Decoding the Gurus - Mick West & Eric Weinstein: UFO Tango

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

We are back with a double-bill decoding! That's right like moths to the flame, or aliens to a Unified Geometric Field drive, we are back in Weinstein world.This time we are looking at a conversation between the irrepressible (ex?) podcaster & mathematician, Eric Weinstein, and skeptical investigator, author, and recent guest on the show, Mick West.The conversation here concerns the evidence for UAP/UFOs and the reaction of skeptics and advocates. It had the potential to be something forensic and transcendent but sadly it gets mired in the messy 'interpersonal drama' that Eric just hates so much and tries to avoid at all costs.Nonetheless, there is much that can be learnt here, including: the linguistic complexities of the word 'flex', the precise levels of passive aggressiveness that a human mind can tolerate, if there is already secret anti-gravity tech, and whether our obsession with Einsteinian physics is what is stopping us from really understanding what is going on with UAPs.We don't have answers. We are just asking questions... honest!Also featured: a recent kerfuffle in the online psychology world over DEI statements, the numerology spectrum, the potential harms of green drinks, and much much more!So join us, won't you, as we boldly venture through the outermost reaches of the gurusphere.LinksTheories of Everything- Eric Weinstein & Mick West: UAPs, Evidence, SkepticismJonathan Pageau: The Surprising Symbolism of 666QAnon Anonymous- Episode 168: The Mutant QAnon Numerology Cult in Dallas.Very Bad Wizards- Episode 263: Free YoelReason article on the Yoel Inbar incident2020 Paper on the potential liver impacts of Green Tea ExtractMick West's Book- Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown. Chris Kavanagh is sitting right in front of me in virtual space. Good morning, Chris. It's the end of the week. It's a Friday. You had a good week. I haven't spoken to you for a while. I haven't recorded for a while. That's true. You know, the problem is, I'm just going to tell you, that was a beautiful introduction.

This is your feedback. So introduction was perfect. I was almost going to make a comment about how you could bottle that professionalism and sell it on the open audio clip market make a pretty penny but then you mentioned the specific time that this has been recorded and day and it doesn't factor in you know that when will this when will people hear this it won't be a friday will it is it going to be it could be no it won't be a friday for them but people understand about the magic of no they don't asynchronous communication they're just gonna be very confused what hey i thought it

was sunday or either like i was just getting ready for monday so that's it man you have to keep the illusion that we're all on the same planet we're just here we're with them you know it's the parasocial bonding we're doing that now we're doing it live we'll do it live that's right there's no editing that goes on taking out the ums and the ahs and chris's ranting ums and ahs what are those we're professionals um apologies chris this is it's probably been a little bit of a gap since our last release of a main episode and it is entirely my fault as you know oh i like that yeah let's blame it on you yeah it is god you matt and your work and stuff my career yeah um it does take up some of my time sometimes a grant application in this case and it's exciting i've complained to you about this it is like 28 000 words it is huge and these tenders it's like they award them to whoever makes the most effort because it's not

enough to show you've got the capabilities that you meet the requirements that you've got interesting ideas no no no no you need to show that you care and the way that you show that you care is to just write an immense amount of material, soul-destroying stuff. But it's almost over, Chris. It's almost over. And then I can come back and give you and the DTG crowd my full attention. Interesting, Matt.

There's actually a relation there, a good pivot to one of the things that we were planning to cover in our short introductory segment before we get to our main decoding this week so you are basically saying that there are sometimes tasks in academia that you are required to do which serve largely symbolic signaling purposes but may be used to evaluate your suitability for receiving a particular benefit. Is that what you were suggesting? Well, it is about signaling. That's topical. That's topical, Matt, because rival podcast with other psychologists, one of which we had on a previous co-host, Mickey Inslick, but two psychologists for beers. It's actually, it's one of those like podcast metaverse thingies where

Joel Lindborg, who is the co, went on our main rival podcast, Very Bad Wizards, with ghost hunter Tamler Summers and psychologist David Pizarro. And there he told a tale, as old as time, of basically that he was being considered for a position at a university and it seems likely that comments that he had made on his academic themed podcast about diversity

equity and inclusion statements and some other comments about whether it's appropriate for professional organizations to take stances on things like abortion or other political issues were brought up in a letter which was circulated during the potential hiring process. And it seems likely this led to the hiring being scuppered, or at least put a significant dent in it. And so he told that story, and I think he did it in a very reasonable manner, not the hyperbolic, just presenting his perspective on it and pointing out that, you know, he isn't cancelled. He has a position at Toronto University. This was a potential partner hire where there's an academic working for an institute and if they have a suitable vacancy, they might hire their partner because

to make it more attractive for the academics and they can live together. So it was very clear that this is not, you know, the end of civilization or he is not being hounded out of the profession. Just that he thought it was an example of some of the dynamics that people have talked about in recent years. But the main thing is this led to the predictable culture war storm across the Twitterverse and in the various camps. And in this occasion, Matt, we are a podcast with a psychologist and a quasi-psychologist,

a psychologist, a person that teaches in a psychology department, but is yet a cognitive anthropologist. And occasionally we venture to offer opinions on similar topics, culture wars, stuff. So if this is not in our ballywick, Matt, what is? What is? What can we pontificate on?

And this is actually our little specific niche. You know, the very bad wizards, two psychologists, four beers. This is our sense-making sphere, really. That's right. We're allowed to talk about it. Yeah, we're academics. We have a podcast. This was a situation where Joel talked in unflattering terms

about DEI statements, importantly. So these are the sort of formal kinds of statements people make and job applications, things like that, where they, you know, talk about their commitment to such and so and et cetera. So he's not talking about how he's against diversity itself. First up, yeah. He's not an ethno-nationalist. No, that's right.

And, you know... Or is he? I think he made the point that if something he's saying on a podcast three and a half years ago, what was it, four and a half years ago? A couple of years ago anyway. Just say a couple. It's easy.

Yeah, it's a long time ago. If you say something quite reasonable, and I think lots of academics would agree with him, myself included, about DEI statements not being particularly useful things, then that can have professional implications for you, which I think is a shame. I think it's a shame. There's this thing, which I think everybody who's ever applied for a job knows that you may be asked to fill in something which feels largely symbolic. In an interview, you may be asked, can you give an example of leadership roles that you have performed or, you know, tell us about an example where you engaged in conflict resolution. I don't know, right? Chris, at my university, university we need to for the promotion

applications i remember we have to have to make a statement about how how what we do at our work aligns with the like mission statement of the university right so people have to look up the mission statement that's not me not me i didn't total no you you No, you're fully aligned. I know. But yeah, on the one hand, there is just this aspect that, you know, when I was applying for my job as a shelf stacker at Tesco, I had to fill in various parts on a form and declare stuff. And it's just normal. It's a part of life. On the other hand, it is true that specific kinds of requirements in academia seem symbolic in the sense that you learn how to pass them, or at least it's easier for people to

pass them when they come from certain educational backgrounds or cultural groups. So typically, knowing how to write the DEI statement is something that well-educated liberal people know, and people from non-Western, lower income backgrounds, no less. So in that sense, it could actually be harmful if DEI statements, you know, a well-crafted DEI statement is taken as the indicator of the actual thing. What's that thing where people describe where a marker becomes the target? Yeah, I know what you mean. I forget what's, I forget. Like citation metrics in academia, the H index. It's not actually supposed to be that you're seeking the number to go up.

It's the number is supposed to reflect the amount that your papers are influential and your research is good quality. Yeah. So to give you an example of that, like it would be totally wrong to approach a DEI statement by, for instance, enumerating, you know, all of the good relationships you've had with people from diverse backgrounds and the successful supervision or whatever that you've done with different backgrounds. Is it?

Yeah, that wouldn't be great. That wouldn't be great because that's like saying, oh, I'm not racist. Oh, my friends. I've got some black friends. You know, what you need to do is talk to the more theoretical, dare I say, jargony aspects of of that commitment to addressing systematic racism and so on and so forth yeah yeah there's a special kind of language that someone who's been enculturated in this world as you and i are finds quite easy but it might not

necessarily be easy for someone who's coming you know from taiwan say or or india that they might get it wrong but you but you but you may have referred to it as habitats that we have the appropriate habitats yes yes yes so like like a good old victorian old boys club you know you're gonna you're gonna be sound you're gonna be right you're gonna have the right opinions no even if you disagree with that perspective and you think they actually are good at encouraging people to think about the issues even on a relatively superficial issue and like that it's only a small gesture about like the values that you want academics to promote or that kind of thing that That's fine. But the point is, Yole's criticism, like Yole is not a Jordan Peterson-esque figure. He's not. He leans heterodox in certain respects, but in most respects,

he's a fairly standard liberal, left-wing, academic-y type person, right? And the view painted of him in that letter, if you just read the letter that the students wrote, you would potentially view him as a Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or James Lindsay type person. And that's not who he is. He's much more measured and reasonable about these kinds of topics. So it is a shame if he's regarded by a significant portion of students as being beyond appeal, because I think that does speak to the potential for a roller-specific political monoculture to be developing, right? Now, it's not across all universities.

There's conservative colleges. It's probably more restricted to Gaie league universities it's not all the students who signed the letter there was a counter letter sent by other people there's been some criticisms that the letter was sent apparently at like 1 a.m and people had to sign it by the next day before it was sent and you know most people wouldn't have had the time to do a deep dive on y'all's past episodes to inform themselves so so there's there's issues like that in terms of criticisms for the students writing the letter but also in terms of not really regarding it as the collapse of the academic edifice but i just saw online matt that there was

the predictable divide where you know it's just kind of knee-jerk taken that you must be a body right like if he starts to be promoted by one wing of the culture war you know reason magazine put out stuff or fair or commenting on them then for one group he automatically becomes a body right and the the students are immediately victims being unfairly maligned by the crushing right-wing media that's going to target them and their families. And then, on the flip side, you have in the heterodox space, it being presented as evidence that all of their claims are vindicated. Brett Weinstein was completely justified. Joe Rogan is right. You know, academia has fallen.

Now you can't even voice slight disagreements without being cast out. And yeah, in both cases, there is YOL actually, or the Very Bad Wizards podcast, much more marshalling than what they take, right? Just saying, well, they don't think this is a good thing. And it does speak to the kind of political skew in academia, but it, you know, it's not the end of the world. That's it. And I bemoan that it has to be all or nothing, you know,

and I just think it doesn't have to be like that. It's fine to say, I think you all should be perfectly within the Overton window in any reasonable academic field. But him not getting this position does not mean that all of academia and all educational institutions are now completely captured. And you can say nothing without being hunted down by the woke apparatus and strung up. It's mostly America, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, surprise, surprise. the the walk apparatus and strung up it's mostly america to be honest yeah yeah yeah well surprise surprise the discourse is stupid once again yeah yeah it is silly also i just i don't like the conflation of if you say something about not liking dei statements specifically then it means that you must be like a a threat to students from backgrounds. It's like saying if you don't like company mission statements,

I think that they're kind of like a bit of a waste of time. Then it means you must want the business to fail. That's a non-secondary. Yeah, but the other thing that they highlighted was that you kind of suggested that psychology professional organization shouldn't be taking strong political stances on controversial topics. Yeah and again you can agree or disagree it's all right it's a reasonable opinion like but people have very strong passions and i do think there is also this evident context collapse online where people just treat america as the default but the hiring procedures that are

commonplace in america are not commonplace i don't think i've even to be honest heard of partner hires here in japan that i think is much rarer so you know i don't i don't know but yeah i don't think we have partner hires here in australia either we certainly do have those something similar to to dei statements and you know it's not such a big deal. As Joel and the Very Bad Wizards guys said, it's actually not a big deal. They're quite happy to write them. Joel did write one for that position.

But you can have an opinion about them. It's okay. And there was a thing that I found quite annoying, Matt, where there was a thread posted by an account I won't mention the name of, but it basically was saying, you know, I was a student who was there. I saw you all making inappropriate comments

and complaining the fact it would be about problematic students and so on and so forth. And this thread was shared around saying, look, there are other perspectives available, you know, don't take Yole's account for granted, which, fair enough. But then it turned out that that thread was written by someone who wasn't actually at the meetings. They clarified that when they said, I was there, they just meant they attend the university and they had heard second hand accounts or whatever. And then a lot of people, you know, just kind of skid over that

and said, well, it doesn't really matter. You know, the point is just that you should be critical. I'm like, come on, come on. It's okay to just say, no, that's, you know, they made it clear, which was a lie in essence. And it's okay to say that's fine. Even if you still disagree with y'all, you could just say, yeah, but somebody claiming to be somewhere and not be there, that's actually bad. So yeah, it's not the end of the world. And just to be clear as well, I want to make this really clear. We've said this a hundred times, or at least I have. always been that there is issues on campuses in academia about like a kind of left-wing skew especially in certain disciplines and it is not the case that all of the campus outrage stories are completely unfounded but that doesn't mean that there isn't constant ginning up and hyperbolic catastrophizing about what in many cases are fairly marginal protests over a particular speaker or so on. So like, no, it is not true that none of it is happening that it's all just a fantasy invention but no it is not

true that james lindsey and jordan peterson are completely vindicated the two things can be both true don't you think isn't that okay yes you're right you're right very nuanced oh is that us i know i know we've stated this we're gonna get this brought up in years to come welcome to the idw yeah well uh so there was that unedifying spectacle online but matt i have another more guru related topic to discuss with you go ahead and it concerns an old friend of ours religious icon carver and jordan peterson orbiting minor guru jonathan pajot you're familiar with his work matt oh i always know it's going to be something good when pajot is mentioned yeah he's in the demons and he is saying that we need to put stocks into necromancers necromancers are the things that people are

are not discussing enough and then that leads to a crisis uh and monster and monsters it leads to giants and monsters and they're all these interesting uh uh traditions that are not in the bible but they talk about how you know the time of cain they made alliances with these demons and then created hybrids and mixture and and all kinds of of of kind of monstrosities uh and also necromancy and everything. Because it's like people better start thinking about necromancy really fast because people think that that's a silly thing. And necromancy is right on our, it's right there. It's like standing right in front of us right now.

So we have to start thinking about these old things that nobody wanted to think about anymore. Anyways, that's a little parenthesis. So basically necromancy and all this kind of chaos, and also women putting on makeup also is really this part of the yeah okay right it's all comes together right talk about mammon and and aphrodite and all that and that leads to the end of the world right it literally leads to the end of the world but does he mean conceptual necromancers or literal necromancers i'm guessing it's not quite clear what matt what a reductionist

point of view you reductionist just wants to constantly put things into your is it real or is it not real bracket that's so reductionist just enjoy the mystery okay that's that's all but i'm not going to talk about his particular declaration about necromancers. We'll get to that. But I want to talk about numerology. What do you know about numerology, Matt? How would you describe numerology?

