Name: Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work
Uploaded: 2021-04-02T17:10:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-02. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience this is from 1964 what is it it's a FOIA risk
request made for the freedom of information freedom of information act
for the file of Barack Hussein Obama senior as a graduate student in the
economics department at Harvard University okay Obama has passed his
general exams which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay
around here and write his thesis however they are going to try to cook
something up to ease him out all three that is all three Harvard people will
have to agree on this however they are planning on telling him that they will
not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his
thesis at home which means he will never get his PhD remember when they said
take
a break to you this is my alma mater this is the thing I've been you know there's
this whole story about what happened in my early life and why I don't talk
about it
publicly and this is why this is interacting with your story about joke
thievery because it's weird for a comic not to turn that into a joke and it
wasn't funny to you in around I don't know 1988 1989 Harvard University told me
to
remain in good standing in this program you cannot live in Massachusetts why
and I
said what how can you tell me where I can live and where I can't live it wasn't
until somebody foied Barack Obama's father in his file and I read the story
that I
realized that Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to
get
rid of who are in good standing there's a move it makes them move so that they
can't complete their thesis why they want to do that with you probably because
I'm
as learning disabled as the day is long probably because I took a an unpopular
stance that the equations that people were working with called the Donaldson
theory self-dual equations were not the right equations to be working with and
that
we had somehow been assuming that they were highly peculiar to dimension four
and
that the difficulty of the equations which was what was giving us all these
great results I had effectively gotten on the wrong side I proposed some
equations that were I was told were insufficiently nonlinear never mind what
that means that in 1994 effectively the same equations took over the entire
field whatever it was and this is like part of the idea of reclaiming your own
story it was so crazy that a university would tell me what state I could live
in
can I stop you so the people that are telling you this yeah they're operating
on a pre-existing solution to deal with people that they find undesirable or
problematic you saw a foul of them right so it's written somewhere I don't know
or
it's you know it's like you people maintain for example one way of getting rid
of a
tenured professor that's known is is that you ask the person to report on their
research and you load them up with teaching and you give them a lousy office
and then eventually they'll just quit because you make their life hell so
people know that there are these kind of secret quiet ways to do the undoable
can
I ask you this what did you think about Cornell West being denied tenure from
Harvard first of all I thought I assumed yeah he already had it I mean Cornell
West
is this loved intellectual when when I found out they denied him tenure I was
like what the what how do you how do you deny Cornell West tenure like what is
that
what did you think about that I first of all am NOT knowledgeable in that area
I
think of him as a very bright superstar of some sort of part academic part
social
crossover high-impact human yeah I was there when Larry Summers was president
of
Harvard when he went out and said effectively too many people are using the
Harvard label and we're going to be reigning it in and going back to hard
rigor and basics let me tell you what people don't understand about Harvard
Harvard is two separate structures fused together one is about power and one is
about achievement and the two of them are interlinked in a way that cannot be
separated it without the achievement Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing
reputation that causes us to sort of ooh and ah over history right without the
power it wouldn't be able to attract the money and it wouldn't be able to
constantly position itself so through achievement it gets enough cache to wield
power through the power it gets the resources to buy achievement and this sort
of
thing is not understood and I've been in both sides of this thing like one of
the
things that happened was that the Boskin Commission in 1996 tried to figure out
how to cut Social Security and raise taxes without getting caught because
that's the third rail of politics and what they said is if we change the CPI
the
consumer price index the way we measure inflation because tax brackets are
indexed and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare are
indexed if we claim that Social Security sorry if we claim that inflation is
overstated by 1.1 percentage points we will gain a trillion dollars in savings
and
the public won't be able to object to it because we're going to be just
adjusting a dial we're going to say that this dial was broken and we got some
technocrats to fix it so they figured out we want to get a trillion dollars
over 10
years they backed out that would require 1.1% overstatement they broke into two
teams one team came up with 0.5 one team got came up with 0.6 0.5 plus 0.6
