Full episode with Eric Weinstein (Apr 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE
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Eric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics.

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This idea of disk, right, distributed idea suppression complex.

Is that what's bringing the Elon's of the world down?

It's like he's asking Joe Rogan, like, is that a joint?

You know, it's like, well, what will happen if I smoke it?

What will happen if I scratch myself in public?

What will happen if I say what I think about Thailand or COVID or who knows what?

And if you think about what we put people through, we need to get people who can use FU money, the FU money they need to insulate themselves from all of the people who know better.

Because my nightmare is that, why did we only get 1 Elon?

What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elon?

And the weird thing is like, this is all that remains.

You're looking at like Obi-Wan and Yoda, and it's like, this is the only, this is all that's left after Order 66 has been executed.

And that's the thing that's really upsetting to me is we used we used to have Elon's 5 deep and Then we could talk about Elon in the context of his Cohort, but this is like if you were to see a giraffe in the Arctic with no trees around, you'd think, why the long neck, what a strange sight, you know?

So I think that you've, so we know MIT and Harvard.

So maybe returning to our previous conversation, my sense is that the Elons of the world are supposed to come from MIT and Harvard.

Let's think of 1 that MIT sort of killed.

Are we MIT supposed to shield the Aaron Schwartz's from, I don't know, journal publishers?

Or are we supposed to help the journal publishers so that we can throw 35 year sentences in his face or whatever it is that we did that depressed him.

I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz.

And if you wanna send Aaron Schwartz to a state where he's looking at 35 years in prison or something like that, you are my sworn enemy.

You are the traitorous, irresponsible, middle brow, pencil pushing, green eye shade fool that needs to not be in the seat at the presidency of MIT period, the end, get the fuck out of there and let 1 of our people sit in that chair.

And the thing that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs are not the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised, is that it's just that's the distributed nature.

Is that there's some kind of aspect of the system that's just These are

And the fact is is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.

Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?

We're supposed to have a part of Harvard.

And when the sharp elbow crowd comes after the sharp mind crowd, we're supposed to break those sharp elbows and say, don't come around here again.

So what are the weapons that the sharp minds are supposed to use in our modern day?

So to reclaim MIT, what is the, what's the future?

First of all, assume that this is being seen at MIT.

Hey everybody, try to remember who you are.

You're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dump.

You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge.

You created a Tetris game in the green building.

You should make their life a living hell.

You should be the ones who keep the mirror memory of Aaron Schwartz alive.

And all of those hackers and all of those mutants.

You know, it's like, it's either our place or it isn't.

And if we have to throw 12 more pianos off of the roof, right?

If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs with slow-mo back in the 40s, if Noam Chomsky's on your faculty, what the hell is wrong with you kids?

You are the most creative and insightful people and you can't figure out how to defend Aaron Schwartz?

So some of that is giving more power to the young, like you said, to the brave,

Taking power from the feeble and the middle brow.

I don't know, you have some 9 volt batteries?

I tend to believe you have to create an alternative and make the alternative so much better that it makes MIT obsolete unless they change.

Where you take some complicated edifice and you map all of its planes and then you actually project some unbelievable graphics, re-skinning a building, let's say at night.

Okay, so you wanna do some graffiti art with lights.

They say things like, I think we need some geeks.

You treat PhDs like that, that's a bad move.

And we act like our job is to peel grapes for our betters.

It's how we treat basically the greatest minds in the world, which is like at their prime, which is PhD students.

And by the way, when you become ungovernable, don't do it by throwing food.

Don't do it by pouring salt on the lawn like a jerk.

Do it through brilliance, because what you Caltech and MIT can do, and maybe Rensselaer Polytechnic or Worcester Polytech, I don't know, Lehigh, God damn it, what's wrong with you technical people?

It's unclear to me how you reclaim it, except with brilliance, like you said.

But to me, the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the system.

Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class.