If I just put you on the spot right now. Well, I think it's, you know, using patterns and numbers that signify important things. I guess using numbers like their tarot cards. Is that basically it? That's pretty good. That's pretty good. I like that.

Yeah, maybe patterns of numbers or patterns in numbers, numeric patterns. So here's Jonathan Pagel, and this is a clip that he promoted on his Twitter feed discussing the number of the beast, 666. Have a listen to this. You have to understand the way the ancients thought. Creation was six days, and then there was the day of rest.

The years of Noah were 600 years, and then there was the flood. And the whole world lasts 6,000 years, and then it's the end of the world. So you have to understand it that way. That is, the six is related to the notion of man, the sixth day of creation. That's the key to understanding 666, is to understand it to the sixth day of creation. The symbolism of six has to do with a kind of fullness of creation. The fullness of the six days. The complete cycle is seven days. But that completeness includes rest. Seven represents completeness. Six represents a kind of perfection of work. The six is the days of work. That is why the symbolism of six and the symbol is not a dark symbolism. It's actually a symbolism of light. There are

reasons why, for example, the devil is represented as an angel of light is because it is the pride of light. It is the pride of work. It is the pride of accomplishment, of creation. Okay, yep, that made perfect sense. Yeah, so religious tomfoolery, perhaps, but a particular brand, and I pointed out that this is numerology. Right, almost by definition. It's symbolically interpreting references to numbers in holy texts. And Peugeot did not respond well to that. But I wanted to

highlight this as an example, Matt, because that is a very dense, symbolic form of numerology, like a religiously inclined type of numerology. And people get value from it. Some people get value from it. But just one point to relate to the actual content there. into the number 666 and there's been some discoveries of fragments of earlier versions of parchments or things that reference this particular part of the bible and it seems that in some of the earliest fragments it looks like the number was 616 right but the thing is it doesn't actually matter right but just just imagine that if the number was off because of a translation and you're waxing lyrical about, hey, it's because it's all

the sixes and there has to be three sixes. And actually, oh, it's just a mistranslation. So it's univated one. Well, that's good because one, right? One is also unity, right? That's right. One is unity. It symbolizes the integration the the spirit and the soul and the passion of the yeah hang on so 666 number of the beast right this is the thing that got him started right and he's sort of pointing out that's kind of a bad thing maybe because it's pride because it's the pride of all of the work that you've done in six days yeah but also it's good because six days of work and then the day of rest is coming so yeah i mean matt doesn't matter it doesn't matter for the sense maker religious type this matters a great deal but it doesn't matter for our purposes

and because i'm going to show you a different example. This is from a different source. It's actually a piece of fiction, Matt. But as Jordan Peterson often says, is fiction not true? Is there no truth in fiction? He might focus on famous texts and philosophical treatises. I'm going to reference Nicolas Cage's movie,

National Treasure. And what you'll hear is like blowing a hairdryer on the document, which revealed some numbers. And let's just listen to this. It's not a math. Is it? More clues. What a surprise.

There's latitudes and longitudes. That's why we need the silence do-good letters. That's the key? The key and silence undetected. Can we have the letters now? Will somebody please explain to me what these magic numbers are? It's an Atendorf cipher. That's right.

Oh, okay. What's an Atendorf cipher? It's just codes. Each of these three numbers corresponds to a word and a key. Usually a random book or a newspaper article. In this case, the silence do good letters. So it's like the page number of the key text, the line on the page, and the letter in that line. So, Dad, where are the letters?

Okay. So, you know, the Nicolas Cage also there. You know, it's not as dense with symbology but trust me the whole movie man if you watch the whole movie there's plenty of symbology to go on and the same thing as the da vinci code right the dan brown story look at the shape of the picture of the last supper there's a triangle in that and if you point the triangle at the top of the pyramid you'll see that it reflects the light from the moon of Jupiter or whatever. I remember when the Da Vinci Code came out, it was a supremely popular book.

And I also remember a lot of people taking it extremely seriously. Yeah. That was people learning. It should have been an introduction to statistics, right? Because part of the thing about the Da Vinci Code was people started looking for Bible codes, which are people taking the text and looking for patterns in the letters,

depending on how you arrange them, or if you count every X amount of letters and stuff. But what they should learn is if you fish enough, you can find patterns. Human mind can find patterns in a random assortment of numbers or letters. And sometimes, this is the confusing thing, it's the thing which confused Michael Shermer,

sometimes there are actual codes in the world. People actually use ciphers. They write things in secret that they don't want other people to know and they write in lemon juice. Yeah, so what you're saying is that anything could be a cipher and we need to take them seriously. Right, so should we

criticize numerology because is it not true that people have disguised messages with numbers? No, they do do that but that doesn't mean that numerology is not a problem, just like conspiracy theories are a problem. And I have one final clip that brings it all together.

And sadly, this actually is somebody who just passed away very recently, was in a motorcycle accident and died, the person that we're going to hear. That's a tragedy. He, however however was the leader of an exploitative q anon cult so sweet family karma karma yeah it might be real i just said but yes this is a figure called negative 48 and the audio quality isn't great but you know there's

this thing that people do where they attribute a number to a letter so like a is one b is two c is three right and you add up the letters in the word and then equate that to some mystical number this is in lots of esoteric religious traditions through this as well depending on the language so this is what they do but it's with trump tweets and q anon statements and uh you'll hear it so this is this negative 48 guy doing that for some of his followers we're going from 3d to 5d which happens right here weakness 97 popcorn 97 thank you 115 thank you 115 very much 115 345 do you have your popcorn ready 345 that's not what donald trump was really saying he said do you have your weakness ready 345 for a download download wow yeah so that's him so adding up making those magic numbers from the words in a

trump tweet and then because it's got the same number as something else yeah and it is amazing isn't it what people will humans are incredible creatures right we're just astounding. We're astounding. And I will draw a continuum from what we heard Pajot do at the start to this. I think Pajot's version is more intellectual and less overtly silly. But fundamentally, the mechanism underneath is just making these connections between numbers and symbols and symbols and

numbers and and forging that as if because we can make the connections and there's different numbers connected to different symbols that this creates a kind of cosmic connection when does it or is it just numbers yeah Yeah, no, there are some Christian sex cults or whatever that make a whole business out of doing this, this complicated numeric system to determine cross-references within the Bible, which allows them to sort of cut the whole thing up and imagine it as like a choose-your-own-adventure where you have to read it in terms of connections

to some other random spot essentially in the Bible. And, you know, the mechanism is exactly the same. Have a bit of a system which gives you a huge number of degrees of freedom and then that allows you to turn a text or some sort of stimulus into a happy hunting ground for any kind of story that you like. And it is tremendously fun, I suppose, in a way. I can see the appeal of hunting through the thing and trying all the different permutations

and then finding one that sort of gels with you and feels like right and going bingo. What we like is the image from A Beautiful Mind or from the Dan Brown cinematic version where the symbologist is seeing all these images floating in the sky and connecting them together in his mind and then revealing the hidden truth. And it's a nice image and it has aspects of truth to it in the way that, you know, people can make imaginative connections, which are actually meaningful and think metaphorically and all of

these kind of things that we do but it is also the thing which people who have mental illnesses do or people who don't have mental illnesses but are just particularly prone to speculative and conspiracy driven cognition right so yeah it is yeah it is too genuine intellectual work as a hamster running on a little wheel is to running a marathon yeah yeah because it just like our sense makers the general rule is you don't say no you look for the part that you can take some truth from or some validity maybe all of it isn't true but maybe some part speaks to you and like yeah you know if the numbers aren't exactly right what does it matter you know you're just using them as a stimulus for your religious message your conspiracy theory or your q and a cult whatever it is like yeah when you look at a cloud

don't you see a cloud maybe you see like a sausage dog made out of balloons or an octopus or an octopus yeah and if if it doesn't quite fit you know look a bit look a bit more carefully you know it's when you take a different angle yeah can reductionist bastards um so the last thing that i'll mention for this week's short introduction segment, I just have to do an update on my unspecified green concoction that I've been taking to reduce my coffee consumption. Now, I just want to mention that I suggested that what harm can those things ultimately do? They're just giving you vitamins and stuff anyway. So like if it's all placebo, what's the issue? I subsequently became aware, I kind of knew this, I think from somewhere, but that like other multivitamin stuff, these concoctions

tend to go a bit overboard in their dosages of the stuff that they put in. dosages of the stuff that they put in they seem to follow the principle that less is not more you want more so the like the percentage of vitamin e provided for example from a you know a single serving it's over 500 percent the daily recommended intake and now in general you know your body can deal with that it just passes it out right although it depends on the type of vitamins because there are some that are less amenable to being passed easily and are stored as fat or whatever but in any case i did start to see when i poked around that there are some concerns about various green drinks, just as there were multivitamins, that they're potentially causing liver issues for people. Because as your body is struggling to remove the excess material, if you had some liver problems or, you know, a genetic inherited propensity towards liver disease

or something, this could be just an exacerbating factor. So I retract my statement that, you know, what's the potential harm? And I know I'm thinking, well, why can't they just stick to 100% the dose map? Why do they have to go up into these multiple multiples of recommended daily alliances can you explain that for me why did they do that i don't understand it but that's a deal breaker for me chris if you want to ruin your liver do it in a more fun way drink whiskey rather than drinking a disgusting green concoction may as well get some benefit out of it so i'm just saying you know given the amount of people that are taking these drinks and there hasn't been like a massive influx of liver disease or whatever it's probably you know like a relative

moderate impact but i did see discussions and some papers and some anecdotal accounts on various people reporting about having elevated liver function tests and then stopping supplementation and then going back to normal. And yeah, just, is that what I want, Ma? I mention all this because I'm somebody with a inherited liver thing and it doesn't, it doesn't cause me general problems but it just means i need to be a little bit careful you know risk factors and all that kind of stuff and uh yeah so like the thing i don't want is some daily drink that will put stress on my fucking liver so so yeah be careful out there yeah be careful out there. Don't take health advice, dietary advice from unlicensed anthropologists.

No. Put the green drink down, people. I know you've all been influenced by Chris. He doesn't know what he's doing. I'm just going to get back to drinking sweet coffee. It's going to turn out to be the last lethal concoction that I should be consuming. So, yeah.

Yeah. That's all right. Thanks for the update. Yeah. More interesting. Health advice done. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, there it is. Thanks, Virat. Thanks for the update. Yeah, more interesting. Health advice done. More interesting than the nuts. Well, well.

Do you have anything else for us in this introduction, Chris? I do, Matt, but I want to keep it brief. I want to keep it tight. You know, I'm on the tight ship here. So, we'll turn now to the man of the hour. And it's always man, isn't it? But we have a former guest of the show, Mick West, a science writer, skeptical investigator, and ex-video game programmer, who we recently had on to talk about UFOs. And he is having a discussion with

a guru we've covered once or twice in the past. His name has cropped up. A guy called Eric Weinstein. That rings a bell. That rings a bell. Yeah, used to work for Teal Capital. Does not anymore. It's like a freelance, freewheeling intellectual.

You might have seen him online, providing insight. providing insight. So yes, Eric Weinstein in conversation with Mick West for a YouTube channel which was called Theories of Everything with Kurt Jamongle.

That's what it is. And the topic is UAPs, Evidence and Skepticism. It's been a while since we've been in the Weinsteinstein bros backyard here we are again ready to kick over the lawn ornaments and and poke around the mole holes mole burrows right yeah those are things that people have in their garden sometimes, I guess. In the UK, I think. Yeah, that's a UK thing.

It's not a UK thing. I've never seen a mold burr, but I thought then... Anyway, whatever you've got in your garden. And according to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, there's scorpions in people's garden. So I don't know what's going on in people's gardens, Matt. So let's just keep that in mind. The metaphor is falling apart. It's gone. It's gone too

deep. We need to pull back. So we're going to look at their two and a half hour two and a half hour conversation, which we've clipped up for you people. We do this for you. Okay, you wanted it. The patrons voted on it. This is

what we've got um and then this is the first in a two-part because we're next going to look at how brett deals with ufo so but but first eric first eric okay let's do it so the first clip matt is the host introducing the topic that will be discussed today he can probably do a better job than us so let's see how um how this shakes out here's him doing that today's theolocution involves eric weinstein and mick west on the topic of the evidence of ufos as well as the relationship between skeptics debunkers disclosure the public perception and scientific inquiry eric weinstein is the inventor of geometric unity a proposed theory of everything as well as being an advocate for ufo disclosure but did he say today's field location field look feel like

theologution maybe i don't know i don't know what that means okay right yeah well that's it's sense-making term um anyway and eric is the inventor of geometric unity which does claim to be a theory of everything so this is all uh all right so far and it wouldn't be a proper sense-making environment if you didn't have stuff like this why don't we start with mick what is it that you respect about eric and then eric what is it that you respect about mick yeah we'll we'll save you guys from having to listen to that um imagine that i would i would i would hate to turn up to a podcast and have to go okay now it's like play school now i'm gonna talk about the things that i like about you chris i like your hair say three things that

are nice about yeah it is it's like the most cringe team building corporate exercise you can imagine well but aren't we just cynical bastards ma isn't that our problem yes yes we are not built for the sense making world though in saying that i've done many hours talking to sense speakers and they never you know they they always find me perfectly delightful to deal with so you know just saying just saying now matt so after that invitation we have eric helpfully framing a little bit of the dynamic that we're going to hear reoccurring you you know if you don't know who mick west is you will hear him crap up in these clips but you should go listen to the interview we did with him that's a good overview of his character

but he's a he's a pretty um what's the way to describe straight ahead like yeah yeah he's like he's honest he is what he says he is and he speaks you know clearly about what he wants to say he doesn't speak in riddles or subterfuge and he's you know he's quite clear about it what his motivations and interests in the topic are and yet matt yet when mick introduces himself here and kind kind of explains why he is moving away a little bit from the debunking title, we'll see that this proves to be extremely confusing for Eric. I've decided to remove that from my Twitter profile and just focus on being a skeptical investigator who does sometimes end up debunking things. know being a skeptical investigator who does sometimes end up debunking things but debunking isn't the label a debunker isn't really a label that i would uh actively use eric what's the

salutary role for skepticism and do you see mick as being a proponent of that i'm confused by mick and i don't understand mick but consider that I really haven't been out here for very long in UFO territory. It's not a region of the world, the intellectual landscape, that I expected to visit or spend any time in. Yeah, that's something he finds him so confusing, because he didn't confuse me. I felt like I understood what he was doing why he was doing it pretty quickly yeah and you'll notice that that's eric saying that he finds mick

confusing right so you know if we're keeping a little tally here of how many people have said slightly disparaging things like this isn't disparaging yet necessarily but it's it's hinting at you know mick's role being perhaps not all that he says it is and in any case you also hear there that two things which are going to recur eric explaining that this is an area he he hasn't been interested in he's He's new to it. He's like a babe in the woods. Just he's come into it and he's completely opened all opinions and ideas. He doesn't come with presuppositions.