equals
1.1 totally fictitious they got a trip they got a proposal for a trillion
dollars that they were going to steal effectively from Social Security and they
describe this action publicly Robert Gordon who was one of the five Boskin
commissioners Jamie could you bring up something called Boskin wild versus mild
they brag about these things power wants to explain just how powerful it is and
you
remember the scene in the big short where they're talking to these guys in
Florida and saying why are they confessing and somebody says they're not
confessing they're bragging it's a question of what are you proud that you're
able to do all right so until Robert Gordon did this PowerPoint presentation we
did not have understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in
economics which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute
the
Consumer Price Index objectively using gauge theory the same year they were
trying to
figure out how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny
games with
the gauge called inflation do you find the wild versus the mild yeah I did it's
just loading a PDF and it's like taking it bailed so this thing perfect if you
go to
go about five or six slides in we'll see how that works okay
keep going you find the word is somehow keep going okay Dale said 1.1 percent
implies 1 trillion in
in other words they came up with the target which is let's save trillion
dollars and then they came up
with we have to say it's overstated by 1.1 we then broke into two groups and
somehow keyword we put the numbers
together and we got the target this is academic malpractice in the absolute
extreme when Harvard was doing that it was acting in its power capacity and the
way they did it was they buried what I think is probably the best work in 25 to
50 years in mathematical
economics that happened in the Harvard economics department which is a second
so called marginal revolution where we changed the calculus underneath all of
economic theory so how does something like this happen is there a concerted
effort did they get together and they they have this idea this is how we're
gonna do a five person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousins
house of somebody on the commission in Florida and in another presentation in
Florida Florida man
person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousin's house of
somebody on the Commission in Florida and in another presentation in Florida
Florida man in another presentation they say we solve this at the kitchen
table of my cousin's house in Florida and you're just thinking like okay so
it's five guys Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan a Democrat and
Republican
got together picked five economists who were willing to play the dirty game the
dirty game broke into two teams they knew exactly what they had to do they
found the results to put them together to put in front of Congress to put in
front
of the National Academy and then were they ever held accountable for no there's
an entire book called the physics of Wall Street in which my wife and I are
chapter 10 and the epilogue which it talks about they made Weinstein and Milani
go
away right so what I'm trying to talk to you about is like this this experience
for me I've never talked about this with anyone I've never I mean I've talked
to
tons of people privately this is gonna go out into the world I was you know you
know this question like what is Eric Weinstein ever done I did that I did the
marginal revolution is engaged that question is Tim Dillon joking around yeah
I know he said what did he never created the rotator he was that was very
joking he was fucking around that was the funny part about it he was joking but
he's saying that because he knows you're brilliant I understand the only reason
why you can say that if you're a loser Joe Joe he couldn't say you don't need
to
make me feel good about myself I know but you brought it up again no I'm
taking I'm saying something completely different okay okay I actually have been
scared of this question what question that Tim's question taken seriously
don't you take it seriously I'm taking it seriously okay no you're in a weird
world okay here's what here's your weird world you're in a world of serious
intellectual people you're damn straight you're also hanging out with Tim
Dylan and me and I love it but it's it's the problem is like you're you're
conflating these two Joe no it Joe I'm not that angry at Tim Dillon it's not I'm
not that angry do you hear that you heard the word you heard the word that
that's a problem you're not that angry at Carlos Mencia I'm not angry at him at
all I know and I'm not I feel I'm sad I'm sad for him Dylan anyway should be
sad for Tim wait wait wait wait he's one of the most important comedians of our
Tom okay how dare you how dare I I it took it gave me a moment to to reflect
and I
realized something which is I don't want to talk about this shit publicly I don't
want to say Dale Jorgensen is the guy who buried one of the most important
innovations in economic but yeah you just did I just did and that's what I just
done that's what I realized by reviewing your history and revealing your seven
years away from the store I don't want to be associated with Dale Jorgensen I
don't care about him I want to be associated with gauge theoretic economics I
see what you're saying and what I realized is I don't want to be
associated with the shit that happened over something called the cyborg Witten