The super capable people need to flex, need to be individual, they need to stop giving away all their power to a zeitgeist or a community or this or that.

You're not indoor cats, you're outdoor cats.

the 1 asking me before, like what about the World War II generation?

All I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming.

How angry are you about our country pretending that you and I can't actually do technical subjects so that they need an army of kids coming in from 4 countries in Asia.

It's about lying about us that we don't care enough about science and technology, that we're incapable of it.

As if we don't have Chinese and Russians and Koreans and Croatians, like we've got everybody here.

The only reason you're looking outside is that you want to hire cheap people from the family business because you don't want to pass the family business on.

You didn't really build the family business.

You the boomers and you the silent generation, you did your bit, but you also fouled a lot of stuff up and you're custodians.

What you did instead was to gorge yourself on cheap foreign labor, which you then held up as being much more brilliant than your own children, which was never true.

See, but I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger, without revolution.

Not by kissing and hugs, but by, I mean, I don't understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.

But why, who within MIT, who within institutions is going to do that when, just like you said, the people who are running the show are more senior.

I don't know, get Frank Wilczek to speak out.

So you're, it's basically individuals that step up.

I mean, 1 of the surprising things about Elon is that 1 person can inspire so much.

That you think money, okay, so yes, certainly.

You've, yes, but I think that testicles is more important than money.

I think, I do agree with you, you speak about this a lot, that because the money in the academic institutions has been so constrained that people are misbehaving in horrible ways.

But I don't think that if we reverse that and give a huge amount of money, people will all of a sudden behave well.

you have a job on Monday when on Friday you say, I'm not so sure I really love diversity and inclusion.

We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign?

Are you against the inclusion part or are you against diverse, do you just not like people like you?

Like actually that has nothing to do with anything.

You're making this into something that it isn't.

I don't want to sign your goddamn stupid statement and get out of my lab, right?

The administrators need to find other work.

Listen, I agree with you and I hope to seek your advice and wisdom as we change this because I'd love to see.

I will visit you in prison if that's what you're asking.

You get a lot of reading done and good working out.

Well, let me ask, something I brought up before is the Nietzsche quote of, beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster, for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

Are you worried that your focus on the flaws in the system that we've just been talking about has damaged your mind or the part of your mind that's able to see the beauty in the world in the system?

That because you have so sharply been able to see the flaws in the system, you can no longer step back and appreciate its beauty.

Look, I'm the 1 who's trying to get the institutions to save themselves by getting rid of their inhabitants but leaving the institution, like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class but leaves the structures.

So I- so the leadership class is really the problem.

But the individual, like the professors, the individual scholars.

Well, the professors are gonna have to go back into training to remember how to be professors.

Like people are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards, they're unemployed.

Yeah, that's 1 of the disappointing things I've encountered is to me tenure.

Whether they do or not, they certainly don't have the kind of character and fortitude that I was hoping to see to me.

But see, you're dreaming about the people who used to live

You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university.

And if you looked at somebody like, you know, Isidore Singer is very old.

I don't know what state he's in, but that guy was absolutely the real deal.

And if you look at Noam Chomsky, tell me that Noam Chomsky has been muzzled, right?

what I'm trying to get at is you're talking about younger energetic people, but those people, like when I say something like I'm against, I'm for inclusion and I'm for diversity, but I'm against diversity and inclusion TM, like the movement.

Well, I couldn't say that if I was a professor.

Oh my God, he's against our sacred document.

Okay, well, in that kind of a world, do you wanna know how many things I don't agree with you on?

Like we could go on for days and days and days, all of the nonsense that you've parroted inside of the institution.

Do you think you have to have some patience for nonsense when many people work together in a system.

How long has string theory gone on for and how long have I been patient?

You're talking about like 36 years of modern nonsense in string theory.

So you can do like 8 to 10 years, but not more.

Well, you've done that over 2 hours already.

been 36 years of nonsense since the anomaly cancellation in string theory.