So, you know, just treat him as a good FIF novice walking around the meadow. And that simultaneously, he's a bit concerned about something right some things have got him confused and out of shape about what's going on in this space so we will see eric adopting the role of something of a knight in shining armor for the ufo community um and For the UFO community. And that's because, Matt. And this is where I start to get into my issue, which is I really don't like the personal destruction of individuals who are trying to sort out fact from fiction and type one versus type two error and incredible and preposterous stories that are clearly not true and incredible and preposterous stories that are clearly not true and incredible and

preposterous stories that are absolutely true. And the debunking energy of this is fun. It's a hobby. It's a pastime with other people on the other side of this who are not bunko artists, who've come to believe things. Some of those things may be completely false. who've come to believe things. Some of those things may be completely false. Some of those things may be confusions. Some of those things may be true, and we're going to call them false because they're actually part of a storyline. For example, you could easily imagine in the UFO case that we would use a UFO cover story to disguise the testing of stealth technology before anyone knew that we were working on it. And if so, if I see a giant black wedge in the sky that looks like no airplane ever, you know, and it was thin as a pancake, I would be in need of debunking

simply because the government had created a bunko story. bunking simply because the government had created a bunko story. Yeah. So the motivation for this interview is an interesting one. It seems like, as we'll hear throughout this debate, Eric has a real problem with Mick. He feels that Mick is part of a community that is ridiculing and attacking good faith people like him that are trying to figure out the difference between the absurd and crazy stories that are definitely untrue and the absurd and crazy stories that are definitely true and he refers to their interactions on twitter quite a bit so with a bit of your help i i searched up those twitter conversations chris and and read through them read through all of the interactions between

nick west and um were they enjoyable yes fascinating and uh nick west i just this is important context is perfectly civil throughout actually imagine the opposite of your twitter behavior chris um nick west is basically is basically that um so yeah it was just interesting to contrast that with the kind of um sense of aggrievement that eric projects through this uh debate yeah in general there's a fairly consistent double standard applied by eric in every single thing that he does, but in particular in this conversation. So let's see a little bit of Eric discussing their interactions and how they've made him feel. Well, let me ask you a question. I don't have the sense that there's any real reason for any

animosity between you and myself, to be honest at all. No. Why do I have the takeaway of what are you doing in my timeline? In other words, I would imagine that in a slightly different world universe, a prime rather than a, where we live, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic. And yeah, we're scientists, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic. Sure. Yeah.

We're scientists, scientific-type people who have a natural skepticism of things. Okay. So I didn't come looking for you. And then multiple times you've sort of entered in and you're talking in specific about Lou Alessandro and somebody who I think I've never mentioned the name Chris Mellon. I hope I'm that it's yeah, Chris Mellon. I can't remember everybody's name.

He's a government official who's part of the whole invisible college type thing. Okay. So what is it that you perceive me as doing that needs to be sort of minded? me as doing that needs to be sort of minded well you uh make bold declarative statements about this you know that this is a huge deal so you you heard it there as well matt like for some reason when eric these things, it's kind of like a southern gentleman sipping on his sweet tea or whatever saying, you know, I just noticed you, you know, coming across my territory while I was just out here shooting the breeze, enjoying myself on the porch.

Like he was on Twitter making these big claims about UFOs. And Mech, who's somebody who's dedicated years to looking at the topic, you know. He did to reply to the tweets. Yeah. Yeah. Eric is a master of passive aggression. I don't see why we should be enemies.

I mean, why are you attacking me? Why do I feel unhappy when you're around? It's like if you're in a relationship with someone who talks like that, then yeah, you should get out. It's just that sense of grievance emanating. It's hard to oversteer. So Mick there explains the reason. explains the reason and he also highlights this i think very significant point about why in particular eric would be somebody that you know might get pushed back when they make statements

i can't remember exactly what you said but i think you you were something along those lines and i think at the time i was basically saying what i am saying now that it is more complicated than that and the the reason I interacted with you, and I probably wouldn't with just some random person, is that you have reach. You've got a lot of followers. You've got a very popular podcast. You've written books.

You're quite well known. And people take what you said, and you become a hero within the UFO community, and they listen to what you said. So I feel it needs addressing. Eric's written a book i haven't gotten the coffee it's a secret invisible book um but sorry yeah he explains his motivations pretty well and eric does make extremely strong claims about ufos about government conspiracies about the government is either lying or trying to keep something hidden and mick west is someone who specialized in debunking or skeptical inquiry of ufos for quite a few years

now so that's why they've run into each other and that's why eric has a bit of grievance here because um mick has been bursting his bubble a little bit. Yeah. And there's an early interaction that I think bears highlighting for the dynamic that we're going to hear play over and over again in the clips. And it's when Mick is describing his kind of interest in this topic and why he is involved with it. And he describes it vastly. I kind of settled down in a way on this UFO thing because it's so interesting in terms of the mathematics, the geometry and the physics. Very simple physics, just simple Newtonian stuff, linear algebra and

things like that. It's nothing complicated, but it's stuff that I used in my previous career. And so I kind of enjoy flexing those muscles. And recently I've been enjoying flexing my muscles programming simulations. And I do also enjoy the interactions with people. I like talking to people. I like talking to people who believe and people who used to believe and to a certain degree, talking to skeptics. Okay. So there, Mark.

Any problem with anything Mick said there? I feel like Mick was pretty clear there. He described it just like he described it to us, which is, you know, it's a hobby. It's an intriguing hobby, which is a mental challenge

and allows him to explore all the technical issues involved in cameras and perspective and physics of light and all of that stuff get a mental workout as he described right yeah so but with i think you missed something mark eric's gonna gonna pull him up on that trying to figure out who's active in trying to bunk things that needs to be debunked who's confused who needs to be made unconfused and who is saying that they're seeing something that needs to be followed up and not necessarily having their reputation destroyed because somebody wants to in your own words flex i don't find the flexing fun. And to be able to say flex, you did say flex. I don't, well, it's not a word I actually use. So I'd say something about flexing your own.

Oh, flexing my muscles, but it's not like flex as in like, you know, yes, I know. But for me, flexing actually means the same thing as stretching or exercise. Right now, I just went through exactly one of these moments where I tried to remember something you'd said, and then you told me that you don't use that as a phrase, and I happen to be able to recall it. Yes, but in the sense that you meant. I think you did say it in the original sense,

from which the internet term flex comes from. So I don't think that's even correct. So my point to you is I don't enjoy the feeling in my body right now, which is I've just contradicted you. You assured me that that's not a term that you use. We had perhaps at most a misunderstanding, but the feeling of somebody saying, no, you're wrong. And thinking that that's fun, your initial description of your activities is a hobby. I don't much care for this as a hobby. If it's a duty, because the world is going to be filled up with nonsense, I actually appreciate that.

I want to be very clear about that. about that. But the fun of interacting with people, many of whom are scared. I've seen people close to and filled with tears. I've seen people who feel that their lives have been destroyed

because they have made contact with something that they can't talk about. Yeah, there's so much there, Matt. He's such a gaslighting little freak i'm sorry but that is so annoying like yeah it's just so duplicitous to pretend that mick meant flexing as in if people are not flexing yeah the weird flex this is internet lingo for like showing off and making this big noting yourself and making yourself out to be special that is clearly not the way in which mick meant it eric is smart enough to know the difference between that and he pretends to take it differently and to feels like he's scored a hit on mick and then when mick sort of

doesn't doesn't associate those two meanings because which quite an easy mistake to make he feels like he's he's pinned mick and mick has made another error but he's got him because because he's denied the truth that that eric has so rightly pointed out. Yeah, it's such an example of bad faith argumentation. Like it's exactly the kind of thing that Eric and all of his friends accuse others of doing, right? Of like leaping on incidental points that are actually irrelevant to what's been made. And to be clear, like you said, mick said i don't use flex i don't it's not a

term i use because he doesn't use the internet lingo version of it so he didn't recognize and then when eric pointed the example he says oh oh yeah well but i meant like stretching you know like using my muscle and eric acknowledges it half and says but it that is still the word from which the internet version derives from so you were and like no that's that's wrong eric he was using it in a different context and without that meaning that's why i didn't recognize it and then eric's shift to my bodily sensation of discomfort at you correcting me when i know that i'm saying something that is true and like no eric you're not saying something that's true that's the problem you're misinterpreting and then you're getting all upset because mick doesn't immediately defer to you and your

interpretation and he kind of saying yes we do have a disagreement that's fine but and move on but eric just takes it as such a like well this has revealed your true colors hasn't it yeah i mean we'll hear more examples of this but eric's approach throughout this interview is very much a textbook case of manipulative passive aggression where he'll flip between you know we we could be friends you know we we could get on well together if you know i i i want to believe that we can get along but you are doing wrong you need to shape up and do better it's it's very manipulative and um yeah mick to his credit by the way we don't play too many clips from mick on this because we're decoding Eric, not Nick. He doesn't respond to it. He deals with it as well as any normal person can, I think, which is to mainly ignore it. But he is ultimately a person who is trying to speak honestly and straightforwardly to someone like Eric. And it does come across like a person grappling with a Python. That's the image that I have. A big bowl of jelly. And also, again, you hear the reference to Eric just as concerned about the people who've had their lives destroyed

over simply talking about their UFO experiences. And the heavy implication throughout, although he, as usual, does not have the guts to come out and say it straightforwardly is that mick west is personally responsible for this destruction of individuals for ridiculing them and destroying their lives and he'll sometimes kind of imply that that's related to mick or he'll say that it's other people in the community and so on but it's just the constant framing of himself as the representative of victims who are being attacked while he in this interview is being constantly passive aggressive and insulting

towards Mick so yeah anyway let's play another example and you can hear more of it. When I'm talking about fun, I'm talking about things like geometry and programming and figuring out what's in this video. And those things should be things that are essentially neutral from a personal perspective. I know some people don't like it, but I try to always keep that personal aspect of it separate. I enjoy talking to people just simply from the interactions with people, but I'm always very sensitive to people's feelings. I haven't enjoyed our interaction. Well, that's perhaps my interaction style could do with some improvement. Doubtedly, mine could as well, and I look forward to improving. I haven't blocked you.

I'm just saying that the feeling I've had is I was effectively lied to that there was absolutely no there, there. I believed it. What are you referring to? The idea. I thought that in essence, the entire UFO story could just be dismissed with the back of a hand that this is complete nonsense yeah again the implication eric hasn't enjoyed their interactions and the implication is this is this is something for mick to fix yeah and there's a half-hearted well maybe yeah i could improve too but eric doesn't in any part

emphasize that right it's not about him he is the consummate gentleman mick is the one ruining his day with his skepticism and that other thing about eric presenting it as he dismissed UFOs out of hand for so long. And now he's realized there's something to it. I'm very curious about that framing, because as long as I've heard Eric in public commentary in the couple of years since he's been around, I have never heard him out of hand dismiss UFOs. He's always framed that, Building 7, very similar conspiracy theories as things that are too readily dismissed. So I'm wondering when was this period of dismissal that he had?

Because it doesn't seem to have been when he was in the public eye. Yeah, I think this is a valuable um debate interview whatever to to analyze because it's more than just pointing out the kind of person that eric is because when you look at what he says and how he says it almost everything is geared towards self-presentation how he frames things and how he presents himself in the role whereas you take when a relatively normal person like mick is talking about a topic he presents himself in the role. Whereas you take when a relatively normal person like Mick is talking about a topic, he's interested in the topic, right? He'll make a bunch of factual statements. He'll be talking about UFOs, a bunch of details. He knows an awful lot about it and he's very interested in it and is ready to talk about it. Eric actually has far

less interest in the actual details of the evidence for and against this particular UFO thing or that one. He's got a great deal of interest in self-presentation. And I think this is a way in which Eric is in many ways a consummate internet guru. If you want to see an example of him, what I think is a good example of the kind of just asking questions, but also leaving yourself enough room to present it as you're not actually endorsing anything, right? It's all, you've just noticed patterns and isn't there a reason to be suspicious here? Eric's very good at that. So listen to this.

I don't think I have any particular history of, Oh, didn't you understand in the, in the go fast video of this, but on the Nimitz video, you know, such and such in flavor said this. And, but Lazarus said that like this whole world, I'm just not even a part of I know that there's somebody with the last name of Greer. I couldn't tell you the first name. I don't know whether they're pro or anti it's like, I'm really not part of this world.

don't know whether they're pro or anti it's like i i'm really not part of this world sure um what i have learned is that the amount of indirect evidence that something is up and something i have to say when i don't when i say something i don't mean little green men and i mean little green men not as little or green or men but just as the phrase to aliens. Yeah. It's like, what could be up could easily be just a disinformation campaign. It could be a cover for a stealth program. There's something up. And I don't need to please you to tell you what weights are on the branches of the decision tree. I simply need to say, boy, was I confused.

Confused, Matt. He's very confused. Very confused. On one hand, he's very interested in this topic. He's got very strong opinions about what Mick should and shouldn't be doing and has come to some strong conclusions that definitely something is up, right? It's a disinformation campaign. There's some kind of gaslighting by the government.

All of this technology is in physics beyond our ken. What's so bad is something. Something is up. That's right. But he doesn't know anything about it. He's just a newcomer here. He doesn't know any of these people. And actually, I believe him.

