Take Back MIT | Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman

This idea of Disk Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, is that what's bringing the Elons of the world down?

You know, it's so funny. He's asking Joe Rogan, is that a joint? It's like, well, what will happen if I smoke it? What will happen to the stock price? 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 everybody's like, don't say that. Say this. Go do this. Go do that. Well, it's crazy making. It's absolutely crazy making. 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 one Elon? What if we were supposed to have thousands and thousands of Elons? And the weird thing is, this is all that remains. You're looking at Obi Wan and Yoda and it's like 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 to have Elon's five 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, how do we get more Elons? How do we change these? 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.

Right.

And how do you change.

Let's think of one that MIT sort of killed. Have any names in mind? Aaron Schwartz leaps to my mind. Yeah. Okay. 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. Okay, so here's my point. I want MIT to go back to being the home of Aaron Schwartz. And if you want to 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 not mit. 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 one of our people sit in that chair.

And the thing that you've articulated is that the people in those chairs. Chairs are not the way they are because they're evil or somehow morally compromised. Is that. It's just that that's the distributed nature. Is that there's some kind of aspect of the system.

These are people who wed themselves to the system. They adapt every instinct. And the fact is is that they're not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt.

Let me ask a silly question. Do you think institutions generally just tend to become that?

No. We get some of the institutions. We get Caltech. Here's what we're supposed to have. We're supposed to have Caltech. We're supposed to have Reed. We're supposed to have Deep Springs. We're supposed to have mit. 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 to reclaim mit? What's the future?

Are you kidding me? First of all, assume that this is being seen at mit. Hey, everybody is okay. Hey, everybody. Try to remember who you are. You're the guys who put the police car on top of the great dome. You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge. You created a Tetris game in the green building. Now what is your problem? They killed one of your own. You should make their life a living hell. You should be the ones who keep the memory of Aaron Schwartz alive. And all of those hackers and all of those mutants. 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. If Harold Edgerton was taking those photographs with Slo Mo back in the 40s, if Noam Chomsky is 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. That's on you guys.

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

No, it's the brave taking power from the feeble and the middle brow.

Yeah, but how do you. What is the mechanism to me?

I don't know. You. Do you have some nine volt batteries?

No.

Copper wire?

I tend to.

Do you have a capacitor?

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. And that's what forces change. So. As opposed to somehow.

Okay, so use projection mapping.

What's projection mapping?

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

Yeah.

Okay, so you want to do some graffiti art with.

You basically want to hack the system.

No, I'm saying. Look, listen to me, Lynn. We're smarter than they are, and they. You know what they say? They say things like, I think we need some geeks. Get me two PhDs.

Right.

You treat PhDs like that? That's a bad move. Because PhDs are capable. And we act like our job is to peel grapes for our betters.

Yeah, that's a strange thing. And you speak about it very eloquently. It's how we treat, basically the greatest minds in the world, which is, like, at their prime, which is PhD students. We pay them nothing.

I'm done with it. We got to take what's ours. So take back mit. Become ungovernable. Become ungovernable. 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 Polytechnic, I don't know, Lehigh. God damn it. What's wrong with you technical people? You act like you're a servant class.

It's unclear to me how you reclaim it, except with brilliance, like you said. But to me that the way you reclaim it with brilliance is to go outside the system.

Aaron Schwartz came from the Elon Musk class. What you guys gonna do about it, right? 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. Go be outdoor cats.

Do you think we're gonna see this kind of situation?

You were the one asking me before, what about the World War II generation? What I'm trying to say is that there's a technical revolt coming. You want to talk about.

I'm trying to lead it. I'm trying to see.

No, you're not trying to lead it.

I'm trying to get a blueprint here.

All right? Lex? Yeah. 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 four countries in Asia. It's not about the four countries in Asia. It's not about those kids. 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. And you know what? You didn't really build the family business. It's not yours to decide. You, the boomers, and you, the silent generation, you did your bit, but you also fouled a lot of stuff up. And you are custodians, you are caretakers. You were supposed to hand something. 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.

