TENDENCY?:

Is Eric Weinstein--unofficial founder of the "Intellectual Dark Web," money manager for eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel, and frequent guest on the Joe Rogan show and other power podcasts, where he's gained a reputation for brilliance--a crackpot?

This question came up near the end of a long conversation I just had on The Wright Show with a mathematician named Timothy Nguyen, and it actually has two dimensions. The first dimension--the main subject of my dialogue with Nguyen--has to do with physics.

Weinstein, who has a PhD in math from Harvard, says he's developed a unified field theory--a "theory of everything"--that, if correct, could not only put him next to Einstein in the physics pantheon, but put him above Elon Musk in the visionary hierarchy. Whereas Musk wants to take people to Mars, so they can safeguard human civilization in the event that Earth implodes, Weinstein says Mars doesn't buy us enough insurance. He says his theory of physics--the theory of "Geometric Unity"--could open up whole new vistas: Maybe once we have the universe's "source code," which a fully developed version of his theory would provide, we'll see that Einstein was wrong to think nothing can move faster than the speed of light, and then we can send humans beyond the solar system in search of hospitable planets.

Suppose, Weinstein said on the Lex Fridman podcast, that Musk "got us to Mars, the moon, let's throw in Titan. Nowhere near good enough. The diversification level is too low." But you can't really blame Musk. "He doesn't know how to do anything else. He knows rockets." Weinstein, in contrast, knows Geometric Unity, which, he says, can "give us hope of breaking the Einsteinian speed limit."

So, all told, Weinstein's theory--which he finally released in written form this April after much drum roll--would, if valid, be quite an accomplishment for someone who, at age 55, has never published a paper in a physics journal.

I'm not fit to pass judgment on Weinstein's theory or its relevance to the crackpot question. If you want to see that done by someone with appropriate credentials, you can find my conversation with Nguyen (who did work on theoretical physics before leaving academia to do AI research at Google) here.

The dimension of the crackpot question I feel more qualified to explore is the second one:

Weinstein has a tendency to sound like a conspiracy theorist--and, not infrequently, like a victim of the conspiracies he theorizes. He says he would have become famous in math and physics circles decades ago had his ideas not been squelched by what he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex" (DISC). He says the DISC also kept his brother Bret (a biologist), and his wife Pia Malaney (an economist) from getting due credit for academic work they did as PhD students. Had it not been for the DISC, he says, both might have won Nobel Prizes--which could have meant three Nobels for his family, since, he says, he might have won one too, in a DISCless world.

Among the DISC's other alleged doings: suppressing non-mainstream ideas about covid's origins and its possible treatments, misleading Americans about good nutrition, and, several decades ago, producing fake news about a supposed shortage of American scientists and engineers. This last one, says Weinstein, was big, because it helped build support for liberal immigration laws--which allowed "the Chinese to populate our labs and put a proctoscope in the entire university system, which is where we do our research, so they would get the benefits of... all the stuff we were doing with our freedom and then they'd go implement and execute with totalitarianism." Weinstein didn't vote for Trump (which his boss Thiel famously did), but he has nationalist leanings and a feel for populist rhetoric. "The enemy is the DISC," he says.

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