That's the one thing that I do believe him. He actually doesn't know a great deal of the details of this topic but that doesn't stop him from having a very strong stance i think he i ever i think like the mention of those names and stuff right it's it's kind of serving a dual purpose of being like well i don't know the details but he's mentioning names that illustrate that he isn't a complete he has no idea right like because it's it would be like saying you know i'm an amateur of psychology sure you know i've heard of jung and freud and milgram but you know and i i could talk about zimbardo but i you know i don't know how they but just doing that already implies that you actually have a bit of knowledge about the topic, right? That you can read off psychologists'

names. So yeah, as always, there's just a kind of melange. Yeah. And a cloud of ideas. And in any case, that cloud might have sounded like, eric said there's something there but he can't quite pick out the contours like something there's a foot but but what is it but at other times it does seem like he's suggesting the the weights on the various branches of the trees are pushing down towards certain conclusions. The thing that goes in the other direction, though, is just how much indirect evidence there is that something has been going on and how willing we've been to destroy people

who've been willing to poke at this. And if you believe that the direct evidence argument is effectively a pretty good argument that nothing's here, because so many of us have cameras, it's kind of amazing that nobody ever captures something that's really, really convincing. That doesn't make sense to me. If you believe that story, you've got a big problem with the level of indirect evidence. If you believe the indirect evidence, you have the reverse problem. For God's sakes, why is there no absolutely crystal clear data set that has slipped into the public's hands? So whatever your resolution to that puzzle is, I'm usually in the position where I come up with too many explanations.

i'm usually in the position where i come up with too many explanations this is one of the only topics i've ever met where a creative brain can't come up with a single explanation to fit all these data so eric returns to this line of thinking a few times in the interview so chris help me summarize it it's his point of view is that yes it acknowledges that there is very little firm direct evidence of ufos on the other hand there is reams of indirect evidence now the indirect evidence is people who have claimed to have had an experience with ufos or people that have claimed to have had access to documents that show that the u.s government has alien vessels or something like that. That's, I think, what he means by indirect evidence. And he can't marry these things up. There has to be a stunning, a non-mundane explanation for this. He doesn't

consider the possibility that actually the weak or the indirect evidence is simply unreliable that seems to be his epistemic him yes and we we get to hear quite a lot of how his epistemics function like how he decides what's good information and compelling and personal testimony will feature heavily, also known as anecdotal evidence. And here's him introducing some of that. This is going to come up a lot. I have been told by multiple people who do not strike me as charlatans, I only wish you'd seen what we have because we're wasting time in this conversation. because we're wasting time in this conversation yeah so vick's telling yeah the idea there was because he recognizes this gambit right the people always saying if you could see the evidence that

we've seen you would have no doubts about the veracity eric's frequently repeated i guess defense of this point of view is that these people don't seem crazy to me. And I don't believe that they're lying. They don't seem to me like they're lying. In other words, they're not wearing their underpants on their head and ranting and raving. They are speaking in a way that conveys a high degree of conviction. And for Eric, this is pretty sufficient. Let's hear a little bit more of Eric on the importance of hearsay. One of the things that I did was consult with some people about the safety issues of this UFO stuff. And they said things that I wasn't really prepared for. One of which particular individual said to me,

there is absolute tissue damage that we can record that comes out of stories of encounters and you make what you want of the encounter story, but it is completely consistent with our biopsies and our understanding of what cell death has occurred, which I found really interesting. Someone told them there was irrefutable biological evidence that is highly consistent with their interpretations. This actual evidence isn't available it's somebody no it's it is but it is available they've they've done it and they have it and

their analysis said that it's there you know okay so i'm sure there are people that have done because you know when mick was talking to us he was talking about you know little shards of metal that people say yeah isotopes and so on. Yeah, somebody's done the analysis somewhere and they told someone else about the results. And maybe you actually do have material, but it's just all these, you know, it's like the same thing as the frigging Shroud of Turin or the cloth of Pottery Peel, whatever the case might be.

But that's the thing, Chris. I mean, sorry to butt in with a bit of analysis, such judgment here. But in case it's not obvious to people, that framing that Eric puts forward in support of giving a lot of credence to these UFO stories, you would have to apply exactly the same logic to, like you said, people seeing the face of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary or people seeing ghosts. There are at least as many personal firsthand experiences of people seeing ghosts.

And I'm sure many of them will recount their experience in a very sober way. They won't be wearing their underpants on their head. And they will tell you in very clear, in no uncertain terms, that they absolutely had a personal close-up contact with a bona fide ghost. Well, you know, it's not just Eric that finds those kind of accounts convincing. As we know, philosophers also are prone to be swayed by the way of eyewitness accounts with similar features, Matt. There are similar features in all different cultures.

So there's no real compelling alternative explanation for that. So Eric finds that kind of stuff convincing. There are alternative explanations, by the way. And like you said, but in large part, it relates to the status of the people that eric has spoken to i have heard many of these stories now from pretty sober people yeah and i would never never have heard any of these stories until i was willing to make myself stupidly vulnerable to this topic saying geez i thought this was all bs um Having now opened myself to that,

I cannot explain how many highly conserved stories I've heard from various people that don't show any interest in being public, don't seem to be happy about the fact that they have pieces of information that distress them. There's a few things to unpack there. First of all all the self presentation thing another example of this eric has bravely exposed himself to reputational destruction by picking this stuff seriously which is very brave of him i'm good on you eric the other

thing is i you know people that are long-time listeners will know that eric will never choose a simple way of saying something when a fancy way of saying it is available what does he even need little green man complicated earlier right mac was like elliot's elliot's actually because because things sound less stupid when you beat around the bush and abstractify a bit what does highly conserved mean like if you said a highly conserved story i understand yeah it means transmitted with elements that are consistent or that don't change like so degradation um the story is isn't changing though that's not true the stories often can be documented to change over time and and also elements that are conserved across accounts there are alternative explanations for that which are that there's an entire culture around ufo

sightings and motifs that we're talking about here are ones that you would usually recognize in the you know yeah standard ufo movies it's weird yeah people keep seeing the what is it the what's the aryan type ones the the blondes or something uh there are the blondes yes or whatever they're called weird how people keep seeing those and weird how that latest story about um about the Pope facilitating the transfer of an alien craft from Italy to the American army. There's a Pope up to that? There's a Pope or an old Pope?

An old Pope because this is a story. Yeah. So that's a highly conserved story because it's a recycled trope, of course. Yeah. So that's a highly conserved story because it's a recycled trope, of course. Yeah. So that notion about the people being attacked that you mentioned, Matt, right?

That there's a danger to these people. And also Eric saying that the people don't want to share their stories. They're reluctant and like, I'm curious. How did Eric read them? Eric doesn't and other people in his neck of the woods never seem to account for the fact that there are actually positive attentional aspects to coming forward with stories like your media presence is often much larger after you claim to see a ufo compared to when you were just a random person or a random u.s serviceman right so i'm not saying they're all out to make a buck or that kind of thing but it's more like

there actually is an ecosystem which treats you quite well whenever you endorse ufo stories but eric wants to highlight some nefarious aspects, Matt. I don't know enough about secret weapons or geology or who knows what. You know, I do know that I've been warned that bad things happen to people who get too close to some of this stuff. No, he's not saying bad things do happen matt he's just saying he's been warned that bad things could happen right we'll come back to the issue about personal testimony but there is one more little story that i think illustrates this quite um neatly which eric provided and it's one where he was at dinner. He was at one of these legendary IDW dinner parties, right? Or I don't know, maybe it was a teal capital event, whatever the case.

There was somebody there who told a personal story about an abduction or some experience with a UFO slash alien. And Eric is a bit perplexed by people's reaction afterwards he told that story at a dinner i was at to maybe there were 12 15 people at the dinner at the end of the dinner we walk out and i'm standing around with maybe 10 of those people brandon is not in evidence and we talked about many things and i said well what did you guys think of the dinner and nobody brought up the fact that a businessman who seems to be ostensibly normal oriented towards family and and real estate and all these things just described an unfakable encounter. So he finds this baffling and I guess an indication of the kind of culture of silence

that hangs around UFO reporting. So a guy at a dinner party recounts an incredible sort of thing, probably a little bit strange and embarrassing. And people kind of raise their eyebrows and there's probably a bit of an embarrassed silence. And then somebody changes the topic and then they don't talk about it afterwards. Or even they find it interesting and just like it's somebody telling a story. I've seen a ghost once or that kind of thing. It's not this life transformative experience, but Eric is like, he's a businessman for God's sake, people. He's describing seeing it in your phone.

Did you not hear what he said? And it's like, Eric, maybe what if he is being honest and he's just wrong? Or what if, you know, humans are fallible, right?? Even rich people are fallible. Even people that are successful are fallible. Even Elon Musk sometimes gets things wrong. Eric has this weird heuristic where he tells people off for looking down at people in manual labor or various things. But yet he's constantly, at the same time, appealing to people's status to say,

well, we have to take this seriously because this guy is, you know, a businessman and a respected guy. Well, as well as that, Eric makes these weird dichotomies, and he's not the only one who does this, which is that if somebody recounts a weird experience, an experience a ghost or how they saw a ufo or something like that in eric's mind there are like three possibilities one is that they are describing something that absolutely happened exactly the way that they're telling it two that they are deliberately lying to you they're liars yeah it lies they're deceiving you. Or three, they're absolutely insane, like absolutely crazy. So, what he does is he kind of goes,

well, they're a businessman. They're clearly not crazy. And why would he lie to me? There's no reason for him to lie to me. So, he shifts to that third explanation. And obviously, you don't need to have a higher degree in psychology to understand that there is a broad spectrum of confusions, misperceptions, odd, ambiguous experiences that people interpret in a certain way, all kinds of things going on. And a lot of people who believe they've experienced very strange things are perfectly normal in many other respects. things are perfectly normal in many other respects. Yeah. And so Mick tries to explain to Eric why, you know, we can't just take eyewitness reports as like the be all and end all and give some possible other explanations for things that people might report. Seagulls, mylar balloons, like plastic bags and drones are the things that were in the airborne clutter thing by the government. That does not explain everything. I mean, I think there's even categories that they

haven't listed there, like distant planes, which are a huge source of UFOs. My sense of it is just from people coming forth out of the woodwork, to me, out of the woodwork to me, the stories I've now heard of encounters are so far beyond plastic bags and seagulls that I, and again, I'm not, if you told me that there was like a huge theater troupe that was out to convince us that this stuff was real. Sure. But I can't process i don't think there's enough mylar balloon in the world to explain all the weird stuff going on so that that illustrates exactly

the bad heuristics it seems that eric applies to this so it's it's interesting though isn't it chris i mean he's meant to be very very very clever, understands quantum mechanics and things like that. But this seems like a very elementary confusion, the fact that he finds it baffling that a reasonable percentage of people, still probably in the single digits, the single percentages, can believe that they've experienced weird things that didn't happen. Correct. And you will hear Mick constantly trying to be reasonable about this. He's trying to explain, well, you know, we shouldn't dismiss these things, we should take them seriously, but we also shouldn't be credulous. And look at the way that Eric responds here. I think it's very telling of the different way that they reason about this topic. I think eyewitness testimony, whilst it's an important part of the equation, you really have to take that with the possibility that a lot of it, if not, I wouldn't say all of it, but it depends what we're talking about, isn't really very reliable evidence and the fact that it's not backed up with with hard evidence with uh with with data with recordings is a problem the major point in favor of the

debunkers is the fact that we've never gotten good evidence i've ceded that to you from the beginning now the thing that i'm surprised by is it feels to me like you're trying to take a twin-size fitted sheet of explanation and fit it over a king-size mystery and the corner keeps popping off and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners and my claim is is that I think that that ship sort of sailed and I don't need to be rude about it wait wait yeah I think that that ship sort of sailed. And I don't mean to be rude about it. Wait, wait, wait. Let me spit it out. I think that we're still in range of some serious disinformation.

Was that clear? You get that? You considered that, yes, we're lacking any hard evidence, but something about sheets and the boats have sailed and dot dot dot so we're in a situation of serious disinformation did you catch the rebuttal there because i got lost in the in the eric cloud it just yeah it was just eric was just like he used the metaphor he just said you've got a big explanation sheet and it doesn't fit the evidence bed but like nothing actually supports that beyond eric's assertion and mick could instead say actually we've got a very huge sheet

of explanation we've tucked in all the corners and there's a tiny bed and it there are lots of cases where we can't be exactly sure what that bump is under like but it's clear that it's under the explanation blanket and like yeah so eric just is reasoning from metaphor to his preferred conclusion and again there's that reference to let me just continue on on my point here and i don't mean to be rude but but here's the thing that you're missing mick right how many times has mick and i don't mean to be rude but but here's the thing that you're missing mick right how many times has mick said i don't mean to be rude in the conversation it's just double standards it's kind of annoying yeah but i think it's it's helpful for people to pay attention to this kind of stuff because you look even though you're very rarely going to meet

someone in real life who is who is that passive aggressive and is that rhetorical in their approach, it's good to pay attention to this. Because when you make a point and their response to it is not to reply, but to spiral around some loosely related analogies, but then delivers it with a great deal of confidence and gives a strong impression that they have actually replied. They have made a rejoinder to the point. Just pay attention, because often they have not. But, you know, a casual listener could think that Eric did actually reply to Mick's point there. Agreed. And you mentioned some surprise that Eric isn't getting this point. There is a point where Mick references some statistical elements and Eric also seems to glide past that. So here's this one. What we see is this cohort of people, this large group of people of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are really just a minuscule kind of tip of the spear of all these possible sightings.

These are the best ones. We've got this 144 sightings from the Navy. These are just the ones that have risen to the top. And it looks like a lot. You say, oh, we've got 144 cases. It's 144 cases out of millions of hours of pilot training. But if I ask you to just live inside your own construct, pilot training. But if I ask you to just live inside your own construct, what are the five that have risen to the top of Mick West's, that is a puzzling, disturbing story for which I do

not have an explanation. Yeah. So once again, one needs to pay attention to what's actually been said and whether or not there's been a reply to it at all. So Mick makes a pretty good point about a statistical one, as you said, Chris, there's millions a reply to it at all. So Mick makes a pretty good point about a statistical one, as you said, Chris. There's millions and millions of hours, hundreds of thousands of people who are flying planes, making all kinds of observations. It's a big world and you're going to have, even if these things are incredibly rare as a function of some combination of people's psychology and ambiguous phenomena and pre-existing cultural things, whatever, it's still going to seem like a lot because you're going to have 100

or so. And Eric does not reply to that point. He just moves on to say, okay, well, you talked about crazy experiences. Now you tell me about the ones that you think are the most crazy. At no point does Eric actually really respond to any of the points that Mick makes in this. No. And so you've got there Mick referencing the kind of statistical pattern about the distribution of cases that we've seen and what the underlying amount of cases that we should infer, right? And what would be some mistakes. This is a valid point about potential errors in inference

that we might make based on just a superficial look at the evidence. I want to contrast that to the way that Eric uses statistical terms and references to scientific theory. So here's one example of him talking about superpositions. Let's get back to your superposition argument. We all agree that it's going to be a superposition. That's not the interesting, you know, if it could be Iran or it could be China, that's a superposition of different explanations. No one says that all drones have to come from one country.

