In the video, former SCUHS instructor (not professor) Dave contends that theoretical physicist Avi Loeb is a “fraud.” First, I want to comment on who I think Dave Farina is. California, it seems, has devolved into a swirling toilet bowl of intellectual and moral debris, as evidenced by the fact that this man managed to be hired as a teacher at a private college there. From June 2010 to October 2013, he was an instructor in organic chemistry at Southern California University of Health Sciences. After that, his career thins out. He rebrands himself as a “science communicator” with a YouTube channel. His endeavors seem to target the low-hanging fruit of flat-earthers and creationists. But I imagine he’s making six figures more than he ever did as a teacher, so more power to him. I hope he continues to succeed on YouTube -- at least for the sake of his family.
However, I hope he fails spectacularly at slandering undisputed geniuses like Avi Loeb. In his video, Dave drills down on Loeb’s claim that Oumuamua -- the interstellar object that passed through our solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory in 2017 and has since vanished into space -- was possibly, and more likely than anything else mankind has ever encountered, an alien artifact of non-natural origins. Dave suggests that in the years since this unique phenomenon occurred, Loeb has trafficked in widely debunked claims about the object’s origins in a cynical cash grab that defies the scientific community and serves mostly to inflate his own public profile and bank account.
I’m going to surprise my readers, and possibly even Dave himself (hi, Dave), by saying that the organic chemistry guy's contentions aren't entirely out of bounds. Loeb is a public figure, and he holds controversial scientific and social science views that make him fair game for pointed criticism -- even when those critiques are thin and poorly conceived. This is America, and here we allow for public dissent on all reasonable and rational arguments. Therefore, I have no problem with Dave saying he disagrees with a theoretical physicist who has made a few million dollars on his notoriety as a supporter of the extraterrestrial explanation for Oumuamua. If I were a fellow traveler physicist in elite scientific circles, I’d probably have a basketful of my own criticisms of what Loeb has been doing since 2017. Loeb would probably expect that of me.
My problem with Dave’s video stems from a conversation I had with him in the comments section -- since deleted for the second time -- in which it became disturbingly clear that he had done very little reading on Oumuamua prior to posting his video and likely knew even less about Avi Loeb. Let’s be clear about who Loeb is, starting with Wikipedia:
"Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In 2015, he was appointed as the science theory director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. He is an Israeli and American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, where since 2007 he has been Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics.[1][2][3][4][5][6] He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016."
And from Loeb's 2021 book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth:
"At the time of this writing, I serve as chair of Harvard University's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, chair of the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, a member of the advisory board for the digital platform Einstein: Visualize the Impossible from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington, DC.
In his book, Loeb posits that the reaction to Omuamua in the scientific community was a bit slapdash and inconclusive, to say the least. He writes:
"Indeed, mere weeks after the object's discovery, in mid-November 2017, the International Astronomical Union -- the organization that names newly identified objects in space -- changed its designation for 'Oumuamua' for the third and final time. Initially, the IAU had called it C/2017 U1; the C was for comet. Then it switched over to A/2017 U1; the A was for asteroid. Finally, the IAU declared it 1I/2017 -- the 'I' stood for interstellar." (Loeb 5)
All of this is well established in the scientific community, but apparently not in Dave's world. In his video on Loeb, Dave confidently claims that Oumuamua is “widely considered” by experts to be an exocomet. I asked him, “If Oumuamua is widely considered to be an exocomet, why isn’t it officially classified as one?” He shot back: “It is.” I replied, “No, it isn’t,” and cited the actual evidence.
That’s when Dave’s composure cracked. He resorted to name-calling, declared that none of what I said was true, and that I was stupid. I doubled down with the facts. Then, in the interest of accuracy, I called him a complete moron, because at that point, it was irrefutable. If you make a whole video purporting to “debunk” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist with endless credentials who has worked with the US government on international defense projects, and simultaneously botch the most basic classification facts about the object in question, you’re not just wrong -- you’re proudly, performatively, Olympic-level wrong.
Predictably, this sent Dave into full damage-control mode. What does an idiot say and do when confronted with basic facts? He began deleting my comments, then went silent for half an hour, probably to Google “Oumuamua” like a college freshman cramming for a quiz he forgot was tomorrow. When he returned, still having scrubbed most of my replies, he opened with: “Hey worthless shitstain, Google ‘Oumuamua is an exocomet,’ see that every single source says yes, it is, and then come back and apologize. There is no ‘C1’ designation. That’s not a thing. You’re the dumbest loser alive.”
This was… unwise. Yes, if you punch that phrase into Google, the algorithm helpfully regurgitates the “widely considered” myth, and leaves out the fact that official classification tells the whole story. But switch to any other AI engine (I used Grok), and the result is the opposite: Oumuamua is not considered to be an exocomet, although one hypothesis suggests it might be. Those sources -- the same ones Loeb references in his own book -- also explain exactly why, and none of this has changed since 2021. Oumuamua remains classified as an “interstellar object,” with no consensus on what it actually is.
I posted all this back in the comments, roasted him for the error, and told him I expected an apology, though I figured he’d just delete everything again. Instead, after a strange pause where I imagine him staring blankly at his screen, he undeleted the entire thread. Maybe he thought it made me look bad. Spoiler: it didn’t. At least for that evening, the exchange stood. Since then, surprise surprise, it’s mostly gone. I could go back and dismantle him all over again, but why bother? He’ll just hit delete, pretend it never happened, and keep his deeply flawed Loeb video up for the next unsuspecting viewer.
