Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work

This is from 1964. What is it? It's a FOIA request made for the Freedom of Information Act for the file of Barack Hussein Obama Sr. as a graduate student in the Economics Department at Harvard University. 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 have been, you know, there is 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 theory 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 foyed Barack Obama's father in his file and I read this 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. It makes them move. It makes them move so that they can't complete their thesis. Why did they want to do that with you? Probably because I'm as learning disabled as the day is long, probably because I took 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 the university would tell me what state I could live in. Can I stop you there? The people that are telling you this, they're operating on a pre-existing solution to deal with people that they find undesirable or problematic. If you fall afoul of them. So it's written somewhere? I don't know. It's like people maintain, for example, one way of getting rid of a tenured professor that's known 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 there are these kind of secret quiet ways to do the undoable. Can I ask you this? What did you think about Cornel West being denied tenure from Harvard? First of all, I thought, I assumed he already had it. I mean, Cornel West is this loved intellectual. When I found out they denied him tenure, I was like, what the f- what? How do you deny Cornel West tenure? 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 being. 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 reining 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. Without the achievement, Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing reputation that causes us to sort of ooh and aah over it historically. 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 cachet 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 on 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 percent overstatement. They broke into two teams. One team came up with 0.5. One team came up with 0.6. 0.5 plus 0.6 equals 1.1. Totally fictitious. They got a proposal for a trillion dollars that they were going to steal effectively from Social Security. And they described 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. Your 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? 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, it's just like a PDF. It's like taking it. So this thing, perfect. If you go to about five or six slides in. We'll see how that works. Okay. Keep going. Find the word somehow. Keep going. Okay. Okay. Dale said 1.1% implies 1 trillion in silver social security savings over 10 years. Somehow our separate efforts came up with the 1.1% bias number. 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 practice 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 have this idea? This is how we're going to do it. There's a five person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousin's house of somebody on the commission in Florida. And in another presentation- Talk 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, 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 were they ever held accountable for this? 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 Malani go away. So what I'm trying to talk to you about is like 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 going to go out into the world. I was, you know, this question like, what has Eric Weinstein ever done? I did that. I did the marginal revolution using gauge theory. No, no, no. That question is Tim Dillon joking around. Yeah, I know. He said, what did he, he never created the rotado. He was just 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 love him too. Do you understand the only reason why he can say that? If you were a loser, he couldn't say that. Joe, Joe, Joe, you don't need to make me feel good about myself. I know, but you brought it up again. No, I'm saying something completely different. Okay. I actually have been scared of this question. What question? Tim's question taken seriously. Who's going to take it seriously? I'm taking it seriously. Okay. No, no, no. You're in a weird world. Okay. 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 Dillon and me. And I love it. But it's, the problem is like you're conflating these two things. Joe, no. Joe, I'm not that angry at Tim Dillon. 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. I feel sad. I'm sad for him. I'm sad for Tim Dillon. Anyway. Should be sad for Tim. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He's one of the most important comedians of our time. How dare you. How dare I. It took, it gave me a moment to reflect. 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 yet 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, theoretical 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 cyberg-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, 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 was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense to any academician. You hear it like, what do you mean you weren't allowed to 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. 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. I couldn't accept myself in this world of like, 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 John Lee Hooker in the orchestra of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra on one string in a guitar playing with some weird syncopated rhythm. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Going to shoot you right down. Yeah, exactly. Mom said, let that, daddy said, let that boy boogie, it's in him and it's got to come out. That thing I'm scared of. Why are you scared of it? 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 Tabs. You had Gary Tabs on your program. Clifford Tabs was the guy who told me I had to move out of state. Is he related to Gary? Yes, he's a 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 us. 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 joking. I know. Well, but wait a second, Joe. Such a dick. Such a dick. I had to. Oh, man. Bring some levity into this. I thought you were going to cry 30 seconds ago. Do you have a tissue? No. Somewhere. That's right. Yeah, I was over there. But 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. That's 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? I know what you're saying. Because I want to be joyous. I want to produce positive things that uplift us, that give us a hope of breaking the Einsteinian speed limit. 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 there and say, holy shit. I think there's something here. Well, now we're going to know, right? I think I'm hoping. I'm going to release it today on Geometric unity.org and go to pull that up, Jamie.com and you can watch all the videos that we didn't show you. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.