The key issue isn't superpositions of different mundane categories was that helpful yeah clarify that just superposition is one of those words that eric i think brett too really really loves he's just referring to that there's there could be there's multiple different explanations for something oh you wouldn't be saying he's using jargon to make it sound more complex than it is matt i mean look at this this this would be him doing that and dropping references at the same time you know very often in in science experiments i've watched people throw out the outliers because they have a feeling that you're allowed to throw out the outliers. And sometimes the outliers are bad pieces of information. This occurs in, you know, the tau theta puzzle story that Richard Feynman tells about the asymmetry of the weak force.

And sometimes, you know, sometimes it's real information. Sometimes it's an artifact of the environmental setup. What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? What outliers do you think are being thrown out of the UFO sphere? We don't have amazing videos that are just being thrown out because they're... Well, I think you and I are disagreeing about something more fundamental. My feeling is that there's a sort of debunking energy versus a scientific energy.

Yeah. Did you notice that, guys? A couple of things. Well, first of all, Chris, before we forget, what experiments has Eric been involved with? Been involved, yeah. Where he's seen outlier data points being disembodied. And he's had to work out how to deal with it.

Yeah, he's very involved with science, you know, Matt. He's involved in science generally yeah of course of course he's around when the when the experiments are happening he's around he's around but uh it was funny how like when he's actually pinned nick quite reasonably says well okay you're saying that we're throwing away outliers discounting things that don't fit our preconceptions what specifically do you mean what's an example eric doesn't have one he doesn't have one so he needs to change the topic no no no no let's step back a few we disagree about something more fundamental oh dear yeah yeah matt can you uh can you decode this reference for me by by the way? This is a statement that Eric uses a bit later

to return to a point that he wants to make. And he says... So, Mick, I stand by my statement. This is a huge, big deal. And I don't mean this UFOs. I mean, this decision tree has no boring branch. What's a boring branch? Well, I can decode this well because i remember the decision trees do you remember the decision trees from classic dtg eric and brett talking about superpositions and the ability to hold a multiple explanatory

are they spinning up 70 paradigms all at once, rotating them? That's right. And the trick is to hold them all in your head at once and wait all of those nodes of the decision tree. And Eric thinks we're in a position where there is not. There cannot be a mundane explanation. Oh, boring. I see. I was thinking of boring, like drilling, you know, a boring.

No, no, no, no. I was like, I got lost in this metaphor this metaphor i was like he's a woodpecker that's it that's a foul on your part mate i'm the eric whisperer i i understand what he's talking about yeah well that's that's that makes sense a little bit more than of that particular um one and just in passing matt because it's it's the clip happens to be nearby just noting this could be like guru bingo whenever you hear one of them make a reference to this you just have to bear in mind that this this could be a sign that you're listening to a heterodox guru and basic attitude towards people who engage in this kind of gaslighting is F you.

Science has your back. These people don't belong in our minions, in our community, and they have to be driven out. Peter Daszak is in a very serious position trying to orchestrate the idea that only, you know, racists entertain the lab leak hypothesis. Everybody should want to know what the hell he was doing in the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Defense Department funding. There's so much packed into that.

And it's not like they were talking about Dasik and any of that context, right? That is just Eric launching into lab-like minutia to spin off into heterodox bonus points, right? Oh, it's all Dasik is the one that is actually responsible for the lab and the diffuse proposal, Matt. It wasn't funded, sure, but was it not? See our episode with the three experts where we cover this in detail.

For more information. And Eric certainly isn't the only one. There is a strong crossover between the people that are taking the current UFO craze extremely seriously and the people that are all in on the lab leak hypothesis as well. Before we move on to one of the other points, I think we should finish off the one about personal testimony because there's two things that Mick brings up at the end that I think are very good.

Here's him talking about the limitations of eyewitness testimony again, Matt. A point that can't be stressed enough. A lot of what I'm doing in my just day-to-day stuff isn't like questioning people's eyewitness accounts. I very rarely actually take cases where it's just an eyewitness account simply because there's not a lot you can do with it. And often it gets very contentious

because people are very emotional about their things. So a lot of what I do is just simply the nuts and bolts type thing of looking at individual videos and photos and things like that. So if I could do something that was better in terms of outreach to people who have had experiences, yes. But I think it's really more about kind of in a way avoiding that type of confrontation because there's not a lot you can do with someone who just has an eyewitness experience someone who tells you i saw this this this black triangle you know i talked

to quite a few of them you know kind of online Twitter, and there's only so far you can go. Yeah, very sensible. I mean, there's obviously a plethora of eyewitness firsthand experiences with UFOs that exist out there, and they span the gamut from a sober military pilot who saw something unusual in their gimbal camera versus someone who claims that the UFOs stopped their car and strutted about going bebop bebop and then endly probed them the whole spectrum is there and nick is is quite

correct in steering away from investigating those because it's good but isn't it very counter to the how eric presents him as you know somebody that wants to just debunk an attack eyewitness accounts but he's actually trying to tell him here, look, actually, don't spend much time on that topic. I'm mostly about technical videos and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's right. He enjoys the technical aspects of investigating. There's nothing for him to do with an anecdotal narrative. But, yeah, I just keep going back to the fact where even Eric

would totally accept and concede the point that that the vast majority or at least more than 50 of claims about uf experiences with ufos and aliens are bullshit i don't think eric would defend the anal probing type types of nose yet those stories do exist right and you can find people that will relate those stories with a high degree of conviction and will not necessarily be that they'll hold down a job then might appear to be a perfectly normal person in all in all respects yet they are giving what is even eric would concede is a story that cannot possibly be true so if eric can concede that a very large number of these firsthand anecdotal experiences are false but he

can't seem to accept that maybe all of them are or you know are false in the sense that they made a mistake they misinterpreted some ambiguous phenomena again i think it bears emphasizing that mick is very moderate and empathetic to the people right here's here's a little bit more of him like kind of expanding on that point of dealing with people you know with eyewitness testimonies you can listen to their their explanations and you can ask them questions about you know what angular size do you think it would be like how many hand widths would it be and you know what time it was and where were you but at some point you know you enter the low information zone and there's not much further you can go.

And I generally just say, well, I can't really help you. I don't mock them. I don't like make fun of them. And in general, I don't mock people. So, you know, I'm sure there are things I can do to improve, but I don't really accept

your kind of characterization of me being part of this very dangerous uh community uh i think you described it as an abomination that we need to get rid of the debunking community and in your your your last last thing so the way eric would portray it is that he is a victim here of ridicule of personal attack that he's defending other poor people that have been traumatized by these experiences and this debunking community aka mick west because it's not clear who this community is is mocking them disparaging them ridiculing them drumming them out of polite

society yet the only thing you hear in in in this interview is Eric being the one who is being aggressive and disparaging towards Nick West and people like him. So, we'll hear a little bit more about that. But just to remember, Matt, whenever Eric was talking about how his interactions with Mick had an unpleasant taste to them, a flavor of disagreement. There's a role for debunking. And then there's the problem of the debunkers. I think we have to actually talk about debunking as kind of an anti-social negative movement.

I want to... Sorry, let me know. I think that's ridiculous, though. I think that's, frankly, I think it's ridiculous because I identify as a debunker. I've said there are problems with that term. So unless you're talking about somebody else, I assume you're talking about me.

No, no, no, I'm talking about, there's a movement of people, right? All right, so do you see me as being part of that movement? Well, you've been curious in my mind. You're certainly, and again, I'm not angling for anything in particular. I'm not a takedown artist. I don't love interpersonal conflict. It feels to me like in the world of debunkers, and I've now met them in multiple fields, you are one of the most disciplined, and to be honest, one of the most charitable that I've met.

Now, so this isn't principally about Mick West. Yeah. So much there, so much. Eric calls debunkers an anti-social negative movement and he's talking to mick who you know is identified as a debunker and mick says well hold on you know i i don't like that characterization and eric is first of like well what you know let me finish my point please and secondly it's not even about you mick it maybe it's not about you maybe it's about other people and if mick had referred to ufo advocates as an

anti-social negative group how immediate would eric's tart palpitations have been so it's like this double standard where he gets to be insulting and then when somebody pushes back and then he says well you know you make i'm not sure whether you fit into that negative group like you could be one of the good ones you're disciplined you know starts praising them yeah and trying to get them on side so this is how you do passive aggression right you have a bit of sunshine you offer people a route to please you and to stop you from being unhappy with them and get them to bend the knee and do what you want so with eric the passive aggression the emphasis is on the passive like as soon as somebody says hang on are you talking about me

okay no no no no i'm not talking about you know, you see him retreat and he'll go back in the car, but he'll be back. He'll be back just to stick the knife in or claim some sort of grievance very shortly. It's the little two-step there. It's very unpleasant. Yes, that's true. And there's quite a lot more clips that speak to this.

So here's him again, you said you know like the shark he circles back after swimming away no no i'm not going to attack you then you get into this problem which is you have to spice up your skepticism because it's not really tremendously entertaining so that's when you typically get snark you get condescension, you get stigma. And all of those things tend to chase good people out of these discussions. No, it's, is it Mick that's doing that, Matt? No, right. It's not, he's not saying it could be Mick, but it's the debunkers. Is Mick at the bunker? Well, look, if he's referring to snarkiness and cynicism,

he could be referring to us and it would be very justly yeah that would be fine well he he does have a bit matt where he in essence does refer to us a little i don't think it's specifically us it's more eric's collective people that criticize him and in particular he says understand that. One of the things that's very interesting to some of us who do commentary on social issues is that people who are employed by legacy media outfits react to anybody who makes a living as an individual not attached to a legacy media outfit. They refer to these people as grifters in order to give the idea that you can trust Harper's and the Atlantic, but if somebody is telling you something on the internet,

then it's probably nonsense. I think that what you have to understand is that bunk and bunko and the idea of fooling people, I appreciate that you're moving away from it, but maybe a repudiation of the energy around that is really necessary because it's one thing to say, yeah, I'm trying to use that less. A lot of the fun that comes from skepticism is mixing in this dunking and dragging. And whether or not one is actually doing the dunking and dragging, just let me get to the end of this. Whether one is actually doing the dunking and dragging or whether one is painting a bullseye on a target for someone else to execute, I think is really kind of the issue. I feel like we've got a shout out there. That's almost a

shout out. But you notice the self-presentation there that eric is an aggrieved party he's been the victim of a lot of unfair treatment mick west is somehow implicated in this and i gotta emphasize to people all that mick has done in relation to eric is to reply with quite factual on-topic comments on some of his more flagrant conspiratorial ufo claims this in eric's mind is enough to put mick into a position where mick needs to distance himself from this other nebulous group of people that are eric's enemies yeah peeking inside eric's brain is it's not pretty the mainstream legacy media got kicked there and then people being snarky and dunking and dragging on him right but then also mad eric's thing about you know you can be just someone who paints targets but doesn't do it yourself that's eric does that constantly constantly with his audience he's even done it with us.

He has hinted that there are people that are out to get me and I might have to stop the portal if they can't be taken down and blah, blah, blah. He is constantly trying to paint targets on other people, on Peter Hotez, on peter dasik i know right well the thing the other aspect which we haven't emphasized so much is just a blatant hypocrisy of eric doing exactly the thing that he is insinuating that mick is doing this idea that eric doesn't want to make this into a personal drama he's not about this kind of fracas and stuff like that. He's above the fracas.

That's completely the opposite of the dynamic here. Mick came to this discussion thinking they'd be talking about factual, evidence-based stuff relating to his principal interest of UFOs, and Eric throughout has been far less interested in talking about the details of UFOs, which he doesn't know anything about. He's just wandered into this thing. Yeah, it's just what he's really interested in is having an interpersonal drama with mick west it's it's like other interpersonal dramas that he's not involved with he doesn't even know about them he doesn't know the characters involved or anything and poor old mick is just totally

confused by this because he's got no idea what nonsense is going on in eric's brain yeah i don't think he's used to dealing with someone like eric but um so here's eric making that point rather directly i don't do many of these look i i really hate interpersonal drama and so in general i avoid these like imagined dust-ups because i was never looking for a dust-up with you which we share too much in common i'm worried that you're screwing up the overton window oh that we share look mick i'm worried you know we share so much in common don't we but i'm worried about you mick i'm worried you're screwing up the overton window you know what i mean that back and forth you know people would be sensitive to this because this is

just classic blatant attempts at manipulation which mick is absolutely immune to i absolutely love to see all of these things just bounce off him yeah we'll we will move on to like uh reference some of the responses that mick gives to these tactics but it's just that underhand thing of it's somebody looking you right in the face and saying i'm not doing what i'm doing right now what you can see them doing. Like I'm not into interpersonal drama. This is a massive two and a half hour long interpersonal drama episode. And Eric is all about interpersonal drama. He's constantly inserting himself to whatever drama is going on. And he's trying to get involved in the background of any rising heterodox thinker or that kind of thing but yeah he likes to portray himself as the elder statesman above the fray who you know he would prefer to be at home drinking a nice glass of wine not having to deal with any of this but he just sees so many good people getting

forced and he loves you like he he really wants to get along with you because he respects you but you make him so angry you and he feels a bad and you're so good but i mean you've got such insight such value that you could have if you were just a bit more agreeable yeah yeah we've had this map we've had people talk to us i won't should i name names i'll just say that like you know were you to listen to the episode we recorded with jv wheel towards the end you may hear him insinuate that we would be welcome at the sense making table if we were just like a little bit less aggressive in our criticism and yeah that kind thing. And that is not the only person who makes those kind of comments consistently to me. Particularly, sound speakers are prone to saying, you know, Chris, if you would just be nice,

you could sit down and talk with such and such. And this person, I'm like, I don't care. That's my goal. I don't care what your dinner parties. I've got very nice food over here in japan but yeah you know what listening he's never going to be more agreeable this is it i'm not as easy as i'm set this is it but it's just uh so you know look people can have different values people can value the interpersonal aspect but the thing that we constantly bump into in the guru sphere and with the Weinsteins is front and center is their personal grievance narratives, the narcissism, and the focus on the interpersonal as kind of almost all that matters. And it's a

