Eric Weinstein: Genius Is Sitting in the Wrong Chair

After the ads, Lex Fridman asks a ridiculous question on purpose: who is the greatest musician of all time. Eric Weinstein, on his third visit to the show, answers with Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers. Richman’s line, as Weinstein remembers it, is that you have to be prepared to play when the instruments are broken, the electricity is out, and it is raining. The point is not taste. It is how far you can peel a performance back and still have something that is intrinsically musical.

They have been talking off-camera about Eddie Van Halen, who had just died. Weinstein was never a fan of the band as a band. He revered the guitarist’s capacity for discontinuous innovation, the way he reveres the skateboarder Rodney Mullen, and he had posted *Spanish Fly* rather than *Eruption*. *Eruption* is the Southern California eruption most people heard first: whammy bar, Frankenstrat, distortion, a whole electrified apparatus. *Spanish Fly* is acoustic. The arpeggios on a single string are so fast they smear, and the hammer-on attacks, Weinstein says, go at light speed. Strip the electronics and the musicianship is still there.

Weinstein has a three-port theory of what a performance can grab: head, heart, and loins. Very few things integrate all three at once. Van Halen’s head was the classical harmony smuggled into rock, the sense that the medium might be as extensible as Jimi Hendrix thought it was. The heart was the smile, sometimes with a cigarette dripping off the lip, which Weinstein finds almost painful to watch now. The loins were the stage itself: skin-tight pants, athleticism, a mythical alpha who was also a mischievous little boy. Put those together and millions of teenage boys playing air guitar were not being stupid. They were looking at a picture of what a human being might be.

The acoustic track also changed how Fridman imagined the man. He had only ever pictured Van Halen in front of thousands of people, lights everywhere. *Spanish Fly* made him see someone sitting alone on a couch, a supermodel walking past, completely uninterested, in a relationship with the guitar instead. Weinstein is almost sure you cannot get where Van Halen got without being a complete introvert. He will grant that Van Halen, Hendrix, Paganini, and Heifetz jacked into something real. He will not grant that it is as good as differential geometry. Thank God, he adds, because differential geometry does not scale as a way for human beings to talk to each other.

Fridman asks what Leonard Cohen’s *Hallelujah* means to him. Weinstein starts with mystery, then with two chords. A major chord and its relative minor share two notes and differ by one. One is typically heard as more joyous, the other as sadder. Cohen opens by alternating them, which means the smallest possible harmonic change, the distance between joy and sadness as it is encoded in us, is already happening in the accompaniment before anyone has been told a story.

Then the lyric does something rude. “I heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord. But you don’t really care for music, do you?” Weinstein hears bathos: the sublime yanked down into the guttural, with bitterness in it. The way the song speaks to him, Cohen does not believe the audience. Of course they care for music. They are too cool to admit it. He sees through them, and the energy is *screw you*. A great song, Weinstein grants, allows other readings. This is his.

The next trick is that the words describe the chord progression in real time. “It goes like this” lands on the tonic; then Cohen hits the fourth and the fifth, the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony. Other writers play related games. Cole Porter, if it is Porter, lets “how strange the change from major to minor” name what the harmony is doing. Johnny Cash’s *Ring of Fire* is a head fake: the lyric goes down, down, down while the melody goes up. Nina Simone’s *Feeling Good* is the unreliable narrator. Birds, sun, a voice that claims she feels it, over music Weinstein hears as funereal, oppressive, a strip-club beer. Ray Charles’s *Lonely Avenue*, by contrast, is honest about the depression. Musicians play these games, he says, and the rest of us only notice them subliminally.

The baffled king composing is the thesis of the song. Some music is invented; this kind is discovered. Cohen has the audacity to compose as David, and he is baffled because he knows he is uncovering something rather than making it. Weinstein’s image is a brush on sand: you uncover a pyramid and briefly think you created it. Underneath sit two perfect intellectual systems. One is the wave equation, usually solved for a one-dimensional medium, a string or an air column. The other is the almost-miracle that two to the 19/12ths is nearly three, which gave us even temperament. Both are perfect. They are not compatible. That tension, he says, is one of the most beautiful stories inside the system, and it is why the king is baffled.

Listeners had asked about depression and suicide. Fridman says it is a Russian program, so they have to go there, and Cohen is the wound. The man wrote some of the most beautiful songs in the language and suffered anyway. Weinstein will not collapse that into a slogan. Suicide and self-harm are umbrella categories: brain chemistry, an event, evolutionary programming, religion. The commonality is that someone is harmed. The causes are not one thing, and the subject is treated, he says, with the same clumsiness as other taboo clusters.

