I Was a Fan of Eric Weinstein. Now He’s Threatening Me on Twitter

After months of intimation about trolls preventing new episodes of his podcast The Portal from being released, Eric Weinstein specifically calls out a group of online acquaintances. This is my first-hand account of what really happened and what Weinstein’s motivations may be for the false accusations.

Probably like you, I was a fan of Eric Weinstein, popular social commentator and originator of the Intellectual Dark Web. His ability to synthesize his knowledge across a broad range of fields into conclusions that are only obvious after you hear them is second to none.

But perhaps unlike you, I know the person he was referencing in this tweet from August 5, 2021:

He was describing someone I had met in an online space on the Discord platform dedicated Weinstein’s The Portal podcast. I was even more shocked a few tweets later:

These educational backgrounds matched those of other online acquaintances. But most notably, the “UCLA math PhD” was a clear and direct reference to myself, with credentials I had revealed to Weinstein in confidence during amicable academic-oriented interactions via Discord.

Up until I saw this tweet, I counted myself among Eric Weinstein’s supporters. Weinstein had insinuated that there was a dedicated group of internet trolls targeting his safety. These unnamed, villainous trolls were said to take sadistic pleasure in harming those close to Weinstein, even having the power to derail podcast episodes from being produced. My strong initial reaction was concern for Weinstein and his family.

After reading the August 5 tweets referencing my friends, the incongruence troubled me. Suddenly, I felt my own safety being threatened. How could Weinstein brandish the prospect of releasing identifying information he had collected about me in such a way when I had been a long-time, actively-involved supporter?

The confirmation that I am among those supposed trolls put everything else Weinstein claimed into question. To understand this, you would need some understanding of Weinstein’s history, whose underlying theme is that dark and powerful forces have worked at every turn to thwart his genius: teachers failed to accommodate him, professors sabotaged his PhD, powerful committees silenced him, and even Twitter’s Jack Dorsey secretly throttled his online output, manifestations of a Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) in his lingo. Were these all as baseless as his accusations against me?

How could Weinstein brandish the prospect of releasing identifying information he had collected about me in such a way when I had been a long-time, actively-involved supporter?

This is the story of my involvement with Weinstein and the various Discord servers centered around The Portal podcast. What has actually happened may not be as wild as Weinstein might have you expect: the people he referenced are simply friends connected by a Discord server. To my knowledge, none of us have ever made threats towards him or his family, nor have we stalked or harassed him. What some of these individuals have done is questioned and criticized his ideas using valid scientific arguments. In fact, prior to this tweet I myself had celebrated his work and sought to share it with others. Nevertheless, Weinstein has deemed it necessary to associate me with actions that I have not taken and label me using the libelous term “harasser.”

The accusations serve as an effective tool enabling Weinstein to evade criticism and draw the attention of his audience by attracting more drama and intrigue. Below, I will give my account of what happened, undistorted by false narratives and backed up with references on key points.

The context of this story involves various Discord servers (there are several) and the characters who populate them. Discord is a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform used to create online communities known as servers, each of which is administered by users called moderators. The original Discord community that grew around Weinstein gathered on the Portal Unofficial server which was created in January 2020.

It was a remarkable place in the early days. Weinstein appeared in voice chat multiple times per day during his commutes and daily walks. As soon as he entered the channel, hundreds of server members would flock online to receive the wisdom of a modern Socrates. He led discussions around the importance of family, the wonders of nature and mathematics, and most prominently, the pervasive unfairness of society brokered by the cabal of people who held real power in this world.

Members of the server were interested in leveraging blockchain technology, extending human longevity, and learning fundamental physics. In a channel called physics-discussion, a young physicist known as Theo Polya (username “FieldTheorist”) held court on topics like quantum field theory, AdS/CFT and the underpinnings of our universe on the smallest and largest scales. Weinstein attended these sessions and, impressed by Polya’s expertise and communication skill, publicly declared him as a friend. In private messages, Polya revealed his real name and personal information to Weinstein.

In his podcast appearances, Weinstein touted the Portal Unofficial server’s self-organization and productiveness. There was some truth in all of this hype. Here was a community that united people of different ages and nationalities. It regulated itself in certain incidents, including reversing malicious Wikipedia edits on Carole Greider’s page from overzealous members inspired by Weinstein’s claims that she prevented his brother Bret from winning a Nobel Prize.

In March 2020, Weinstein began focusing on physics discussion in his visits. The reason would soon become apparent: he was preparing to release Geometric Unity (abbreviated GU), his theory of everything. Weinstein claimed that his breakthrough could potentially lead to technology like faster-than-light travel that would enable the human race to inhabit distant worlds.