very one-way thing. If they don't feel good from interacting with you you've done something to upset them never mind what eric has claimed about like something that you've worked on for years or never mind what he's insinuating about virologists or that kind of thing it's how eric feels that matters and you know if you contradict him he doesn't like it so isn't that a problem narcissism manipulation and passive aggression what a trifecta on the subject of manipulation and rhetoric and all the things we usually talk about but particularly on this episode eric is or was a member of the intellectual dark web right who used to pride themselves about being

above identity politics now we're well aware that that uh golden rule was frequently uh flounced no what's the word frequently it's no word yeah observed more in the oh how does that saying go it's not more in the absence abstract yeah it's more as they said in parts of the caribbean it's more of a guideline than a code because they they seem to be willing to use identity politics when it suits. And Eric, I would say, is doing this here. So let me just play this clip of him trying to think a little bit more about the broader impact of what he's up to. Let me try to put a different sheen on it. So last attempt to make the point. I am

very much more careful. I want to figure out a phrases. I am much more careful when I hear somebody talking about chem trails, for example, if they come from the black American community, then if they don't, and I'm much more understanding if somebody comes from a radical progressive family that went through the McCarthy era and they don't trust the government. So in other words, when particular groups of people are repeatedly lied to

and manipulated and have a different history than the rest of the country. I tend to take their fears much more seriously. If you went through the Tuskegee medical experiment, it's not that crazy to worry about what's in a vaccine. If you didn't go through the Tuskegee medical experiment, if your community wasn't subjected to that, you may have a very different sense that you know something's going on or if you're aware that we've experimented with biological agents involuntarily against people in subway stations there's all sorts of weird stuff that we've gotten up to well there's a reasonable version of that

as you'd know chris conspiracy theories and ganti vac stuff is extremely widespread in africa and there is like a like a trope in africa and a fair bit of distrust of you know when an international organization like the unhcr or whatever is is out there setting up a medical station wanting to vaccinate people or whatever there's some degree of skepticism, suspicion of these white people coming in from overseas, these international organizations. So that's the reasonable version. But it is interesting how throughout this, Eric has played a kind of like a social justice

card repeatedly, hasn't he? I mean, he's used that kind of language. The way you're interacting with me you know it gives me a bad feeling in my body and he talks about standing up and defending this vulnerable marginalized community of ufo believers who have been traumatized by their experiences and then being marginalized and ignored by the establishment. Yeah, and more directly. And it comes up a lot, Matt, and this might seem a little bit pedantic, but I just want to mention when people reference the Tuskegee syphilis study, which was a shameful medical experiment done on

people in America, but they usually represent it as they were given something secretly, the substance of which was not divulged to them. And they want to say that the vaccines are being tested on people without their knowledge. But the actual issue with the Tuskegee Study, was that for a bunch of people, give them stuff that was disguised, placebos, ineffective methods, and so on, because they want to see the progress of the disease. So it's pretending to treat people and not giving them treatment or being unclear what you're actually treating them for.

So it's a bad thing. It could make people distrusting, but it's slightly different than the way that a lot of anti-vaccine people portray it. I just want to mention that in passing, but I think that anybody can use social justice rhetoric to furlough their argument. It should be something that people know because it can be there's lots of people that we see from all different groups that understand how to adopt the language and the rhetoric to argue you know whatever it is and in this case it happens to be arguing for ufo ufo people yeah yeah it's very it's very flexible You can pretty much adopt the mantle of the marginalized, ostracized community and adopt the role of somebody who is standing up for these people. And that's exactly what Eric is doing in this conversation. I mean, the problem is, is that I don't believe him. He's got no track record at all, for instance. Like, I doubt that he's ever interacted with anyone who's had

anything to do with the tuskegee syphilis thing um no he's he's a dilettante he's wading into this ufo thing because as i think we'll hear with some clips he has his own reasons for being interested in it and it's got something to do with geometric unity yes that's right so maybe that's a good place to turn but i think we have to do some due diligence for mick because most of the clips we're playing you know he's pushing back he's trying to explain himself but he has been a bit browbeat by eric but i i think we have to show that mick does not just accept all of Eric's streaming. So I have a couple of clips to highlight that. This is Mick pushing back against the kind of passive aggressiveness that we've heard so much of.

Conversely, when we turn over to the UFO community, you know, the issue is I don't want people who've seen something or who have data scared anymore. And it's very important. Who are you scared of? I mean, you keep talking about this debunking community, but who exactly are you referring to? I mean, I'm not a person who mocks people. So that just comes across to me as playing, I'll be blunt, that comes across to me as playing dumb. No, I think that lots of people are... No, no, it's a genuine question.

It's a genuine question because there's not very many UFO debunkers out there. I think it's a really disingenuous sounding question. I may have you wrong, Mick, but... Are you including me as part of this this i don't i can tell you that i find your interaction unpleasant oh my god that is so annoying because mick mick directly asked him right who are who are you talking about eric who there are not many debunkers who is it and eric's like well aren't replaying the food right yeah i find that question disingenuous but mick says why yeah it's not disingenuous it's a very plain question because uh as we said at the beginning

we've looked at the sum total of the interactions between mick and eric there is no community like there's no community involved right right? It's just Nick had the temerity to disagree with Eric in public, right? Eric's got a problem with that. Eric is accusing him of these nebulous things, but doing it in that sort of backhanded way where he can't really be held to it. And Nick, to his credit, says, hang on, just, just you know put up or shut up tell me exactly what you're referring to are you referring to me what exactly is your problem and because eric has nothing to support this apart from a generalized feeling of grievance because somebody contradicted him in public he does this kind of thing well he focuses on his feeling. I feel unpleasant interacting with you. Well, sorry, Eric,

but you know, I'm sure tons of people feel unpleasant interacting with you when you're promoting conspiracy theories and stuff as well. But the world does not revolve around anybody's individual internal sense of the pleasantness of a conversation. So it's just, that's frustrating. And especially because Eric is framing it as a general point. But then when Mick is saying, is it referring to me? He's unclear, but then he moves to saying, I find interaction with you unpleasant. So that is him showing that it actually is the levels that he's jumping around from and it's it's eric does this so much with so many arguments to just keep a hears about who specifically he's referring to and the main thing is that all of his enemies and people that he's disagreeing with are kind of

put together into this hisy nefarious group and some of them are doing very bad things are are you saying i'm doing that no yeah i didn't say that yeah yeah well it's disingenuous even to ask really yeah well so you know there's a good thing where you can hear uh you can just really hear that mick isn't lying he's not putting it on. Just listen to the way that he is talking about the UFO community and how he sees them. Almost nobody I know who's not independently wealthy can afford to say, oh, that was interesting. Would you want a surgeon operating on your child if the surgeon had had lots of discussions with aliens? Sure. I mean, yeah, I would.

It's a perfectly normal thing for someone to see something in the sky and think it's this weird thing. This happens all the time. If somebody told me that they were abducted by aliens and that they wanted to operate on my kid, I'll be honest, that would tutor my prior to say I don't want to take that risk that this person might be a line yeah yeah but like simply seeing a craft in the sky that is that's a different thing entirely i think that's a very understandable thing to happen to people and there will be

inevitably some people who have some kind of misperception or illusion that uh you know isn't doesn't deserve mockery certainly not it's a perfectly understandable thing and you know i tell people this when i talk to them that yeah i can see how this might have taken this even even that is a very sensitive thing even that uh they they see that as being um dismissive uh so it's difficult and like i say i try to stay away from that type of thing yeah eric is looking to you know continue this argument around stigma around it's it's impossible to even talk about this thing without being someone like you know even you even i we wouldn't want somebody

like this operating on us or anything and and again mcdrew's credit says no it's perfectly understandable it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you or you're insane if you see something weird in the sky and you potentially make an error about what you see um so yeah Eric doesn't really know what to do with that yeah and again Matt like towards the end he also emphasized this point more strongly pointing out that you know there's lots of people that believe in aliens or see ufos and it's uh some of them are people with impressive careers some of them are just you know ordinary people and they're not a bizarre collection of freaks right that's not what he's saying most of them are not yeah there are a few crazy people in there but you

know they're crazy people everywhere everywhere crazy people outside there, but there are crazy people everywhere. Everywhere. Crazy people outside. As I say that with the chemtrail community, there's all kinds of people in there. There's people with PhDs who believe in chemtrails. There's people with PhDs who believe in UFOs. So it's not like it's a group of ne'er-do-well idiots. It's just a cross-section of society who happens to believe in a certain thing. And that should be respected. Well said. Well said. Given how moderate Mick comes across, and it's not just in this conversation, this is generally

his tone in his material, right? And he's not like us, for example. He wouldn't be as sarcastic or as pointed in his critiques. So it's funny to see that he's considered at the vanguard. Yeah. Well, I realize I'm like just fogging a dead horse here, but you have to really keep in mind that mick has committed the single cardinal sin of contradicting eric in public that's all that's all it needed and then eric frames it into this entire um you know he builds a castle of grievance and tries to put mick in the box of part of this nebulous, sneering, nasty community which is trying to destroy good,

honest people that just want to investigate this topic. And the problem is that Eric's thing is a pure fantasy. It just doesn't work with Mick. Yeah. And so you heard Mick being charitable, being friendly. But then I'm just going to play the thing which contrasts like that's what Mick sounds like when he's talking about these people. And this is the way that Eric presents that. these things because the conspiracy theory really bothers me because we have a group that is simultaneously engaging in conspiracies and not clearing up things that they could clear up, which does feel that personal destruction is a good way to keep secrets. And I guess what I'm asking you is, can you be a bit more charitable to people who've been lied to? Okay.

That's a perfectly reasonable request, I think. And yes. Yes, I think I can. And I'd like to invite other people who are watching this to give me feedback on whether they, like, not necessarily just agree or disagree, but, like, in what way could i do better in what way could the debunking community do better and what specifically should we do because i i interview people uh who have had experiences you know a number of uh people like you know say kevin day one of the guys off the nimitz and gary vorhis another guy from the nimitz encounter as a different ship uh but i'm nice to them.

I'm not mocking them. Eric's attempted jabs there just don't land. I don't think he knows much about Nick or what he does. The only thing Eric has done is make these sort of nebulous sweeping accusations about being lied to and how you have to be more charitable. But yeah, Eric is just not familiar with this topic. He's not familiar with all of the investigations that Mick has done. And he doesn't know the way that Mick does them. So yeah. Yeah. Or I think that's possibly true that he hasn't looked into depth.

But I think Eric has a very low tolerance for people pushing back on ideas so it is likely i mean you can hear in this conversation right he sometimes says your comment makes me feel unpleasant what should i do about that so i think in that respect he does see this dark energy around the kind of interactions which Mick has, because he's not signing off on the experiences, or he's not saying, well, these are very unusual, and there's a lot of, like, he's basically not agreeing with the narrative of the people. And to Eric, that seems like being cruel to them, because, like, you'll notice he keeps using this language, extreme language.

People have been lied to they've had their lives destroyed you know personal destruction like it's always up to 11 it's not just they've been criticized people have disagreed with their account or that kind of thing it's so emotionally then yeah somebody's investigated the video of this and it turns out it was just some stars in the sky and some blur on the camera lens. Like that is a personal attack to Eric. And like Eric's always about the framing. He doesn't ever get into the specifics.

But in his framing just there, the framing is that we've all been lied to. There's a cover-up going on. Yeah. Well, I get that particular thing about being lied to. yet. Well, I get that particular thing about being lied to. And you know, this is often how Eric frames issues that he has around mainstream media or science. There's conspiracies, right? To frame people outside of the mainstream is crazy. And you can see how personal it gets whenever like examples like this. In the case of UFOs, I i've been lied to it is very clear that a lot of very smart people have feel that they have had their lives destroyed over taking this seriously as a

topic and not by me what not by me yeah perhaps by their colleagues and perhaps by the the government why do i have the impression that you police UFOs? Eric's language is amazing. Like, why do I have a bad feeling in my body? Why do I feel like I've been lied to? Yeah, maybe you're overly sensitive. I don't know, Eric. That's not my problem.

That's the truth. But Mick is polite. But again, you know, just wrapping it into the personal whenever mick is like are you talking about me and he's like why do i feel like you police ufos yeah i know we have to come back again to say remember that eric's again his framing at the beginning which is that he's not interested in interpersonal drama. He's interested in this as a scientific discussion. As you can clearly see. As you can clearly see.

Yet, during this whole interview, it's actually quite an interesting interview to listen to because Nick is a wealth of information. He's got lots of interesting details. He knows all the different stories and what happened here and what this person said to that person. So he's actually a wealth of information. Eric doesn't do anything in the entire interview

except try to litigate this personal grievance, this personal drama that he's got with Mick. And it just hurts me, Chris, because his framing is that he's not about that. He doesn't care about personal dramas. He doesn't want anything to do with it. it's him it's just him and and mick is not playing along with it yeah and uh so you mentioned that part of the issue here might be that it's tied into the grander weinsteinian narrative around the new physics escaping planet Earth and geometric unity as the key driver

to these future technologies being harnessed. I have some clips that speak to that connection. So here's Eric explaining why he wants to keep his mind open on this topic. We don't have, not technology, because people keep freezing Einstein in, which has become very distressing to me. You cannot go faster than the speed of light within Einstein's construct, but Einstein's construct is the map, not the territory.

And we don't know whether a better map allows us to do things that are prohibited on this map, but not necessarily with a better understanding of reality. that are prohibited on this map, but not necessarily with a better understanding of reality. So if this were technology based on new science held by some civilization that we don't know anything about, could be us from the future, could be somebody from neighboring galaxies, who knows what. It's hugely consequential scientifically scientifically and one of the things that causes me to despite wanting to get on with you and understand each other better you know also sort of push back relatively forcefully is i don't want that window stigmatized anymore he wants to get on that he

wants to get on yeah but it's difficult because mick is standing in the way of potentially understanding a new kind of science a new kind of science that is being brought to us chris from maybe people from the future so they've traveled back in time and their planes are crashing in area 51 or it could be aliens from another galaxy. So, yeah, I mean, this is connected to Eric's principal interest. And I think this is informed by a lot of his tweets and a lot of the stuff that he says, Chris. I think you'll agree, is that the thing that really makes him want to believe in UFOs is that for him, this could be the proof that there is this new kind of science, like a new kind of non-Einsteinian physics that is probably somehow related to his own geometric unity.