But I'm trying to understand how we create a better system without anger, without revolution, not. Not by kissing and hugs and, And. But by. I mean, I don't understand within MIT what the mechanism of building a better MIT is.

We're not going to pay Elsevier. Aaron Schwartz was right. JSTOR is. Is an abomination.

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 here is basically individuals that step up. I mean, one of the surprising things about Elon is that one person can inspire so much.

He's got academic freedom. It just comes from money.

I don't agree with that. You think money. Okay, so, yes, certainly.

Sorry. And testicles.

You've. Yes, but I think that testicles are more important than money.

Right.

Or guts. I. I think I. 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. In. In.

Horrible. Yes.

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

No, you need to give people security.

Security. Yes.

Like, you need to know that you have a job.

Yeah.

On Monday, when on Friday, you say, I'm not so sure. I really love diversity and inclusion. And somebody's like, wait, what? You didn't Love diversity. We had a statement on diversity and you wouldn't sign. Are you against the inclusion part or are you against diversity? 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. Get out of my lab. It all begins from the middle finger. Get out of my lab. The administrators need to find other work.

Yeah, 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.

I have no. I think prison is great. You get a lot of reading done and. 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 the mind 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 one 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 the leadership class is really the problem.

The leadership class is the problem.

The professors, the individual scholars.

Well, the professors are going to have to go back into training to remember how to be professors. People are cowards at the moment because if they're not cowards, they're unemployed.

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

But they don't. Nobody has tenure. Now.

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 they'd be gone. See, you're dreaming about the people who used to live at mit. You're dreaming about the previous inhabitants of your university. And if you looked at somebody like Isadore 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? Yeah. Now, 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 want to 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. Any sane person has no need for it. They have no want or desire.

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? Okay, so you're talking about a limit to patience. You're talking about, like, 36 years of modern nonsense in string theory.

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

I can do 40 minutes. This is 36.

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

No, but I appreciate. But it's 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. So my hope is that the system just has a few assholes in it, which you highlight. And the fundamentals of the system aren't broken. Because if the fundamentals of the systems are broken, then I just don't see a way for MIT to succeed. Like, I don't see how young people take over mit. I don't see how.

By inspiring us. 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.

Agreed.

Was he also a genius? Was he well spoken? Was he highly cultured? He was so talented, so intellectual that he could just make fart jokes morning, noon and night.

Yeah.

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. Well, don't tell me about it anymore. Go break the law. Go break the law in a way that inspires us and makes us not want to 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. And if the idea is that you're going to dig a moat around the university and fill it with tiger sharks, that's awesome because I don't know how you're going to do it, but if you actually manage to do that, I'm not going to prosecute you under reckless endangerment.

That's beautifully put. I hope those. First of all, they'll listen. I hope young people at MIT will take over in this, 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. Can you, can you go there? Can you tell?

I don't think so. I mean, I appreciate what you're saying. I said it obliquely. I said, enough. There are bad people who cross our paths and the current vogue is to say, oh, I'm a survivor, I'm a victim, I can do anything I want. This is a broken person 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. 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.

So you were sent back a second time.

I tried to complain about what had happened and I tried to do it in a way that did not immediately cause horrific consequences to both this person and myself, because I didn't. 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 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 Satan and we understand why 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 two appointments booked and you have to go for the second one. 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. I don't 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? Has that had to the rest of your life? The absurdity and the cruelty of that? I mean, there's no sense to it.

