Take Back MIT: Eric Weinstein on Broken Institutions and the Scientists Who Should Reclaim Them

Weinstein opens with a thought experiment about what it is like to be constantly watched. Everyone around a public figure wants to know what will happen if he smokes a joint on a podcast, says what he thinks about a foreign country or a virus, or even scratches himself in public. The result, he says, is a flood of advice to say this and not that, which he calls "crazy-making".

His answer is that people need what he calls F-you money, enough independence to insulate themselves from the crowd of people who claim to know better. He finds it disturbing that there is only one Elon Musk. In his telling, the world should have had thousands, and what remains is like Obi-Wan and Yoda after Order 66, the last survivors of a much larger group.

He adds an image to make the point: a giraffe in the Arctic with no trees around would make you wonder why it has such a long neck. We used to have Musks "five deep", he says, so that Musk could be understood among his cohort rather than as a strange outlier.

Fridman suggests that the rules of the world are supposed to come out of places like MIT and Harvard, and asks how they could change. Weinstein reaches for the case of Aaron Swartz, the hacker who faced a possible 35-year sentence. Was MIT supposed to shield someone like Swartz from journal publishers, he asks, or to help the publishers?

He says he wants MIT to go back to being a home for people like Swartz. Anyone who helped send Swartz toward a possible 35 years in prison is, in his words, his sworn enemy and a "traitorous, irresponsible, middlebrow pencil-pusher" who should not hold the presidency of MIT. He wants one of "our people" in that chair instead.

Fridman reads Weinstein's argument as saying the people in those seats are not evil, just products of a system they have adapted to. Weinstein agrees and says such people are not going to be on Joe Rogan smoking a blunt. He then lists the kinds of schools that should defend the sharp-minded against the sharp-elbowed, among them Caltech, Reed, Deep Springs, MIT and a part of Harvard.

Weinstein addresses MIT students directly: they are the people who put a police car on top of the Great Dome and built a Tetris game on the side of a building. If one of their own was killed, he says, they should make life hard for those responsible and keep Swartz's memory alive.

Fridman asks what the mechanism for change actually is. His own instinct is to build an alternative that is so much better that the old institution must change or become irrelevant. Weinstein answers with a metaphor, projection mapping, in which you take a complicated building and cast spectacular graphics over its surface. He says the point is to be smarter than the administrators, who talk about hiring PhDs the way one might talk about peeling grapes for their betters.

Both men single out how PhD students, the best minds of their generation at their peak, are paid very little and treated as labor. Weinstein says to "take back MIT", and to do it through brilliance, not by throwing food or pouring salt on the lawn. He tells technical schools like Caltech, Rensselaer, Worcester Polytechnic and Lehigh to stop acting like a servant class.

He then turns to immigration and labor. He says he is not angry at the foreign students themselves but at the claim that Americans cannot do technical work, when the country has people of every background. In his view the older generations were caretakers who should have handed on the family business, and instead used cheap foreign labor to avoid doing that. He says a technical revolt is coming and that he is trying to lead it.

Fridman asks who within the institution would actually do this, given that the people running things are senior and cautious. He points out that Musk shows one person can inspire a lot of people. Weinstein says that freedom comes largely from money, but Fridman argues that guts and character matter at least as much, and that giving academics more money would not automatically make them behave well.

Weinstein agrees that people need security: a professor should be able to refuse to sign a diversity statement on Friday and still have a job on Monday. He says he is for diversity and inclusion but against the movement he calls "diversity and inclusion TM", which he says he could not criticize if he were a professor. For him it all begins with the "middle finger", the willingness to say get out of my lab.

Fridman raises the Nietzsche warning about gazing into the abyss and asks whether Weinstein's focus on flaws has made it hard to appreciate what works. Weinstein says he is trying to get institutions to save themselves, like a neutron bomb that removes the unworkable leadership class but leaves the buildings standing. He says professors will have to go back to remembering how to be professors, and he cites Isadore Singer and Noam Chomsky as examples of the real thing.

Fridman asks whether he needs patience for the nonsense in large systems. Weinstein replies that he has been patient for 36 years with what he calls the nonsense of string theory since its anomaly cancellation, and that he can do 40 minutes more of patience. Fridman says he worries that if the fundamentals of the system are broken, young people will find it hard to take it over.

Weinstein says that part of what makes MIT special is its irreverence. He cites Tom Lehrer and the phone booth that appeared ringing on top of the Great Dome. He asks students to "go break the law" in a way that shows love and technical talent, and promises he would not prosecute a prank as audacious as digging a moat around the university and filling it with tiger sharks.

Fridman then asks about a story Weinstein told in the introduction to his podcast episode on Jeffrey Epstein, about a therapist he saw as a child. Weinstein says he spoke about it obliquely and does not want to go further. He describes a broken person in a position of authority, and says he was able to say no to him but could not avoid being sent back for a second appointment.

He says we have no good tools for dealing with sexual misbehavior short of treating the person as Satan, which he understands given the risk to children. He believes he fell short by not calling out the Epstein matter earlier because it recapitulated that old terror.

Weinstein then draws on a theory by the academic Jennifer Freyd, called institutional betrayal. It holds that being betrayed by an institution with a parental or fiduciary duty to you is a different kind of trauma than being betrayed by a peer. He says the experience left him open to asking whether schools, hospitals, drug companies, food and journalists were all failing, which led him to ask what could be making all our sense-making institutions go wrong at once. His answer is that they were all built on growth, and we have promoted people who can be relied on not to mention the fire.

Fridman admits there is comfort in being inside an institution, and Weinstein answers that if you see the provost and the president as mommy and daddy, then the question becomes what they did to the family: whom they hired, what they took from wages and grants, what they sold out. Fridman asks him whether he still has hope. Weinstein says the best outcome would be for people like the scientist Carol Greider to come forward, own a mistake and help do right by what is left.

He wants MIT to say clearly that Margot O'Toole was right about irreproducible results in David Baltimore's lab. He would like to see an Aaron Swartz wing of the computer science department, as if an injustice were being righted, the way he says Alan Turing's has not been. Fridman suggests a Turing-Swartz wing in a new college of computing.

Weinstein adds ideas of his own: a Chien-Shiung Wu wing of the physics department and an Emmy Noether statue in front of the math department. If you want real diversity and inclusion, he says, celebrate the best people who never got their due. Fridman closes by saying he shares the hope for MIT, and Weinstein says he does not want revenge, only to clear out the rot, because it is the chairs and not the humans in them that are the problem.