equations what I just handed you one of the reasons I've held it back is that
it
very clearly gives an alternate definition that alternate motivation and
derivation of the equations that revolutionized gauge theory which is what
I was thinking about in around 1987 1988 and I've lived afraid of my own story
because it's such an ugly story the story of a guy who is not allowed to attend
his own thesis defense to any academician you hear it like what do you mean you
weren't allowed to you present your thesis no no no I was not allowed in the
room of my
own thesis so this is why Harvard wanted you to move out of state Harvard and I
got
into a thing because of that because of a conflict because also of this because
of
geometric unity because I said I want to do physics and I have an idea about
how
physics goes and to be brutally honest I was technically underpowered I am
technically underpowered I was conceptually amazing I was very creative very
generative tons and tons of
great ideas I think I'm being honest on both fronts technically underpowered
okay I couldn't accept
myself in this world of like you know if you play classical music everybody's
technically brilliant
there's no technically weak people in classical music I was like a guy it was
like it was like
John Lee Hooker in the orchestra of you know the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra
on one string and a guitar
playing with some weird syncopated rhythm boom boom boom boom boom gonna shoot
you right down yeah exactly
mom said let that daddy said let that boy boogie woogie it's in him and it's
got to come out that thing I'm scared of why scared because it's my history
because I don't want to go back into it I don't want to go back to being the
guy begging Dale Jorgensen oh pretty pleased with sugar and top let me innovate
your entire field I don't want to go back to the Harvard department and say the
words Clifford Taubes you had Gary Taubes on your program mm-hmm
Clifford Taubes was the guy who told me I had to move out of state
and I don't want to go back to the Harvard department and say the word Clifford
Taubes you had Gary Taubes on your program mm-hmm Clifford Taubes was the guy
who told me I had to move out of state I don't want to go back to the Harvard
department and say the words Clifford Taubes you had Gary Taubes on your
program mm-hmm Clifford Taubes was the guy who told me I had to move out of
state
Clifford Taubes is he related to Gary yeah he's his brother yeah he was the guy
who held the secret seminar and the thing is is that I'm not against the person
in the story I don't want to have it I don't want to be involved with him I
want him to go and be successful and have a good career but my story when I put
forward those equations and he said they're insufficiently nonlinear and he
said self-duality doesn't have anything to do with spinners because
if it did Nigel Hitchens would have told us okay Nigel would have told he didn't
say Hitchens he was wrong and then when I gave him the opportunity he didn't
say you know what Eric Weinstein brought these equations up and I told him no
and that thing is like something I've held open the door he's now in his mid-60s
I was like you really couldn't just say maybe I screwed up you should go kick
his ass no why I'm choking I know
well but wait a second Joe such a dick
such a dick I had to come on bring some levy into this I thought you were going
to cry 30 seconds ago do you have a tissue no somewhere that
that yeah it was over there but that's this is the thing I've been running what
I realized through Tim it wasn't a question of being angry at Tim really
I've been running away from my own story just the way I don't like you
associated with I haven't mentioned the guy who
was the joke thief in this entire time yeah I understand what you're saying
right it's like why are you and he
entangled in a story because he has nothing to do with your life it's okay it
doesn't bother me that I'm
entangled with him what bothers me that I'm entangled with this stuff um I know
what you're saying
because I want to be joyous I want to produce positive things that uplift us to
give us a hope
of breaking like the Einsteinian speed limit you know if this is wrong I want
to know I think it's
right I think with all my flaws and all my failings and being 25 years out of
the field I believe that
this story is going to be fixed by people who are trying to shoot it down they're
gonna say holy shit
I think there's something here well now we're gonna know right I think I'm
hoping you released
it today on geometric unity dot org and go to pull that up jamie.com and you
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Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work

the Joe Rogan experience this is from 1964 what is it it's a FOIA risk
request made for the freedom of information freedom of information act
for the file of Barack Hussein Obama senior as a graduate student in the
economics department at Harvard University okay Obama has passed his
general exams which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay
around here and write his thesis however they are going to try to cook
something up to ease him out all three that is all three Harvard people will
have to agree on this however they are planning on telling him that they will
not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his
thesis at home which means he will never get his PhD remember when they said
take
a break to you this is my alma mater this is the thing I've been you know there's