He can name happy warriors who took on the pain of the planet and kept their humor: Pete Seeger at his college, Odetta in concert. He can also name the other pattern, Cohen and Anthony Bourdain, generative people who still went dark. You cannot say genius and madness always travel together. You cannot say beauty and pain are one and the same. What you can say is that there is a cluster of people for whom, in that cluster, darkness and beauty are related. Part of the reason, he thinks, is the work of squaring circles that cannot be squared.

That returns him to the two perfect systems. Once you realize there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection, you recognize that there is no solution to this world. Fridman finds the thought strange coming from poets and musicians, then remembers *Spanish Fly* and the man on the couch. The same incompatibility that makes a song inexhaustible can, in a certain kind of mind, make ordinary cheerfulness feel like a lie.

Weinstein retells a story from darkest Manhattan. A friend had given him a terrible spinet. It fell out of tune, and the only tuner he knew was a Russian whose attitude he hated. His wife told him to get it done anyway. The man arrived, insulted the instrument, and started work. Then the landline rang. Weinstein had set the ringer to Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. The tuner immediately heard the key, which was not the key in which Liszt had written the variations, and launched into the theme and variations at a level Weinstein had never heard. The phone stopped. There was an awkward silence. Weinstein said he had not known the man was such a great piano player. The answer, in Russian-accented English, went through the heart: no, you are the piano player. I am merely the piano tuner.

Fridman hears *Good Will Hunting* in it. Weinstein’s mind goes to Matt Damon as a young man risking everything and giving up Harvard, and to the idea that the most accomplished people may be the ones who walk away from the credential on purpose. He thinks also of Robin Williams, whom he saw in Los Angeles comedy clubs as a straight-up crazy, dysregulated genius in tremendous pain, later trying to be earnest through acting rather than only sniping. In that case, he agrees, madness and genius were neighbors. Williams would react to random stimulus, almost wanting a heckler to play against. Toward the end of his life the sadness was visible in the silences, a bird with a broken wing still trying to fly. He would have made one hell of a podcast.

Weinstein thinks the country is in a terrifying, depressing time, and that almost everyone’s explanation of it is wrong. The United States looked like the greatest thing in the world, in large measure, because it never had to make a plan for low growth. Imagine a billion slightly different Earths. A lot of what was discovered from the 1800s through the end of the twentieth century would be found in a similar window on many of them, because once instruments got better you could see more, and once you could see more you could use what you saw: germs, electron orbitals, the electromagnetic spectrum. A good chunk of American history overlapped that bonanza, so of course the country looked like a genius.

His car analogy is blunt. You can save a lot of money selling a vehicle with no seatbelts, airbags, or rearview mirrors. That, he says, is the machine they had. As long as growth was insanely good, they plowed the spoils back in, made more genius stuff, and carried along hundreds of millions of people. They did not have a plan for what happens when growth goes below the stall speed of the society. The usual argument about “low-hanging fruit” misses the orchard. People say they believe in the infinite inventiveness of the human mind, and then they sit in the same grove fighting about whether the last apple has been picked. Weinstein’s claim is that there is probably a lot more low-hanging fruit, and it is not here. It is in other orchards, some of which still have to be planted. The digital orchard, at least, has not been stagnant the way the chemical orchard has.

Fridman is roaming one of those orchards: robots in everybody’s homes, a new way of living. How many such people does it take? Weinstein says it takes one, then immediately describes the ant that finds a new food source and comes home to be told it was not authorized, that the attempt is privilege, and that it should get off Twitter. Hedge funds, for a while, hoovered talent because they had funding and freedom; smart people want to get lost in their minds and not think about feeding themselves. Fairness and safety matter, he says, but a singular focus on them without growth, discovery, and creation in the same breath will doom us. We spend our time dividing the pie that is, instead of the pie that will be. Divide the thirteenth-century pie carefully enough and you never get a twentieth.

They disagree about whether the playgrounds still exist. Fridman walks the halls of MIT and still sees, in individual eyes, a glow that has nothing to do with career, little pockets from which genius can emerge. Weinstein has watched the change. He liked his old mind better. Relentless focus on critical theory, fairness, and social justice is, he thinks, making many people worse, and even the remaining capable people, Elon Musk, Craig Venter, Jim Watson, Steve Jobs, take a volume of fire that would stop anyone who does not have a stomach for derision. A lot of genius, he adds, lives in people, many of them women, who will not push an idea if it means ten years of being mocked. Some dumb men will. That is not a moral compliment. It is a loss function.