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 Fried, 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 are 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. And that issue had to do with the way in which growth left our system. So I think that the weird thing is, is that this first institutional betrayal by a therapist left me very open to the idea of, okay, well, maybe the schools are bad, maybe the hospitals are bad, maybe the drug companies are Bad. Maybe our food is off. Maybe our journalists are not serving journalist ends. And that was what allowed me to sort of go all the distance and say, huh, I wonder if our problem is that something is causing all of our sense making institutions to be off. That was the big insight. And tying that to a single etiology. What if it's just about growth? They were all built on growth. And now we've promoted people who are capable of keeping quiet that their institutions aren't working. So the privileged silent aristocracy, the people who can be counted upon, not to mention a fire when a raging fire is tearing through a building.

But nevertheless, how big of a psychological burden is that?

It's huge. It's terrible. It's crushing.

It's very comforting to be the parental. I mean, I don't know, I treasure. I mean, we were just talking about mit. I can intellectualize and agree with everything you're saying, but there's a comfort, a warm blanket of being within the institution.

Up until Aaron Schwartz, let's say in other words, now, if I look at the provost and the president as mommy and daddy. You did what to my big brother? You did what to our family? You sold us out. In which way? What secrets left for China. You hired which workforce. You did what to my wages. You took this portion of my grant for what purpose? You just stole my retirement through a fringe rate. What did you do?

But can you still. I mean, the thing is about this view you have is it often turns out to be sadly correct.

Was the thing.

And. But let me just in this silly hopeful thing. Do you still have hope in institutions? Can you within your. Psychologically, yes, I'm referring. Not intellectually, because you have to carry this burden. Can you still have a hope like within you when you sit home alone and as opposed to seeing the darkness within these institutions? Seeing a hope.

Well, but this is the thing I want to confront. Not for the purpose of a dust up. I believe, for example, if you've heard episode 19, that the best outcome is for Carol Greider to come forward, as we discussed in episode 19 with your.

Brother Brett Weinstein, and say, you know what?

I screwed up. He did call. He did suggest the experiment. I didn't understand that it was his theory that was producing it. Maybe I was slow to grasp it, but my bad. And I don't want to pay for this bad choice on my part, let's say for the rest of my career. I want to own up and I want to help make sure that we do what's right with what's left.

And that's one little case within the institution that you would like to see made.

I would like to see MIT very clearly come out and say, you know, Margot o' Toole was right when she said David Baltimore's lab here produced some stuff that was not reproducible with Teresa Minishikari's research. I want to see the courageous people. I would like to see the Aaron Schwartz wing of the Computer Science Department. Yeah, no, let's think about it. Wouldn't that be great if they said, you know, an injustice was done and we're going to right that wrong just as if this was Alan Turing.

Which I don't think they've righted that wrong.

Well, then let's have the Turing Schwarz wing.

They're starting a new college of computing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to call it the Turing Schwartz?

I would like to have the Madame Wu wing of the Physics Department, and I'd love to have the Emmy Nerder statue in front of the Math Department. I mean, like, you want to get excited about actual diversity and inclusion. Yeah. Well, let's go with our absolute best people who never got theirs because there is structural bigotry, you know, but if we don't actually start celebrating the beautiful stuff that we're capable of when we're handed heroes and we fumble them into the trash, what the hell? I mean, Lex, this is such nonsense. Just pulling our head out. You know, on everyone's cecum should be tattooed. If you can read this, you're too close.

Beautifully put. And I'm a dreamer, just like you. So I don't see as much of the darkness genetically or due to my life experience, but I do share the hope from it institution that we care a lot about.

You both do.

Yeah. And Harvard institution I don't give a damn about. But you do. So.

I love Harvard.

I'm just kidding.

I love Harvard, but Harvard and I have a very difficult relationship. And part of what? You know, when you love a family that isn't working, I don't want to trash. I didn't bring up the name of the president of MIT during the Aaron Schwartz period. It's not vengeance. I want the rot cleared out. I don't need to go after human beings.

Yeah. Just like you said with the disk formulation, the individual human beings don't necessarily carry the.

It's those chairs that are so powerful in which they sit.

It's the chairs, not the humans.

It's not the humans, Sam.