this whole story about what happened in my early life and why I don't talk
about it
publicly and this is why this is interacting with your story about joke
thievery because it's weird for a comic not to turn that into a joke and it
wasn't funny to you in around I don't know 1988 1989 Harvard University told me
to
remain in good standing in this program you cannot live in Massachusetts why
and I
said what how can you tell me where I can live and where I can't live it wasn't
until somebody foied Barack Obama's father in his file and I read the story
that I
realized that Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to
get
rid of who are in good standing there's a move it makes them move so that they
can't complete their thesis why they want to do that with you probably because
I'm
as learning disabled as the day is long probably because I took a an unpopular
stance that the equations that people were working with called the Donaldson
theory self-dual equations were not the right equations to be working with and
that
we had somehow been assuming that they were highly peculiar to dimension four
and
that the difficulty of the equations which was what was giving us all these
great results I had effectively gotten on the wrong side I proposed some
equations that were I was told were insufficiently nonlinear never mind what
that means that in 1994 effectively the same equations took over the entire
field whatever it was and this is like part of the idea of reclaiming your own
story it was so crazy that a university would tell me what state I could live
in
can I stop you so the people that are telling you this yeah they're operating
on a pre-existing solution to deal with people that they find undesirable or
problematic you saw a foul of them right so it's written somewhere I don't know
or
it's you know it's like you people maintain for example one way of getting rid
of a
tenured professor that's known is is that you ask the person to report on their
research and you load them up with teaching and you give them a lousy office
and then eventually they'll just quit because you make their life hell so
people know that there are these kind of secret quiet ways to do the undoable
can
I ask you this what did you think about Cornell West being denied tenure from
Harvard first of all I thought I assumed yeah he already had it I mean Cornell
West
is this loved intellectual when when I found out they denied him tenure I was
like what the what how do you how do you deny Cornell West tenure like what is
that
what did you think about that I first of all am NOT knowledgeable in that area
I
think of him as a very bright superstar of some sort of part academic part
social
crossover high-impact human yeah I was there when Larry Summers was president
of
Harvard when he went out and said effectively too many people are using the
Harvard label and we're going to be reigning it in and going back to hard
rigor and basics let me tell you what people don't understand about Harvard
Harvard is two separate structures fused together one is about power and one is
about achievement and the two of them are interlinked in a way that cannot be
separated it without the achievement Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing
reputation that causes us to sort of ooh and ah over history right without the
power it wouldn't be able to attract the money and it wouldn't be able to
constantly position itself so through achievement it gets enough cache to wield
power through the power it gets the resources to buy achievement and this sort
of
thing is not understood and I've been in both sides of this thing like one of
the
things that happened was that the Boskin Commission in 1996 tried to figure out
how to cut Social Security and raise taxes without getting caught because
that's the third rail of politics and what they said is if we change the CPI
the
consumer price index the way we measure inflation because tax brackets are
indexed and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare are
indexed if we claim that Social Security sorry if we claim that inflation is
overstated by 1.1 percentage points we will gain a trillion dollars in savings
and
the public won't be able to object to it because we're going to be just
adjusting a dial we're going to say that this dial was broken and we got some
technocrats to fix it so they figured out we want to get a trillion dollars
over 10
years they backed out that would require 1.1% overstatement they broke into two
teams one team came up with 0.5 one team got came up with 0.6 0.5 plus 0.6
equals
1.1 totally fictitious they got a trip they got a proposal for a trillion
dollars that they were going to steal effectively from Social Security and they
describe this action publicly Robert Gordon who was one of the five Boskin
commissioners Jamie could you bring up something called Boskin wild versus mild
they brag about these things power wants to explain just how powerful it is and
you
remember the scene in the big short where they're talking to these guys in
Florida and saying why are they confessing and somebody says they're not
confessing they're bragging it's a question of what are you proud that you're
able to do all right so until Robert Gordon did this PowerPoint presentation we
did not have understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in
economics which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute
the
Consumer Price Index objectively using gauge theory the same year they were
trying to
figure out how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny
games with
the gauge called inflation do you find the wild versus the mild yeah I did it's
just loading a PDF and it's like taking it bailed so this thing perfect if you
go to
go about five or six slides in we'll see how that works okay
keep going you find the word is somehow keep going okay Dale said 1.1 percent
implies 1 trillion in
in other words they came up with the target which is let's save trillion
dollars and then they came up
with we have to say it's overstated by 1.1 we then broke into two groups and
somehow keyword we put the numbers
together and we got the target this is academic malpractice in the absolute
extreme when Harvard was doing that it was acting in its power capacity and the
way they did it was they buried what I think is probably the best work in 25 to
50 years in mathematical
economics that happened in the Harvard economics department which is a second
so called marginal revolution where we changed the calculus underneath all of
economic theory so how does something like this happen is there a concerted
effort did they get together and they they have this idea this is how we're
gonna do a five person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousins
house of somebody on the commission in Florida and in another presentation in
Florida Florida man
person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousin's house of
somebody on the Commission in Florida and in another presentation in Florida
Florida man in another presentation they say we solve this at the kitchen
table of my cousin's house in Florida and you're just thinking like okay so
it's five guys Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan a Democrat and
Republican
got together picked five economists who were willing to play the dirty game the
dirty game broke into two teams they knew exactly what they had to do they
found the results to put them together to put in front of Congress to put in
front
of the National Academy and then were they ever held accountable for no there's
an entire book called the physics of Wall Street in which my wife and I are
chapter 10 and the epilogue which it talks about they made Weinstein and Milani
go
away right so what I'm trying to talk to you about is like this this experience
for me I've never talked about this with anyone I've never I mean I've talked
to
tons of people privately this is gonna go out into the world I was you know you
know this question like what is Eric Weinstein ever done I did that I did the
marginal revolution is engaged that question is Tim Dillon joking around yeah
I know he said what did he never created the rotator he was that was very
joking he was fucking around that was the funny part about it he was joking but
he's saying that because he knows you're brilliant I understand the only reason
why you can say that if you're a loser Joe Joe he couldn't say you don't need
to
make me feel good about myself I know but you brought it up again no I'm
taking I'm saying something completely different okay okay I actually have been
scared of this question what question that Tim's question taken seriously
don't you take it seriously I'm taking it seriously okay no you're in a weird
world okay here's what here's your weird world you're in a world of serious
intellectual people you're damn straight you're also hanging out with Tim
Dylan and me and I love it but it's it's the problem is like you're you're
conflating these two Joe no it Joe I'm not that angry at Tim Dillon it's not I'm
not that angry do you hear that you heard the word you heard the word that
that's a problem you're not that angry at Carlos Mencia I'm not angry at him at
all I know and I'm not I feel I'm sad I'm sad for him Dylan anyway should be
sad for Tim wait wait wait wait he's one of the most important comedians of our
Tom okay how dare you how dare I I it took it gave me a moment to to reflect
and I
realized something which is I don't want to talk about this shit publicly I don't
want to say Dale Jorgensen is the guy who buried one of the most important
innovations in economic but yeah you just did I just did and that's what I just
done that's what I realized by reviewing your history and revealing your seven
years away from the store I don't want to be associated with Dale Jorgensen I
don't care about him I want to be associated with gauge theoretic economics I
see what you're saying and what I realized is I don't want to be
associated with the shit that happened over something called the cyborg Witten
equations what I just handed you one of the reasons I've held it back is that
it
very clearly gives an alternate definition that alternate motivation and
derivation of the equations that revolutionized gauge theory which is what
I was thinking about in around 1987 1988 and I've lived afraid of my own story
because it's such an ugly story the story of a guy who is not allowed to attend
his own thesis defense to any academician you hear it like what do you mean you
weren't allowed to you present your thesis no no no I was not allowed in the
room of my
own thesis so this is why Harvard wanted you to move out of state Harvard and I
got
into a thing because of that because of a conflict because also of this because
of
geometric unity because I said I want to do physics and I have an idea about
how
physics goes and to be brutally honest I was technically underpowered I am
technically underpowered I was conceptually amazing I was very creative very
generative tons and tons of
great ideas I think I'm being honest on both fronts technically underpowered