Fridman believes technology can help fight trolls, and that a better Twitter can be built, one that incentivizes people to discover and practice the better angels of their nature. Weinstein does not. You can always improve what we have, he says, but he does not think it converges on something that really works, because the problem is not Twitter. The problem is us. His disturbing realization is that academics and trolls have very similar behaviors. Academia is, in large measure, a trolling community.

He recommends *Maximum City*, a book about Bombay in which the author talks to contract killers. Everyone, the killers say, pleads for their life and mentions the two kids at home. Never say that to a contract killer: they have terrible relationships with their parents. There is a minus sign in front of the statement you thought was universally human. You do not know how people are wired. Some wiring is so different from Fridman’s that he will never guess why he cannot reach them, or how much pleasure they may take in the pain, or whether they have gone past a point of no return.

Fridman will not give the point away. Weinstein is a smart man using his intuition to make a hypothesis; he does not know this for sure. Weinstein agrees that he does not know. He has a different hypothesis: even in the darkest human beings there is a good person who could be discovered. That is one reason he loves doing Fridman’s show. The Russian character, as he sees it in his host, is total cynicism and total idealism locked together. They leave the disagreement standing. It is one of two they will not resolve before the microphones go off.

Weinstein tells Fridman he is in the wrong chair. Joe Biden, as Weinstein tells it, was a twenty-nine-year-old with nothing particular going for him. Weinstein knows people as impressive at that age sitting twelve rows back. A huge number of them, none of his own age, can get where Biden got. If you found Eddie Van Halen repairing guitars in a shop, you would be angry, even if the man loved repairing guitars. That was the point of the piano-tuner story. Weinstein sees it in Russian doctors working as technicians. There is a huge amount of talent in the world that is not sitting in its proper seat. His feeling, by this point, is that they have to take the seats, maybe not to sit in them themselves, but to put a smart Gen Z person there and tell them not to chant.

Fridman wants to believe that platforms, long-form conversation, a better Twitter, better journalism, could even redeem the current leaders by letting them search for the real ideas they had before the system made them fake. Weinstein looks for unifying explanations instead of treating every crisis as a separate wildfire. The graph that speaks to him has years on the x-axis and average age on the y-axis. The title is any desirable situation involving institutions: CEO, tenured professor, who gets grants, who wins Nobel Prizes, university presidents. For a long time the average age of the person in those seats has been increasing, something like nine months for every twelve.

Those graphs have to come down at some point. Instead, the last five people in the presidential contest were all born in the 1940s. Not one, not two, five. A silent-generation candidate in a Florida town hall takes a question from a Gen Z kid about the future and has the audacity to say he is a transitional president. When, Weinstein asks, has any generation in history needed a transitional seventy-eight-year-old to take office? It is bizarre. It is preposterous. That graph is the graph they cannot talk about, because a one-line cry of ageism muddles the conversation, and you always have to ask who wins as a result of the muddle.

He thinks every society needs break-glass-in-case-of-emergency people, universally loved and trusted. David Attenborough coming onto Instagram about the planet is the sort of figure he means. He asks Fridman for five American names. Fridman offers Elon Musk, Dwayne Johnson, Joe Rogan. Weinstein says they fail the test because they are too divisive, and because a lot of people treat Rogan as a right-wing racist without having watched the show. The times Weinstein has seen a crowd actually move were a Rolling Stones concert and Nelson Mandela on the banks of the Charles River in Boston. Those are the people you need in dark hours. As soon as they emerge, he says, we get out the shit brush. Fridman disagrees. He thinks the speeches matter more than the saint.

Fridman asks why *The Portal* has gone quiet for a month and a half, in the most difficult of times, when listeners draw meaning from it. Weinstein’s first answer is that everyone assumes everyone wants to be famous. He does not love being as well known as he has become. The perks are real: a tweet and twenty thoughtful people show up for a drink in any city. The fame will turn on you in a heartbeat. He does not want his audience to remain “the audience.” He wants to get closer to them. He wants the status without the fame, the money without being seen as in it for the money, a business that is openly a business so people stop smelling a grift. He has not solved those issues.

In front of the election he sees an incredibly violent period in online life. Anyone who says both parties are completely screwed is heard, from inside the two-party system, as subtracting votes from Biden or scuttling Trump. He does not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that is how he will ultimately vote. He does not believe in the Biden Democratic Party or the Trump Republican Party. The image he wants is the Crips, the Bloods, and the Latin Kings fighting over the right to extort a business, while the business tries to figure out who it wants doing the extorting.

