Martenson w/ Brett Weinstein DARK HORSE 8/18 shorter version

I cut the captain obvious stuff at the end and various parts in the beginning to get to the point faster. Among them there was some talk of Epstein. Here is a brief history of the Weinstein Bros and Epstein.

Brett was a liberal, probably "progressive" professor at Evergreen State, a hippie college in Olympia, WA. I've been there and it's almost like an alternative school. Brett was put through a communist struggle session some time in Trump's first term during BLM that led to his removal from the school or he quit, I don't remember now, and he became an anti cultmarx (like many ex-communists before him) free thinking libertarian type, did a bunch of interviews on Fox and that put him on the map as a public figure. He started his podcast from there, which is quite good from what I've listened to of it.

But long before that, Brett and his brother Eric were members of the Epstein-bankrolled Edge Foundation, which organized Billionaire Dinners almost certainly for the purpose of blackmailing them. I dont know what their roles were other than producing articles to influence behavior.

Eric is a supposed scientist into string theory, quantum mechanics stuff. It's all bullshittery but people assume there's something to it because they have no idea what Eric's colleagues are talking about. Eric exposed himself as a BS artist on Joe Rogan by saying the kind of things string theory people always have said, and that's what he is, a BS artist and fake scientist, propped up by the deep state like many are in tech, because they're just there to put a public face on govt schemes. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, for example, or Mark Zuckerberg.

More famous than his Joe Rogan interview, is Eric's podcast about meeting Epstein, during which he said Epstein did great things for science with his philanthropy. Epstein was no more a philanthropist or hedge fund guy than Eric was a scientist. He was a bagman of sorts, who brokered arrangments that led to blackmail, and that was the theme of Eric's podcast.

It seems to me Eric was doing damage control and getting ahead of the news, having been to Epstein's home and had a professional relationship with him. Indeed, it could be inferred that he admitted as much, in a sly way, during the podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNjH4SP6vw&start=1140

He said the intel community didn't know Epstein was a pedo/child trafficker. Who does he think was using the blackmail?

He also said string theory was false, as if it were fundamentally different than his "Theory of Everything." Perhaps he was trying to rescue the theory, on behalf of whatever agency, by substituting his own version as it lost credibility. But he was claiming not to be part of something he was part of, which was the point of the show with regards to Epstein: Eric telling the world he was not involved in the Epstein racket and neither was John Brockman, Epstein's "Intellectual Enabler" who established the Edge Foundation, in which Eric and Brett, again, were members.

Epstein's supposed hedge fund was essentially a money laundering and blackmail gathering racketeering operation. Weinstein says he "dropped off trading materials" at Epstein's secret Midtown office. That would implicate him in the operation, knowingly or not. I don't believe his CYA story, and I think he did.

But ofc, I don't "know" that, which brings us full circle to the Martenson talk. What Brett calls a "Cartesian crisis" in the beginning refers to the philosopher Descartes, who had the idea that any and everything thing you perceive could be a trick played on you by a great "demon deceiver". This came to include his perception of himself: how could he know he exists, that his existence isn't another of these tricks? He answered the question by saying he knows he exists because he thinks. "I think therefore I am."

A "Cartesian crisis" means doubting everything you thought you understood, like Descartes did, and that's indeed where we find ourselves, with our government and institutions lying about everything under the sun for the past 100 years. We can't say anything with confidence because the records are hidden away, so we're forced to defer to experts on all these different matters that we could evaluate ourselves, if the government weren't denying us the information.

Interview speeds up to 1.5x at around 1h30, the reason for this is my editing program copied the video file with the audio and video misaligned starting there, then going silent. I had to re-record it from my own file so I wanted to save time.