It’s a place where you can learn physics or join a book club, discuss free will or ivermectin, or even post pictures of your pets.

On April 2, Weinstein released his theory in a YouTube video rather than the more traditional route of academic publishing and peer review. He continued with public-facing interviews and podcasts, but had less pointed conversations related to his theory with server members. This led to a disconnect in the ability for some members to fully evaluate the theory as presented and left many lingering questions for the academics interested in the topic from the server. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of Geometric Unity, Polya commented that he’d have to see the Lagrangian in order to evaluate Weinstein’s theory. This appeared to anger Weinstein, as he went on a rant saying that this was something physicists say when they want to dismiss great ideas without any valid criticism. The friendship soured as Weinstein no longer returned Polya’s messages or engaged with him on Discord. Weinstein publicly complained about the criticism, even quoting Polya directly without specifically naming him on a podcast.

In the months following, activity on the server was noticeably waning. The reasons behind the decline in activity are complex, but there were three main factors. First, many members were banned without process for wrongthink or being argumentative, perturbing complex friendship networks and creating a suppressive atmosphere. Though the top moderator on the server took the blame, Weinstein admitted partial responsibility for these policies.

Secondly, the projects were ill-conceived and unfairly administered. Projects were approved in an obscure bureaucratic process by the moderators of the Portal Unofficial server, particularly a pair of “Surrogates” who claimed to have personal contact with Weinstein. Members who wanted to work on projects were told that work was happening behind the scenes and that they weren’t qualified to contribute. In one particularly egregious episode, a young PhD student who wanted to make a guide to Penrose’s book The Road to Reality (considered by Eric to be a key to modern physics) was strung along for a month by the promise of a meeting with Weinstein before the Surrogates deemed it insufficiently interesting. In mid April the Surrogates created their own separate Discord server, Portal Projects, and fell out with the leaders of the Portal Unofficial server for reasons unknown to me.

Finally and most significantly, Weinstein stopped appearing on Discord. The full reasons are not clear, but one contributing factor was his interaction with his one-time friend Theo Polya.

All of these factors led to the creation in July of the new server, called the Portal Community and later renamed the Portable Community. The people referenced in the recent August 5 tweets shown above are connected in different ways to this Portable Community server, and Weinstein himself was a member. The leadership of the new server (including myself and another person among the accused PhD “harassers” in the above tweet) emerged organically from the community.

On this new server, which is open to anyone who wants to join, members are relatively free to discuss whatever happens to be on their minds. Since the community originally grew around Weinstein, the main topics center around politics, economics, and science, with a bit of an emphasis on figures in the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.” But conversations can veer into other areas like dating, psychology, or films, running the full range from thought-provoking to puerile. Harassment and trolling are, of course, against the rules, but disagreement and stupid opinions are not. It’s a place where you can learn physics or join a book club, discuss free will or ivermectin, or even post pictures of your pets.

The philosophy of the server was modeled off of ideals professed by Weinstein. He chided big tech companies and legacy media for censorship and manipulation, so the moderators are extremely careful about banning members and regulating speech. Our server embraces the kind of heterodox ideas and disagreeable people that Weinstein seemed to treasure. And as Weinstein dreamed, we built ways for people to collaborate in learning and scientific research that have historically been cloistered behind the gates of institutions. We empowered artists and creators and culture.

What I didn’t expect was that Weinstein would work to undermine all of the principles he espoused and we sought to implement.

After a several month hiatus in mid 2020, Weinstein made his first reappearance around August 2020 on the old server. He continued discussing GU, claiming he wanted to gather a group of technical people equipped to study it.

Weinstein was less worried about his safety than in maintaining an unchallenged narrative.

This is where Tim Nguyen enters the story. Nguyen is a mathematician now working in tech who has a PhD in gauge theory, the same area of study as Weinstein. Over the course of two voice chats, Nguyen learned that Weinstein knew Nguyen’s thesis advisor and then proceeded to ask Weinstein some technical questions about the Seiberg-Witten equations, the topic of his PhD. These were a set of equations developed by physicists Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten in 1994 which Weinstein claims to have discovered beforehand, without any corroborating evidence from the scientific community. Weinstein was unable to give a satisfactory response.

Nguyen was welcomed on the Portal Community server since he was qualified to talk about gauge theory and Geometric Unity and willing to explain it to laypeople (Weinstein, on the other hand, seemed unwilling even to write the details of the theory in a scientific article, stating that the essential details needed to understand GU could be gleaned from the YouTube video). Aside from occasionally scheduled discussions on scientific topics Nguyen was not active in the Discord community at large. But through those visits he became connected with Theo Polya, who was similarly disillusioned with Weinstein’s inability to substantiate his claims.

