The Collapse Of Harvard, Truth & Independent Thought (4K) - Eric Weinstein - #747

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Weinstein. He's a mathematician, economist, former managing director at Thiel Capital, and a podcaster. It's a rough time to be a human. The massive increase in information we have access to has made understanding the world harder, not easier. Whether it's higher education, culture, physics, or pretty much anything else, life can be very confusing. Expect to learn what Eric thinks about the most recent furor coming out of Harvard, why the world of physics has made no progress in decades, why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in Stephen Hawking, how much truth there is in the recent flurry of stories about interdimensional extraterrestrials, Eric's predictions for the 2024 election, and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and the next couple of weeks have some absolute huge guests coming on. You don't want to miss these, so the only way you can ensure you won't is by hitting subscribe, so navigate to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else and press the button for me. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eric Weinstein. You got your PhD from Harvard. How do you feel, given the most recent fallout?

**Eric Weinstein** (1:33)
These open questions are incredible.
It's amazing. It's amazing that it came to this. And as a person I know studying at Harvard said, I wonder if we are the last generation who will continue to see Harvard as this shining city on a hill. And that's somebody who's there now. I think it's a disgrace and we can't talk about it, which is the fascinating part that we are effectively losing our society because we're afraid to say certain things because we're being made afraid to say certain things.

**Chris Williamson** (2:20)
What do you mean?

**Eric Weinstein** (2:22)
Well, okay, so as a Harvard alum, you get the Harvard magazine and this thing is incredible because it's just always Harvard people promoting other Harvard people in this sort of PR.

**Chris Williamson** (2:36)
The nepotism magazine.

**Eric Weinstein** (2:38)
Yeah. And I think I remember that the article introducing Claudine Gay was entitled A Scholar's Scholar. And I knew from the get-go that this was not going to go well.
Because I don't think people understand what Harvard is and how it functions and why it's different. Harvard is really the fusion of two separate institutions. One is about brilliance and one is about power. And so you can think about this as the sharpest minds and the sharpest elbows. And the sharp mind crowd gets tons of resources because the sharp elbow crowd makes sure that power is used to perpetuate Harvard's place of privilege. And the sharp mind crowd contributes prestige to the sharp elbow crowd. And so by virtue of the fact that you can't deconflate the sharp minds and the sharp elbows, Harvard continues to have this very special place. Now, what is this special place? Why isn't it just a university like any other? I think sort of two or three principle reasons. One of which is that Harvard is sort of an extension of the US government. The government department, which is sort of Harvard's version of Poli Sci, is kind of an extension of the state department at times. The economics department ends up setting economic policy in many ways for the United States. And above all, there is this concept that in every field, there's usually one institution that sets the narrative. So for example, in journalism, the New York Times is different than all other newspapers, and news organs, because of its focus on what we sometimes hear of as narrative-driven journalism. Now, people now talk a lot more about narrative, but 15 years ago, I don't think this was common knowledge, that the editorial room at the New York Times is a place where people thought about what the long arcs of stories were. And you figured out what the arc of the story was before the facts came in. So for example, Hillary Is Inevitable was a long arc in narrative-driven journalism. It wasn't true, but all the information that came in when Hillary was running against Donald Trump was fed through this prism of the inevitability of Hillary Clinton. In the same way Harvard practices narrative-driven academics, it tells you what is happening, what the grand arcs are, and those, just like the 2016 election, are very often untrue. So that's a way in which Harvard serves power. It brings people in who are brilliant, and then it takes the ones of those who are willing to play ball with the engines of power, and it enters into the storytelling mode in which Harvard sets the tone for everyone. So when you lose Harvard, it's very important and very different. The last thing that I would say that really distinguishes Harvard is that Harvard, there's the open part of Harvard, the classrooms, and there's the closed part of Harvard that you can't see at all. And it's sort of a system of star chambers.