It's like, What are you talking about about patience?

I mean, Lex, you're not even acting like yourself.

Well, you're trying to stay in the system.

I'm not sure, I'm not, I'm trying to see if perhaps, so my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it, which you highlight.

And the fundamentals of the system are broken.

Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed.

I don't see how young people take over MIT.

You know, the great part about being at MIT, like when you saw the genius in these pranks, the heart, the irreverence.

It's like, don't, we were talking about Tom Lehrer the last time.

Tom Lehrer was as naughty as the day is long, agreed?

He was so talented, so intellectual, that he could just make fart jokes morning, noon, and night.

Okay, well in part, the right to make fart jokes, the right to, for example, put a functioning phone booth that was ringing on top of the Great Dome at MIT has to do with we are such badasses that we can actually do this stuff.

Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not wanna prosecute you.

Break the law in a way that lets us know that you're calling us out on our bullshit, that you're filled with love, and that our technical talent has not gone to sleep, it's not incapable, you know?

And if the idea is that you're gonna dig a moat around the university and fill it with tiger sharks, that's awesome.

Because I don't know how you're gonna do it.

I'm not gonna prosecute you under a reckless endangerment.

I hope those, first of all, they'll listen.

I hope young people at MIT will take over in this kind of way.

In the introduction to your podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, you give to me a really moving story, but unfortunately for me, too brief, about your experience with a therapist and the lasting terror that permeated your mind.

There are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor.

And I don't know why I was sent to a broken person as a kid.

And to be honest with you, I also felt like in that story, I say that I was able to say no, you know, and this was like the entire weight of authority and he was misusing his position and I was also able to say no.

What I couldn't say no to was having him re-inflicted in my life.

All right, so you were sent back a second time.

I tried to complain about what had happened.

I tried to do it in a way that did not immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself, because we don't have the tools to deal with sexual misbehavior.

We have nuclear weapons, we don't have any way of saying, this is probably not a good place or a role for you at this moment as an authority figure and something needs to be worked on.

So in general, when we see somebody who is misbehaving in that way, our immediate instinct is to treat the person as, you know, Satan.

We don't want our children to be at risk.

Now I personally believe that I fell down on the job and did not call out the Jeffrey Epstein thing early enough because I was terrified of what Jeffrey Epstein represents.

And this recapitulated the old terror trying to tell the world this therapist is out of control.

And when I said that, the world responded by saying, well you have 2 appointments booked and you have to go for the second 1.

So I got re-inflicted into this office on this person who was now convinced that I was about to tear down his career and his reputation and might have been on the verge of suicide for all I know.

But he was very, very angry and he was furious with me that I had breached a sacred confidence of his office.

What kind of ripple effects does that have?

Well, see this is the thing people don't really grasp, I think.

There's an academic who I got to know many years ago named Jennifer Freud who has a theory of betrayal, which she calls institutional betrayal.

And her gambit is that when you were betrayed by an institution that is sort of like a fiduciary or a parental obligation to take care of you, that you find yourself in a far different situation with respect to trauma than if you were betrayed by somebody who's a peer.

And so I think that in my situation, I kind of repeat a particular dynamic with authority.

I come in not following all the rules, trying to do some things, not trying to do others, blah, blah, blah, and then I get into a weird relationship with authority.

And so I have more experience with what I would call institutional betrayal.

Now, the funny part about it is that when you don't have masks or PPE in a influenza-like pandemic and you're missing ICU beds and ventilators, that is ubiquitous institutional betrayal.

So I believe that in a weird way, I was very early, the idea of, and this is like the really hard concept, pervasive or otherwise universal institutional betrayal where all of the institutions, you can count on any hospital to not charge you properly for what their services are.

You can count on no pharmaceutical company to produce the drug that will be maximally beneficial to the people who take it.

You know that your financial professionals are not simply working in your best interest.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Take Back MIT | Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman