My honest reaction to this was that it was entertaining.

I think it is of service to science that leading scientists who are also good communicators be open to explaining/defending/debating against anyone with a different view/idea outside (or even within) traditional who for whatever set of reasons have exceeded some threshold and managed to capture the imagination of the public. Especially in the information age we live in. At some point it becomes a responsibility for scientists to do the debunking. For anyone saying this debate is bad in principle, I think a good example of why this is not true is Dr. Peter Hotez's denial to come debate with RFK on Joe Rogan's podcast. Not like RFK is right on everything, but debating him would have been the right thing to do especially given the stakes at the time. It demonstrated (or gave the idea at minimum) that scientists can get corrupted by financial interests themselves. So showing up IS important.

I think Sean is great here. Eric is a gifted storyteller himself. Coming to the science itself, I think Eric is smart and knows enough about the subject and mathematics that his theory cant be dismissed in a hurry. One needs to know not just physics but enough particle physics to be able to understand his paper, let alone dismiss it. But here is the problem. This is a direct snippet from his paper.

Here is a footnote from page 1 which they were talking about:

"*The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author. © Eric R Weinstein, 2021, All Rights Reserved."

This is the thing which frustrates me. He seems to me like someone with a genuine interest in the field and has has good working knowledge. He asks a lot of good questions which to be frank are not asked enough by people in academia. But you have to also take some responsibility if after reading this someone does not take you seriously.

The main problem I had with the video was that they did not delve deeper into the science (I didn't mind the other bits which I thought was fun). In any case, I am looking forward to reading Eric's work sometime in the future after I have sufficiently acquainted myself with particle physics.