you know, like, yeah, no, Zero Hedge is, it's complete shit.
Like, Eric Weinstein works within Like, hedge fund management.
He actually knows finance.
He's very good at working within this capitalist framework.
He's very good at understanding money.
And he thinks zero hedge is a legitimate source.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And as I say, he's a bit of a 9-11 truther.
He talks endlessly about Building 7.
He does it in a I'm-just-asking-questions sort of way, but he still does it.
And loads of other eccentric statements that we could have, you know, if we wanted this podcast to go on for another hour, hour and a half, it could do so.
But we're going to break off there, and we're going to come back, as we've said, For part two on Eric Weinstein, hopefully next week, where we're going to delve into, well mainly Hulk Hogan's penis by the sound of it, but maybe a couple of other things as well.
And yeah, so that's it for episode… Hulk Hogan's penis and lesser matters.
That might even be the title.
I have actually respectable people emailing me and asking questions.
We're talking about Hulk Hogan's penis.
Welcome to 2020, people!
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
God, this is like, you know, listening to us, this is the milder incarnation of 2020.
Yeah, so that was episode 61.
Thanks ever so much for listening.
We will be back.
Very soon, with episode 62.
And in the meantime, please follow us on Twitter.
Please get in touch if you have suggestions or information, criticisms, stuff like that.
We like to be responsive to criticism, as we showed, I think, at the start of this episode.
I'm very pleased with this, actually, because we took some of it on board.
And the stuff that was bullshit, we said, no, that's bullshit.
And that's what we do.
And thanks for those who do engage and share and retweet and tell people about us and write incredibly complimentary articles about us, by the way, as well.
That's really nice when people do that.
Thanks, Rowan.
That should go in the show notes as well, for sure.
I quite enjoyed having that bit of fan service.
Absolutely, yeah.
It wasn't quite the kind of, you know, slobbering journalistic blowjob that Eric Weinstein is used to getting, while still feeling persecuted and left out, but even so, it was nice to get.
And yeah, if you would like to help us out making the programme, We've both got Patreons.
You don't have to, but we appreciate every listener, even if you don't contribute.
But we especially, especially appreciate the contributive listeners who help us to make the show and keep it completely editorially independent.
That is very nice of you.
And so, any final words, Daniel?
I can't decide if I want Peter Thiel to sue us or whether or not.
I can't decide which would be the better option for us in the long run.
I don't want to be sued but, like, can you imagine our press coverage?
Anyway.
The publicity.
You better bung us some money on Patreon just in case so that we can... Yeah, I'm pretty sure we'd be able to raise some cash for legal defense if, you know, billionaire, like, proto-fascist Peter Thiel That was I Don't Speak German.
get this little podcast it would be it would yeah like uh good you know he could probably shut down this podcast but um i don't think he could shut us up let's put it that way that was i don't speak german thanks for listening we're on itunes and show up in most podcast You can find Daniel's Twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at at Daniel E Harper.
You can find my Twitter at at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore.
Daniel and I both have Patreons, and any contribution you can make genuinely does help us to do this, though it also really helps if you just listen and maybe talk about us online to spread the word.