You might wonder why Dave Farina is so invested in attacking a theoretical physicist. I have a theory, supported by his own video. Near the end, he drifts from criticizing Loeb’s scientific claims into criticizing Loeb’s ethnicity, launching into a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic screed against the “Zionist physicist” he believes Loeb to be. I was waiting for this moment, because as Dave went on and on about Loeb supposedly grifting the public with his views on Oumuamua, I realized the video never actually addresses the fact that Oumuamua isn’t categorized by astronomers as a comet. Instead, he sidesteps the interstellar object entirely and goes straight to ridiculing Loeb for getting frustrated that other scientists aren’t as eager to embrace his extraterrestrial theories.
The video’s thin treatment of Loeb’s actual science tipped me off that Dave’s animus likely has little to do with comets, aliens, or scientific integrity. Dave appears, at least to me, to have a problem with this particular Jew. Why else bring up the war between Israel and Hamas, and go on a tangent about how monstrous Israel supposedly is (and Loeb by proxy) for “murdering children” in Palestine, when Loeb has nothing to do with the war? Why even bother mentioning it? I think Dave’s entire video is built on an underlying hatred of Israel, a misguided romanticizing of Palestine, and perhaps even a soft spot for Hamas -- though I can’t confirm or deny his views on that, because he’s been too vague, at least in this video (and I’m not about to dig through his channel to find out). My suspicions seem supported by the fact that he’s been banned from X for antisemitic content (link here). Pretty sad for a man his age, and a searing indictment of my generation.
Here’s what I'm getting at with all this: if you know nothing about Avi Loeb and then watch Dave’s video, you could easily walk away thinking you’ve been educated about a dangerous fraud looking to scam you out of your money and intellect. Dave frames Loeb’s career and views on Oumuamua through a very selective lens, cherry-picking moments where Loeb is arguably at his worst in debates with peers, and then claiming the entire scientific community rejects him outright. If you’re unfamiliar with Loeb’s actual claims, or why he holds them, you’ll probably buy it -- Dave is good at looking like he knows what he’s talking about. Hucksters usually are.
But if you know even a sliver about Avi Loeb before hitting play, the cracks in Dave’s argument show within the first five minutes. My exchange with him would still be up if he’d actually won, but I mopped the floor with him. He seemed so embarrassed by my comments that he didn’t know what to do -- faced with people reading, in real time, how I’d exposed him on the simple facts of comet prefixes (sorry Dave, they’re real), he couldn’t decide whether to delete my comments or leave them up in the hope someone might think I looked stupid. Funniest of all was when he told me to Google my information and apologize -- only for me to come back with countervailing evidence so specific to Oumuamua that it was impossible to refute. The specific “C” designation I mentioned in our conversation applies to anomalous comets that pass through the solar system only once -- which is exactly what Oumuamua did. It's right there on Google!
This problem isn’t unique to Dave Farina. I’ve subscribed to and regularly watched many prominent fragrance YouTubers over the past decade. Plenty of them are harmless personalities with respectful content, so skepticism is unnecessary. But many are young men in their early to mid-twenties who pontificate about fragrance “notes,” “longevity,” and “best seasons.” While you can take that with a grain of salt, you should also be wary of the context -- just as Dave’s viewers are misled by his juvenilely misinformed content, an endless diet of inexperienced reviewers spewing unfiltered opinions can misdirect an uncritical audience. Much of it is unintentional, but the effect can still be damaging.
I would extend my experiences with Dave and these unnamed fragrance YouTubers to pretty much any popular YouTuber. Take “Babish” (Andrew Rea), for example, who "reviews" everyday food items like Campbell’s Soup and extra virgin olive oil. In his EVOO video, he covers dozens of brands (with a few conspicuous omissions), and I settled in hoping to learn something. Within five minutes -- my standard metric for spotting nonsense -- it was obvious “Babish” doesn’t know a thing about olive oil, and worse, he’s teaching his ignorance. He tells viewers you shouldn’t cook with EVOO because its smoke point is too low (false), and jokes about not swallowing samples because he wants to “live longer than a week” -- implying, falsely, that EVOO is unhealthy.
He then spends most of the video swishing and spitting mouthfuls of oil, pre- and post-reviewing each sample with comments like, “And here we have another yellow olive oil that smells the same,” and, “Okay, that one tastes just like the last one -- these all taste the same.” Between awkward fits of giggles -- oddly effeminate for a grown man, and sometimes forced for effect -- he ends up ranking the oils like a blind man, conveying no useful information at all. For entertainment, fine. For actual education, worthless. He’d have done far better hiring an EVOO expert to taste and explain.
As I said at the start, we live in an online culture dominated by know-nothings with just enough talent and tech to keep their clickbait channels afloat. I don’t care what Dave Farina does with his channel -- this is America, and he can run it however he likes. But that doesn’t absolve him of the responsibility to tell his viewers the truth. Spreading falsehoods, edited and reframed to serve personal (and political) opinions against all available data, isn’t just irresponsible -- it’s damaging to everyone who buys into it. Think about how many viewers leave “Professor Dave Explains” believing he’s a real professor delivering researched facts. Think about the crap being spewed into the world.
Based on his Avi Loeb video, I’m left with one conclusion of my own -- entirely subjective, but worth stating: I think Dave Farina is the fraud. If he ever debated Avi Loeb face-to-face instead of sniping from the comfort of his living room, he’d be exposed as uninformed. And I suspect Google might think twice about letting his content pollute the public sphere.