Eric Weinstein

Not to be confused with Eric W. Weisstein.

Eric Ross Weinstein (/ˈwaɪnstaɪn/; born October 26, 1965^[2]) is an American investor and financial executive.^[3] As of 2021^[update], he was managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital.^[4] Weinstein hosted a podcast called The Portal, coined the term "intellectual dark web", and has proposed a theory of everything called "Geometric Unity" that has largely been met with skepticism in the scientific community.^[5][6]

Eric Weinstein
Born	Eric Ross Weinstein (1965-10-26) October 26, 1965 (age 59)
Education	University of Pennsylvania (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Occupation(s)	Venture capital fund manager, podcast host
Known for	Intellectual dark web
Spouse	Pia Malaney[1]
Relatives	Bret Weinstein (brother)
Website	Ericweinstein.org

Education

Weinstein received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott.^[7][8] In his dissertation, "Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills Equations Across the Eighth Dimension", Weinstein showed that the self-dual Yang–Mills equations were not peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions.^[9]

Career

Finance

In 2013, Weinstein was working as an economist and consultant at the Natron Group, a New York City–based hedge fund.^{[5][6][10][3]} As of 2021^[update], Weinstein is the managing director for Thiel Capital, a venture capital firm founded by American financier Peter Thiel that invests in technology and life sciences–related companies.^{[3][4][11][1]}

Geometric Unity

In May 2013, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy invited Weinstein to give a lecture at Oxford University's Clarendon Laboratory on a theory called "Geometric Unity";^[5] Sautoy also wrote an overview for the The Guardian newspaper.^[6] Physicists David Kaplan and Jim al-Khalili as well as Joseph Conlon of Oxford expressed skepticism.^[5] Physicists criticized Weinstein and du Sautoy for not publishing any equations related to the theory, which is a normal part of scholarly peer review.^{[5][3][6][12]} Science writer Jennifer Ouellette criticized the favorable coverage given to the theory by The Guardian, arguing that experts could not properly evaluate Weinstein's ideas without a published paper.^[13] In April 2021, Weinstein self-published a paper on Geometric Unity and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it. In the paper, Weinstein stated that he was "not a physicist" and that the paper was a "work of entertainment".^[3] Cosmologist Richard Easther of the University of Auckland said Weinstein's theory has had "no visible impact" and "looked massively undercooked after the buildup it got from du Sautoy".^[3] Timothy Nguyen, whose PhD thesis intersects with Weinstein's work, said what Weinstein has presented so far has "gaps, both mathematical and physical in origin" that "jeopardize Geometric Unity as a well-defined theory, much less one that is a candidate for a theory of everything.^[3]

Other ventures

In 2019 and 2020, Weinstein hosted a short-lived podcast called The Portal.^[14][15] As of 2024^[update], he is a member of the research team on The Galileo Project, founded by astrophysicist Avi Loeb to investigate potential signs of extraterrestrial technology.^[16][17]

Personal life

Weinstein coined the term "intellectual dark web", later popularized by Bari Weiss, an opinion editor for The New York Times. The term has been applied to a loose network of public figures opposed to left-wing identity politics and political correctness.^[18]

Weinstein is Jewish.^[19]