Eric Weinstein on The Power Structure of Harvard Burying His Work

the jurogan 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 unc 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 and 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 there's a move it makes them move so that they can't complete their thesis why they want to do that with you um 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 the 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 non-linear 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 if you fall of them right so it's written somewhere i don't know or you know it's like 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 f 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 um 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 uh over a history 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 um 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 trip 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 boscon commissioners um 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 to 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 do you find the wild versus the mild yeah i did it's just loading a pdf and it's like taking a bailed it's like so this thing perfect if you go to um uh go about five or six slides in we'll see how that works okay keep going five you'll find the word somehow keep going okay dale said 1.1 percent implies 1 trillion in social security savings over 10 years somehow our separate efforts came up with the 1.1 percent 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 they have this idea this is how we're going to five person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousin's house of somebody on the commission in florida and in another presentation lincoln florida florida man in another presentation they say we solve this at the kitchen table of my cousin's house in florida 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 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 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 going to go out into the world i was you know you know this question like what has eric weinstein ever done i did that i did the marginal revolution using engagement that question is tim dillon joking around yeah i know he said what did he never created the rotator he was very joking he was [ __ ] around that was the funny part about it he was joking but he's saying that because he knows you're brilliant you understand the only reason why you can say that if you were a loser he couldn't say 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 okay i actually have been scared of this question what question that qu tim's question taken seriously don't take it seriously i'm taking it seriously okay you're in a weird world okay here's 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 it's the problem is like you're you're completing these two things no 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 sad i'm sad for tim dillon anyway shouldn't be sad for tim wait wait wait wait wait he's one of the most important comedians of ours okay how dare you i it took it gave me a moment to rip to reflect and i realized something which is i don't want to talk about this [ __ ] publicly i don't want to say dale jorgensen is the guy who buried one of the most important innovations in economics but yeah you just did i just did and that's what i've just done that's what i 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 gage theoretic economics i see what you're saying and what i realized is i don't want to be associated with the [ __ ] that happened over something called the cyborg whitten 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 gage 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 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 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 boom gonna shoot your head down yeah exactly mom said let that daddy say let that boy boogie woogie it's in him and it's got to come out that thing i'm scared of why 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 on top let me innovate your entire field i don't want to go back to the harvard department and say the words clifford taubs you had gary tabbs on your program mm-hmm clifford tobbs was the guy who told me i had to move out of state clifford is a gary yeah 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 non-linear 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 choking i know [Laughter] i thought you were going to cry 30 seconds ago do you have a tissue no somewhere then that 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 him 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 them 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 and say holy [ __ ] i think there's something here well now we're going to know right i think i'm hoping you released it today on geometricunity.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 cost 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

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 1,379,031

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: l1jTUhwWJYA

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021