And this is the thing that allows you to travel faster than light and means that aliens can come here from a different galaxy. Kind of amazing, really. I mean, I have to hand it to him, Chris. This is a bespoke reason for being into UFOs, right? Like a lot of people are into UFOs for a lot of different reasons. Eric's motivations, you know, that's not everyone.

That's like one in a thousand. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, just to highlight what kind of gains we could be missing out on by poo-pooing this area. So it's very important to me to prop the window open to, is it possible to leave this place? And the chief reason that we are unlikely to be able to leave this place,

and thus we are likely to die in relatively short order due to our technological prowess and our lack of wisdom, is the Einsteinian limit on travel so this map you know the speed of light as a hard limit if true means that we're trapped in a little pocket of the universe and doomed out to encounter other species and intelligences unless they find a way to break that but eric does think that he's got ruined that with his geometric unity and he's talked about it in all our conversations that you know he's on board with elon musk's need to spread consciousness across the universe but elon doesn't seem that

interested in geometric unity that's the limiting factor of elon yeah elon's thinking in terms of these chemical poweredpowered rockets, which is, that's small change, right? Pre-Weinsteinian physics. Pre-Weinsteinian, yes. Yeah, so elsewhere in this conversation, Eric, and, you know, he just makes these, like, U-turns. Like, one minute they're talking about UFOs and evidence for UFOs

and whether or not Mick is a bad person or not. And then suddenly he launches into this non-Einsteinian physics. But it is linked because he talks about this episode where apparently, I don't know, it's all very vague. Antigravity? Yeah, antigravity. Eric himself says he doesn't know much about it, but he thinks it's very revealing.

There was some sort of program run through a couple of individuals named Babson and Bainson, which is extremely confusing to bring a small cadre of leading scientists to discuss something that sounds like anti-gravity in the guise of discussing general relativity anew. Right. And I would dearly like to know what that program actually was yeah and i would like more of us to be talking openly because we know for example that solomon lefschetz was

was affiliated with this crazy gravity research foundation is there a bunch of like classified documents about that that people have been trying to get or is there just nothing uh it seems to me like david kaiser at mit the physicist and historian would probably be the best person to answer that i've never gotten at this nor have i put in the time or the energy he hasn't put in the time of course you haven't eric but it sounds good doesn't it that there was some secret group that were talking about anti-gravity and it might have been something to do with going faster than light. But maybe it was all hushed up and it was all hidden. But, you know, do a bit of name dropping.

You know, you should look into it. You should look into it. Yeah, so it's all like hints and wasn't Operation Condor a paperclip? You know, they were real and, you know, you have all these insinuations. And I like that you can hear Meg saying, uh-huh, right. tape or clip you know those were real and you know you have all these insinuations and i like that you can hear mick saying uh-huh right you know like because he knows what's coming that he's he's just trying to get to some solid ground and actually mick's reaction to this i think is pretty nice because you get contrast them you can see how mick opts for the more down-to-earth explanation for what this could

have been about, whereas Eric hits off into the stratosphere with his interpretation. I mean, no technology that we know of is anti-gravity. Nothing apparently came from it, unless there's this weird parallel track of science that is going on. parallel track of science that is going on. Anti-gravity may be a head fake, which means that it's really just spoke post space time physics. It's now become very fashionable in theoretical physics to say that space time is the problem and that it's doomed as a concept. And that what we're looking for is the successor to Einstein sort of fabric

for reality. looking for is the successor to Einstein sort of fabric for reality. It may be that anti-gravity is a really bad name for something to make it sound junky, but that's what we're really talking about in particularly the presence of left sheds is very interesting here. That what we may be discussing is a post Ramanianian or pseudo-Romanian understanding of space-time, just a geometric replacement. Oh, geometric.

That's surprising. Who do you know that has a geometric theory? You notice in Eric's cosmology, like it can't just be, you know, he heard about something and it means nothing it was just a totally mundane explanation that's not an option it's either a head fake or it's been given a junky label of being you know anti-gravity or whatever to make people think that there's nothing in it for him there is no mundane explanations there's always stuff going on that there was a meeting that he wasn't invited to where they were talking about these things and the secret documents and he hasn't seen them but

i mean eric's brain i mean and mick west by the way is just doing normal critical thinking here he's saying hey if there was some actual research program if what you're saying is true there's actually a research program that had some kind of legs where, you know, they've created anti-gravity, they've got new kind of physics. Well, wouldn't we have seen some evidence of this at some point in the last 50 years? And of course we haven't. We haven't seen any of it. But Eric just glides over those sorts of quibbles. No, it's all secret. It's all happening in darpa somewhere at area 51 and and he very much gives the impression that if you are not questioning the narrative what kind of a fool are you because you think the government doesn't lie to you matt

and that if you have a situation in which um the government is alleged to keep a secret somebody now says oh i don't believe three people can keep a secret, somebody now says, oh, I don't believe three people can keep a secret, much less thousands, as if D-Day was never planned. I mean, this is just, it's sort of this willful playing dumb that I don't understand. It doesn't seem like, to be honest, it doesn't seem like you. Come on, Matt. We know conspiracies are real. We know governments are not completely transparent. Are you trying to tell me that you think there are no secret projects that the government is telling you all the technology that they've developed yes don't play dumb you know they can and will do these things just to

be clear in case anybody doesn't read between our size and eye rolls it's perfectly reasonable and good even to be critical and to not accept that the government is automatically telling you the truth. But that does not entail that all of the conspiracies or ways that projects are presented in the alternative media or the UFO community are therefore accurate. No, it can be that the government has secret projects that they did look into psychics that they were trying to do remote viewing and that those things were bullshit as well so yeah they do investigate weird and wacky things because you know the people running these organizations aren't necessarily good critical

thinkers themselves and they spend a lot of money on a lot of stupid things i mean there are totally normal secret conspiracies going on all the time like i would be absolutely shocked if the cia and the various american intelligence organizations weren't assisting ukraine with various types of intelligence assets and weren't communicating information that various types of intelligence assets. They weren't communicating information that would be useful to them. And they're certainly not broadcasting this on the media. I'd be shocked if that wasn't happening. That's a normal conspiracy.

That's something that actually happens in the world. That's different from like back in the 1950s, they collected together some of the top scientists who were looking into new types of physics and they figured out that they could actually do, you know, anti-gravity research and maybe even get faster than light travel. And then they've kept all of this a secret for the last 60 years. But there's absolutely no evidence for that or any reason to think that that would be true. Well, you know, I was thinking, Matt, that, you know, you have that movie coming out now, Oppenheimer, and there's so much interest about the Manhattan Project. And that was a secret

project at the time. And we now know so many details about what happened there, about the personalities involved and the scientific efforts and how they were undertaken. And it's an example that those things do occur. But when they produce something like the atomic bomb, when they produce revolutionary physics or products of science that can be applied, you do learn about it. And you see them applied in various domains. And you see people become interested in them and government programs exist. And of course, the nuclear bomb is like a very dramatic example of that. But there was so

much that came out of those collaborations of those scientists in that area. But what Eric is proposing is there's similar kind of programs and that have made similar huge breakthroughs and it's all kept under the table for decades but the technology is out there flying around the skies but it's just not in public knowledge like that's that's the interpretation that's the worldview he's seriously considering what can you say it's just not plausible it's such a boring take but it's just the things that he believes just aren't plausible and he finds them easy to believe because he's got a conspiratorial worldview and and he wants to believe that because he thinks that they'll vindicate him and his unrecognized genius. Yeah. And, you know, I might be banging the nails into the

coffin, but, you know, one of the other things that you often hear in Weinsteinian content is about that they need to get good people in, experts to deal with this topic. And why don't they have them? Right. And often it's left unstated who these world-leading experts are. But we know who the Weinsteins are thinking about because they sometimes do enumerate them. But just listen here, Matt, about something that Eric finds confusing.

One of my questions is, why do we not have our best people on this and this was my point i think where you and i came in contact in some sense in twitter where i was saying if somebody is claiming that we cannot control airspace that is sensitive from a military perspective um is that what they're claiming, though? I mean, they're not claiming we can't control it. They're claiming that we occasionally see things in there that we can't identify.

And we haven't determined that they are. That was just questioning the supposition that was presented there. But you can hear Eric saying, you know, why don't we have our best people on this topic that's the suspicion yeah our best people on what there's nothing there is no topic apart from just your normal ufo sightings what are the best people meant to be doing um oh you say that matt i've got the answer for you. Okay. There is this stigma in science, but I think that stigma is largely well-founded because of all the ridiculous stuff that comes along with UFOs.

And I think if there was some good evidence, then people like the UAP task force would have actually brought it forward and actually done something with it. Where are our top physicists? I don't know. You're a top physicist. Well, you're a physicist. I don't know where you are in the world rankings. I'm actually a mathematician. I don't know anybody in the top physics community

who knows what the hell's going on here. He doesn't know anyone in the top physics community. I mean, did you notice the little underhanded self-aggrandizement there, Chris? Like the implication that Eric is in personal touch with everybody in the top physics community, our top men. Yeah. He's not. He's not in the physics community he's not he's a podcaster he's worked for teal capital he's a crank he has talked to physics

people but it's you know roger penrose and he's had interviews with some people like sabine hossenfelder and oh there's a couple of other pop brian people yeah no offense to these people but they're not the top physics they're not the top physics community right uh anyway um no there's that but you also you know i i noticed that you know mick was like somewhat kind to eric right because he said you know you're a top physicist i mean he does clarify well you know i don't know where you're in the world ranking but i think he generally is regarding eric as you know a pretty mainstream expert on stuff which is not exactly um accurate but a lot of people very generous of him yeah yeah a lot of people do make that judgment of Eric's. Yeah, and it's not like he doesn't try

to drive that interpretation home. So, you know, I think I've got a nice thing that can round us off on this. And this takes us back to the sense-making inclined host, Kurt. So you can see the kind of plea that I think the host and Eric both share about what they think is the important thing to take from this conversation. Is it practically that we can get rid of and get away from the stigma?

So what would it require? Mick, I understand that you don't see yourself as contributing to the stigma, but do you see that you could contribute to the removing of the stigma by, let's say, tweeting a repudiation of the stigma? No, I think I'm a small fish and I think very few people are going to listen to me and the millions of people out there, very few people are going to see what I say. I think it has to come from a higher level. And I think we've already started to see it. That same thing about, you know, removing the stigma from the topic. And if Mick were to tweet out and tell people to stop being debunkers or poking fun at UFO people, that this would be very helpful. And Mick's reluctant, Seris, because he doesn't think it

will prevent people from making fun of UFO people, which it wouldn't, because most people don't know who Mick West is. Well, Mick was rubbing up against that sort of very common thing in podcast land, where the implicit assumption is that the stuff that is talked about, the decisions that are made in this conversation are going to change the world. And Mick being a relatively normal person is like, no. I mean... Yeah, my tweet isn't going to do anything. Like, I just have a hobby investigating UFOs.

We're just talking. It's not going to change anything. There is a stigma towards UFOs because there's a lot of crazy, crazy stuff associated with UFOs. Just have a look on the internet, people. You'll find it. Of course, there's a lot of crazy, crazy stuff associated with UFOs. Just have a look on the internet, people. You'll find it. Of course, there's a stigma.

Nick is quite, not to put words in his mouth, but he quite honestly, I think, would prefer there was less stigma because he would like people to just share whatever evidence they have and that way he can analyze it and we can get to the bottom of it. So he's quite happy to be on board with this. But yeah, in Eric's framing, what we can get to the bottom of it so um so he's quite happy to to be on board with this but yeah in eric's framing what we really need to do is to reduce the stigma let's have these conversations we're going to bust this thing wide open we're going to find out what's really going on up there in the skies yeah and so i have an example of this just a very short one where you

can hear him specifically saying it's good that the Navy has a new policy that reduces the stigma about reporting UFOs. That is a happy accident, yeah. But the Navy thing was a specific response to the UFO thing. It was something that they recognized that there was this stigma and they tried to remove the stigma. And that's a laudable thing. I think that was showing results. So he's on board with the stigma and that's that's a laudable thing i i think that was you know it's showing results so he's he's on board with the stigma being removed but oh one other thing matt before

they get to the final closing statements there is one bit where the host notices that they haven't talked about a particular subject they spent quite a long time on the concerns about Mick being too mean to the UFO community and Eric in particular. And Kurt mentions this. I don't think people would stop, but I think a large set of people would. By the way, just as there's excoriation to the people who come out as experiencers or people who investigate this topic, there is also fulmination directed at you and generally people who are skeptics and i don't like that personally i think that should stop i think that that that that is yeah well but that's something we haven't discussed not even a single bit today and i i hope people would well i hope people would do that less and i imagine that if

i imagine that if eric that if you said something, we're not trying to make this all into let's make public. No, no, but I'm happy. I'm just hypothetically saying, Eric, if you were to say something like, hey, please don't gang up on Mick. Mick has a role to play. Then people would be less. Don't worry about it.

Same with Mick. No, but Kurt, the problem that we have. Yeah, I mean, okay, so a few little ingredients there. Hey, Chris. Like one is the, you know, the discourse, you know, the discourse rules that we need more love and understanding. There shouldn't be any personal attacks. Yeah, no ad hominems.

There should be more love. We all disagree and we all discuss things. And, of course, they're into that kind of thing. Nick doesn't care. And of course, they're into that kind of thing. Mick doesn't care. It's like, whatever. I like the fact that if you listen carefully, when he's like, you know, people shouldn't attack you, Mick says, I don't mind.

And then when he's like, you know, and Eric, if you came out and said, and Mick says, don't worry about it. So his response is just, you know, it's not a big deal people being mean online. You know, it is what it is. And then Eric as well, whenever the host is like, he's suggesting that Eric tweet out.