Meanwhile, I began to learn about Weinstein’s work on gauge theory in economics. Weinstein claims that the PhD thesis of his wife Pia Malaney is a royal road to learning gauge theory, which holds the key to physics and GU. There was a research group on the Portal Unofficial server to study this but it never quite took off. Inspired by the freedom offered on the new server and by the importance of the ideas, I read the first few chapters of the thesis and gave a series of lectures on the subject for the server (as a side note, I still feel that this material is valuable and worth learning).

On September 16, the day I was set to give the first lecture, Weinstein called me on Discord and in this conversation I revealed basic personal information to him. He unexpectedly appeared on the new Discord server to attend the presentation. The lecture went smoothly, but during the question and answer phase, bad_stats (whose Discord message was leaked on August 5) started questioning Weinstein on some earlier remarks about the Boskin Commission. The Boskin Commission was convened by the US Senate to measure bias in the computation of inflation, and accused by Weinstein of essentially laundering one trillion dollars. While bad_stats was dominating the session, Weinstein seemed to enjoy the repartee and so the conversation was allowed to continue. The mood by the end was that Weinstein had successfully defended his claims. He appeared again for the second lecture and praised my initiative as a self-learner.

Between these two lectures, Weinstein complained about a stalker he encountered in real life, both in public and private messages. I was very concerned, but he would not provide more details on which the moderator team could act and it was not even clear that this incident had anything to do with our server at all.

Later, bad_stats discreetly contacted certain figures mentioned by Weinstein in his stories about mathematics and economics to try to verify specific claims Weinstein made about the Harvard economics faculty. This independent investigation got back to Weinstein, who mentioned it to a moderator who then subsequently informed the rest of the Discord server. The moderators and particularly myself expressed disapproval about that violation of Weinstein’s trust, yet after a long period of deliberation we determined that his actions were not against Discord’s guidelines and so bad_stats was allowed to remain in the community. In hindsight, I realize that my disapproval had more to do with protecting someone I admired rather than any concerns over a privacy breach. It is clear to me now that Weinstein was less worried about his safety than in maintaining an unchallenged narrative.

After my presentations on the Malaney-Weinstein work, the Surrogates approached me to join their server. Growing weary of increasing disillusionment and waning interest in technical topics on our server, I proposed to create another server built up with moderators selected from trusted members between the three existing servers. During the discussion, the Surrogates tried to turn me against other members of the Portal Community server. They made vague references to threats I knew nothing about, including a secret group that was apparently plotting against me personally. They also expressed extreme animus against certain moderators in the Portal Community who were attempting to “lure” Weinstein to the server. I responded that this may be true but only for the simple reason that Weinstein’s ideas were popular there and a big draw, not for malicious intent as they seemed to insinuate.

The clash of styles was too great and nothing materialized. The Surrogates tried to compete for the Community server’s high level of voice activity by adding more channels and renaming their Portal Projects server to the Portal Group. To avoid encroaching on this space the Portal Community server was renamed in good humor to “The Portable Community” with a message posted to emphasize that we were not anti-Weinstein; in fact most of the active members (including myself) were then still firmly Weinstein supporters. In an attempt to recruit new members, the Surrogates went on the Portable Community server in January 2021 to launch tirades which mirrored the language used in Weinstein’s tweets.

Two key pieces of information came from these visits. First, they revealed that the mentally unstable people supposedly threatening Weinstein were unrelated to bad_stats, who in fact was still a member of the Portal Group (but otherwise they did not provide anything actionable). Second, they informed us that they were in possession of a large amount of recordings and screenshots taken from the Discord servers without the knowledge of the participants. This cache may be the source of Weinstein’s tweet in which he quotes a joke from bad_stats out of context, suggesting that he and his associates may be using it in order to silence and intimidate his detractors. The use of this kind of material is particularly abhorrent since one of the few rules established by Weinstein early on was that he should not be recorded.

Among the several Discord servers now in existence (Portal Group, The Portal Unofficial, Portable Community), the one which Weinstein has been chiefly opposed to is the Portable Community. For example, he indiscriminately blocks almost anyone that he recognizes from the server on Clubhouse and seemingly referenced it in a tweet. I had often wondered why Weinstein was so opposed to the Portable server when the other servers had essentially the same members, and came to the conclusion that it was because the leadership of our server was independent. Although we highly respected him, we were not willing to undermine the community for his personal whims as the leaders of the other servers so often were. And although Weinstein stated that he valued free thought and accepted criticism, the members of the community who he allowed closest to him were those who were not equipped to criticize him and those who obsequiously carried out his orders.