And Eric would do that, by the way. I don't think that would be a big cause for him to appear to take the higher ground. But even then, he, you know, immediately wants to go back to reframing. But Kurt, that's not really the issue, right? The issue is blah, blah, blah. But Kurt says they haven't spent any time in this conversation for two and a half hours

about the attacks on Mick or skeptics, right? Yeah, because Mick is a grown man that doesn't have paper-thin skin. Matt, Matt. That's what we're conversing. Yeah, that might be something to do with it. But so there was that, which was something. But the last thing is that the host invites Eric and Mick to give a summation about things that they would like to see or whatever in this area. And I think it's very interesting to contrast the two answers that you get. here's eric's i want our top um

quantum field theorists general relativists and differential geometers read in to what data we have and i would like them to be the representatives that actually get go through whatever data may exist as to whether anything is moving in ways that are inconsistent with our physics. I would like to figure out whether this is a physics issue or whether this is a defense security technology, public policy issue. If it's physics, I want this turned over to the people who actually understand where the cutting edge of theoretical physics is

and what's possible under the twin theories of the standard model in quantum field theory and general relativity and gravity theory, I would like to know whether or not we are seeing anything that is indicative of science beyond the science we have. That said, I think there's a small probability that something like that would be true. The other basic ask is that we stop destroying people through our skepticism, through our fears of bunk, through our fears of a through our fears of, um, a conversation run out of control. It's really important to me that we recognize that gas lit people, um, are everywhere and that we

need to do as much as we can to restore that. And whether the end of, you know, blue book or something ushered in an era where we poo poopooed all of this, even if it's nonsense or a cover story, that we start treating people who take this decision tree seriously and not force them to either say it's UFOs or a PSYOP, but recognize the possibility that we may be looking at a confluence of many different things and to allow people the freedom to behave as scientists and invite anecdote, data, and disclosure so that the government really has to realize it's not their effing information. It belongs to all of us.

That's Eric's mission statement. One thing that I'd highlight from that, Matt, is the constant presentation of is this a physics issue a new physics issue or is it a security defense public policy issue is it a psyop or is it you know uh or is it a new kind of evidence of a new kind of science happening right and then there's one line or two lines where i well i think it's a small possibility that that could be true or, you know, or it might be just nonsense. Right. But it's never, Eric never takes that possibility seriously. It's always one of the more dramatic things that it has to be. Yeah. He spoke for like five minutes there, say. It was two minutes,

Yeah, he spoke for like five minutes there, say. It was two minutes, but it was very long. It felt like five. Anyway, but he spent 90% of the time, 95% of the time, talking seriously about these two alternatives. And it could be both, right? It could be a PSYOP, it could be a confluence of things. It could be a PSYOP and these amazing new technologies,

either created by aliens or in some secret DARPA lab. But what we know for sure is that we've been lied to, right? It's something. It's something. But as you say, he never forgets to get the little disclaimer in. All of that, all of that stuff that he talks about in the most weighty tones is like just a small possibility. It's just it's most likely Mick is right. Yeah. like just a small possibility it's just it's most likely nick is right yeah and now to contrast that with what mick wants to happen like what he wants right it's a bit shorter thank god but um

just see if you can detect the difference here what i want is to figure out what's going on and i think the best way to do that is to refine the evidence. And I think the best way to refine the evidence is one, like what Eric proposed is to read in experts on various subject matters. But also that doesn't always work. There's been lots of examples historically where experts have studied UFO cases and they've come up with completely erroneous interpretations of those things. There's the famous Chilean case, which anybody can look up, where a huge panel of experts couldn't figure it out. But what happened was that they released the data, they released the video, and then people on the internet, myself included, figured out what it was. So what I would like is for as much data as possible to be declassified. And I think that

is something that is not an insurmountable thing. I don't think there's good reason for the classification of a large amount of this data. When something comes out like this green triangle video, which was classified you know something that you shouldn't have been released uh there's there's nothing that's harmful to u.s interest except perhaps a little embarrassment where they couldn't identify stars yeah very reasonable it's interesting though isn't it like for for eric the fact that some data on the green triangles the stars right the fact that that was classified is almost proof that the government knows there's something going on and you know whatever there's

something there's something serious going on but you know what mick knows and what normal people know is that they just classify things like automatically right like it's just it's just automatic it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something amazing going on there and and mick wants to investigate them wants to get to the bottom of them so he can completely agree with eric on that point which is that yeah you know you don't need to classify it let's open it up to the community of investigators and figure out what's going on often the answer will be mundane, but for Mick, that's interesting. It's still interesting to figure out what's going on.

For Eric, of course, Eric never talks about specifics. He never talks about the details. I don't think he really knows what they are. He gesticulates broadly and knows that there's something going on. Yeah, and I just like that Mick's request is similar to Eric's in the grounds of wanting things to be declassified and for more transparency to be there. But he can do that

without adding in the component of this being like, that it means that there's necessarily something there. And the fact that he's focused on the data, he's not focused on the interpersonal aspect of it. Yes, he agrees, you know, good if people don't do those things. And Matt, just to make this clear, there's this aspect where people like Eric present themselves as skeptical of experts. But as he highlighted when

he was talking about, we need to get all these expert physicists in to sort this out, Mick is the one who actually says, well, hold on, even experts get things wrong, right? There's a particular set of skills that you would need to look at this. And it's not necessarily being a great physicist. Being a great physicist might actually be an obstacle to you just considering mundane, you know, lens flare explanations, right? So there is a skepticism of expertise in mixed worldview. There is a lack of acceptance of the government narrative as automatically true but he doesn't need to constantly hammer that he just does it automatically yeah no in eric's worldview like eric is resentful and suspicious of the government right these organizations in his mind

they are bad people right he's alluded to that quite a few times even if it's just that they're keeping secrets and that they're keeping secrets and that they're holding the data for themselves instead of sharing it with the people. But yeah, Eric does believe in experts because we need to get our top people, probably people that are his friends, people in his club, people like him. And those people will figure it out, those experts. So yeah, the nuts and bolts of their opinions don't fit with the framing Eric has set up from the beginning. Yeah. Well, so I think we've probably hit all of the major points about this content a million times. And, you know, you, kind listener,

will have the condensed diamond of a tightly edited, non-repetitive episode where you know we only meet the points exactly as many times as they need to be in order for it to stay it's a very precise psychological science that we practice here but i i think everybody's probably got the main points by now and it will be interesting to contrast this weinstein with his brother who has a separate episode with a non-skeptical pro-UFO, pro-alien advocate and see how their reasoning differs and converges. So yeah that that would be interesting to look at. This was a fun interview to listen to for both positive and negative reasons on the positive side i mean i don't really have much of a prior interest in ufos but i i do

genuinely find mcwest interesting just because he knows a lot of details and so it's a lot of interesting things like on on his side of the equation he's just yeah he's interesting because he can talk to a lot of specific facts. And on the negative side, it wasn't an amazing tour de force in a way on Eric's side, who had really nothing to bring to the table in terms of, you know, he said himself many times, he doesn't know much about it. He's just wandered in. He's got a lot of strong opinions, but he doesn't actually know much. This debate, this interview, whatever you want to call it, was set up because Eric had

a problem with Mick because Mick disagreed with him in public. And it was a really interesting exercise for people to see how someone like Eric will undertake this kind of conversation, to attempt to manipulate, conduct that kind of passive aggression, do a lot of vague insinuations. But it was just amazing the way that Eric did not respond to any of Mick's direct questions. When Mick directly said, these are the reasons why this is implausible, Eric will change the topic. When Mick says, well, what exactly is your problem with me? Like, in what ways have I been bad or disrespectful or something? Eric will change the topic. It is an amazing little two-step. And I think people probably run into people like Eric from

time to time in their daily lives, maybe not to that extreme, but I've met people like that who do these things. And it's good to aware of of what they're doing so you know how to handle them matt to to put the post note on this episode i'm just going to play a final clip but i'm not going to commentate on that afterwards we'll move on to the you know review of reviews and whatnot but we can allow the listeners to practice their own decoding here so listen to this clip of Eric talking to Mick about what he's getting wrong and what he's doing right. And you'll hear that kind of appeals to how he could be better or how, you know, if he just were to change his approach a little bit,

that things would go much better for everyone. The way I see it is what Mick is doing, and I said this at the beginning, is a lot of it is yeoman's work. A lot of it is thankless. The skepticism is not that well rewarded. And it has to be done because we need people to come up with prosaic explanations in order, even if it's true, you'd want somebody doing exactly what Mick is doing to say, you know, this isn't evidence of speed. If you drag your finger over a picture of the grand Canyon, that doesn't mean it's going hundreds of miles an hour, right? There's all

sorts of stuff that is thankless that has to do with understanding photography and parallax and things that are not that much fun. The issue is when Mick is doing that, it's very important that people not go into, are you telling, are you calling me a liar mode? Because that's the inverse of that. And that's harassing Mick. And, you know, again, I think Mick gets energy out of this from what I can tell, but it's not pleasant to be called names. And I've seen name calling directed at Mick, and that's not right. I think where Mick mistakes his importance is it really matters. You're not that famous, except in this community, in this community, everybody knows who you are. And if you say something, it will be heard much differently

than if you were to say something about food rationing. There we go. Homework for everyone to enjoy. What was a play there? Was that genuine prayers for Mick uh along with just something else so you know you decide you decide that's our good note our positive note to end the episode on yep that's left as an exercise for the listener um yes matt so uh we gotta thank our patrons but before that we have to respond to some reviews or review them say how good or bad they are that kind of thing are you uh down with that do you

oppose this endeavor i fully support this endeavor chris i'm up for it let's do it okay so uh negative or positive which would you like matt negative start with negative it's a topical one needs a more balanced discussion one out of five stars it would be easier to give more credibility to mix opinions about ufos if you had someone else on the program balancing out his views. David Grush undeniably has far better credentials than a retired game programmer who knows a lot about cameras. In brackets, Mick, just to make clear. We know he's referring to Mick there.

Get David on your program along with Mick. That would be an interesting lesson. I'm sure most agree that if something is there, let's just get on with getting that info out there. Doesn't mean Mick is the expert to go on this topic. As if now Mick is

just a guy putting his own opinions out there without the veracity being challenged. Little Birds 92. Yes, yes, yes. We're not going to have david grisham no sorry we had eric gone in a way so that that counts in this episode there you go you had your advocate for ufos pushing back against mick and you got to hear that so there you go that's that's it and why do you give us one out of five just

because you don't like big west it's uh people with the reviews matt what can you do at least it was it had a clear theme this isn't like a both sides podcast this isn't that kind of podcast we're not having anti-vaxxers on let's hear the anti-vax perspective you know no no no sorry um another one this is by dr sexington and it's uh five out of five stars yep it's uh it says enter the matrix come for the pre-show banter tolerate the decodings stay for the post-show banter i do generally appreciate these two waterboarding themselves with hours of jordan peterson joe rogan and idw content so i don't have to i just wish the podcast came more frequently perhaps chris could quit assisting professors and focus on the real world work long form podcasting is that what you do do you do you assist professors

yeah i just get them coffee i give them a lift up a massage at the end of the day after their long sessions that's what associate where oh i'm an associate professor yeah i just associate professors yeah i've been doing it all wrong. You associate with professors. Yes. You just hang around. Who's that guy? I don't know. Should we name a full professor? No, not yet.

Not yet. So, yeah, but that was a good review, wasn't it? The matrix. Yes, the matrix. People have a real issue with my pronunciation. Because it's not how you pronounce that word. That's why they have an issue. You would start a gym with me, and maybe it's not how you pronounce that word. That's why they have an issue. You would start a journey and it would be if I kept saying, what about Chris

Miss. But look, I get to say matrix any way that I like. I was inverting matrices while you were still in short pants, Chris. Wow. So you guys don't get to tell me how to pronounce it correctly yeah no no no um look i appreciated the vote of confidence for the intro banter and the outro banter so did i um you know not everyone appreciates it but you know this guy does and it's the same sex fiend dr sex fiend not sex sex sex past thank you dr sexington um we're going to keep bantering for you and for everyone like you and thank you little bird 92 for providing the

contrasting opinion um and yep yeah we'll take it under advisement let's see maybe we'll get the ufo guy i wouldn't hold your breath but you know you never tell right so we've got one last thing to do it's shout outs matt yeah shout outs shout out and okay so i'm gonna start with conspiracy hypothesizers because we've got a few we have isaac ben raff chris savel linds michael desantis justin brisley cole adrian horbus misanthropic cockney wanker whose seemingly constant existential dread is soothed by the banter and exposing of right-wing shittery. Nice. That's a username.

That's a username. That's a username. Yes. Correct. Callan Inman, Corey Nemkov, Angie Vroom, Matthew Cox, Alan Fortin, Kieran Mullen, Emmett Nelson-Porter, Patrick Lang, and Emily Baucom. That is our conspiracy hypothesizers. Yay. Thanks, guys.

Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. They will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Now, yes, asic was doing just now correct so revolutionary thinkers but we've got yep gordon sweeney rod hodges lucy greaves callan mcgill Lucy Greaves, Callan McGill, Richard Fairbanks, Star Shark, and Michael John and Ryan Booker. How was that? Good. Good.

That was brilliant. Very quick. Very quick. Very quick and efficient of you. Thank you all, you revolutionary thinkers slash geniuses. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Now, the last category. You know what that is, Matt? The last category, as I scroll

frantically. The theoretical geniuses. Galaxy green gurus. That's is, Matt? As I scroll frantically. The theoretical geniuses. Galaxy brain gurus. That's correct, Matt. It's galaxy brain gurus. And there we have not so many. Looking sparse. They're always hard to find.

Not as many as they could be. We could stand a few more. Conor Drury, Jake Lawrence, Ryan Taylor, Desi, and Linda Sears. Linda Sears. Oh, and Scott Hilton and Roland Weber. How about them? Those beautiful few. Yeah. Thank you, one and all, you Galaxy Brain people.

You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. you're so polite and hey wait a minute am i an expert i kind of am yeah i don't trust people at all plenty of room there's still room in the c-suite there's still room at the top tier if anyone is looking for a ticket um yeah i'm with that level of energy who wouldn't who wouldn't be look it's been a long decoding session this we've run the course we're done with the weinsteins for the minute and um look if you want to get to us there's a patreon where we have bonus stuff, you know, that kind of thing. There's the Coding Academia episodes. There's the Grommeter episodes.

If you want to email us, thecodingthegurus at gmail.com. Think again. Think again. No, don't think again. Think again. We apparently don't tell people to email. So it's thecodingthegurus at gmail.com. There's a subreddit what

else is it there's a twitter account there's an instagram there's a meal order catalog there's a whiskey tumblr there's a facebook page there's a facebook page there's none of those actual physical products that i've mentioned but you know a man can dream a man can dream and to be honest do you really want something branded with us on it not really that's not going to be you know yeah and and last thing i'll say to people is you know be careful with your green drink might destroy your liver if you're not careful let's just keep an eye on it despite what lex friedman and huberman will tell you get your diet advice from qualified professional not from an anthropologist i think that's the lesson to be drawn from that one also

true also true well matt it's very important after this content to keep an eye out for the distributed idea suppression complex which we are a part of and protect the gated institutional narrative which we worship and love um do both of those things please yes we'll do so good night good luck everybody god bless Thank you. you