Towards the end of 2020, the theatrics surrounding the Discord servers began to surface publicly. Bad_stats made an appearance on a podcast called Decoding the Gurus and talked about Weinstein’s incredible claims on Geometric Unity and the Boskin Commission. Inspired by bad_stat’s criticisms being made public, Nguyen and Polya joined forces and began studying Weinstein’s GU Youtube video. The expertise of each one complemented the other as Nguyen holds a PhD in mathematics on gauge theory and Polya holds a PhD in physics on quantum field theory. On February 23, 2021, Nguyen and Polya released their response paper to GU, the result of two months of dissecting the video Weinstein released in 2020. The paper presents four precise objections to the work of Weinstein and has since then been the subject of blogs, articles, and podcasts.

I was not involved with those efforts. In fact I was then engaged in a project to use GU as a framework to understand modern physics and mathematics for which I wrote a textbook of some two hundred pages and exchanged some emails with Brian Keating, an astrophysics professor and friend of Weinstein, to try to help the effort to make basic ideas of GU understandable to the wider audience.

I’m sorry to disappoint those of you who thought otherwise: there is no grand conspiracy to discredit Weinstein by a secret group of PhD trolls.

On April 1, Weinstein released the first official paper on GU on Keating’s podcast and on the following day, he presented the work on Joe Rogan’s podcast with high quality animations made by a team from the Portal Group server. Notably, Weinstein refused to substantively engage with the work of Nguyen and Polya on the flimsy basis that Polya was pseudonymous, despite that Nguyen is not anonymous. This is all the more absurd because Polya had given Weinstein his personal information a year ago during the period in which they enjoyed a friendly relationship, and recently Weinstein even visited Polya’s LinkedIn page, confirming that he indeed knows Polya’s true identity. To date, Weinstein continues to avoid responding scientifically to Nguyen and Polya.

Furthermore, Weinstein combines his refusal to respond alongside the claim that there is a group of trolls that are stalking and harassing him, implying that Nguyen and Polya belong to such a group without any evidence. From my own perspective, I have not seen any reason to believe that such a group exists and even if it did, it would be even more absurd to associate Nguyen and Polya with it. I would never be associated with a group that enabled harassment or harm on any individual.

We now reach the part of the story that affects me and others. Weinstein’s claims of harassment have become a recurring theme of his public tweets, for instance:

To my knowledge, these topics have not been discussed on the server and certainly not by those of us who happen to hold a PhD. I used to think, perhaps naively, that he was referencing another unknown group. The most recent events prove otherwise. Nguyen, after a streak of podcast appearances in June and July criticizing GU, released the beginning materials of his lecture series on gauge theory on August 4. In his first lecture, he describes the fundamentals of gauge theory, motivating the subject by analogy of a simple problem of currencies and exchange rates and cites in his video the work of Maldacena. Later that evening, Weinstein named Nguyen for the first time in public with the following tweet:

The next day, he posted threatening tweets alluding to the three other members of the Portable Community by their educational background (the tweet from the introduction was one of them). Two days later, he posted again:

This is Weinstein inciting his followers to fight people whose personal information he casually leaked, people who were accused without ever being told what they did wrong, who most embodied the ideals of “The Portal” and worked hardest at realizing them.

If you are one of the fans who felt that the tweets were a call to action, this article was written for you. I am someone who resonates with Weinstein’s scientific ideas and values, having invested significant time and heart into pursuing them. I therefore feel betrayed, not for personal reasons, but for the fact that someone I respected would so egregiously violate the values he purports to cherish. Rather than fight against suppression, Weinstein spends his energy trying to forcibly censor criticism of his lazily presented ideas and prop up sycophants. Instead of science, he focuses on creating his own interpersonal drama by targeting people (in my case, completely unprovoked) with false insinuations and threats.

I’m sorry to disappoint those of you who thought otherwise: there is no grand conspiracy to discredit Weinstein by a secret group of PhD trolls. Nor is this article an attempt for some sort of “Streisand squeeze” (an Ericism for generating fame by compelling a figure to respond to attacks of the people around them). I simply want people to understand what they’re getting into and what Weinstein really stands for. For me, this latest and most personal salvo has put all his claims of mistreatment into doubt, and I am unwilling to further extend the endless goodwill I have given him. I do not know if he is acting maliciously to maintain his narrative or if he genuinely believes all this to be true; in either case I wish that Weinstein learns how to deal with his demons and that he uses his remarkable mind as a force for good in this world.