His intuition, the one that has kept him mouthing off since the 1980s, is that this is a dangerous time for smart people to spend their dry powder. One outcome might be better than the other; the variance on that judgment is high enough that he is not even positive he is right. Both options are completely inappropriate to 2020. What is needed, he says, is the opposite of more boomers and silent-generation people trying to sort out a highly technical world mediated through social media: more exclusion, actual elites rather than the people called elites, excellence, competence, people who can be trusted behind closed doors, and doors that actually close. Fridman thinks an army of listeners is stronger than the New York Times. Weinstein says he has relatives who will believe one article over him, and that ruin can come to anyone in three or four moves. Brett Weinstein’s Unity 2020 project being suspended on Twitter is the exhibit. Jack Dorsey, whom both men still want to believe in, cannot be reconciled with the Jack who oversaw that.

He will not pledge, as Fridman half-does, to disgorge himself of money. Money is freedom, “a big honking pile of freedom.” You can use it to build a prison and walk in and lock the door, and the number of wealthy people who do not say a few true things is the number who chose that prison. Keep enough to do the beautiful things other people are counting on you to do. Do not make the pledge on a podcast. Single Lex, he says, should not listen to present Lex on this point.

Fridman wants to celebrate Roger Penrose, who had just shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Weinstein did not know the other two winners before they won. Penrose he puts in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang: the highest achievement of the human mind. There is a couplet he likes. Edward Witten was the first physicist to win a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics; Penrose is, in some sense, a mathematician who has now won the Nobel. Einstein solved most of the important problems in general relativity at the beginning, which impoverished Einstein’s children. Bohr and Planck did not do as clean a job with quantum theory, so there was more to pick. Penrose came up a difficult path.

The personal hook is a diagram. In a paper of Hermann Gluck’s at the University of Pennsylvania, a teenage Weinstein saw his first sketch of the Hopf fibration and it flipped his mind; he later brought the picture onto Joe Rogan’s program to recapitulate that wonder. Penrose is visual, geometric, sui generis. He has lots of bets, and none of them, Weinstein says, had really come through the way you would hope. So the committee, he thinks, stretched the rules. It was not clearly a prediction-plus-discovery in the typical fashion. They needed to give the award to somebody of that caliber so the prize stayed funded with prestige. Penrose was getting on in years, and the person should be alive. They could not have bent the rules for a better person. He hopes they will bend them out of strength, not weakness, in future.

The reason anyone cares about the Nobel, he has said on Twitter, is not Alfred Nobel. The prize came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrödinger, Feynman. People of that class give value to the prize; the prize does not always return the favor. It focuses the world and distorts it at the same time. The omissions are a blot: Chien-Shiung Wu, Emmy Noether, George Sudarshan, George Zweig, Freeman Dyson. Weinstein takes a dim view of pushing prizes for ethnicity or gender to make the list look inclusive if the work does not lead. He is equally clear that in a few cases the work did lead and the committee failed. Try to get through a day as a physicist without Noether’s theorem, or imagine a universe without Wu’s demonstration that left and right are not symmetric.

Dilution bothers him as much as omission. Dirac and Schrödinger, he believes, were given the prize in the same year with no need to share. Weinberg, Feynman, and Schwinger did not need to dilute one another either. His theory is that the field does not want to create luminaries who could defend it from budget cuts and worldly pressures. Superstars should be acknowledged, not sanded down. Bend the rules, if you bend them, to keep the prize charged with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Penroses, Einsteins, and Diracs.

Fridman has not talked with Weinstein about Jeffrey Epstein before. Everyone at MIT, he says, is quiet. Was the man evil, or was the system evil, or is evil too strong a word? The presence of this person destroyed reputations, weakened the institution, and made people unable to say anything interesting or difficult. Weinstein says something horrible happened and he does not know what it is. The first thing he wants to get rid of is what he calls the woke talk about power differentials. Attractiveness, competence, and power are mixed up in adult life in ways he does not want to adjudicate. Consenting adults are one subject. Adults and minors, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, are another: really sick depravity, if the story is what it appears to be.

He thinks Epstein was doing several different jobs at once, and that the public conversation cannot pull them apart. One was money, encouragement, and support for scientists. One was tax advice to very rich people. One was linking wealthy people with young adult females. Another, he thinks, was doing things with children that will curl your toes. The woke layer, as he describes it, treats a forty-three-year-old billionaire partying with a twenty-three-year-old as if it were the same discussion as twelve- and fourteen-year-olds, and that conflation is why the conversation cannot move. He does not think MIT was deep into pedophilia. His guess is that the scientists were not the targets of the sickest material. His further guess is that what you are looking at was a government construct, whose government he does not claim to know.

Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, sits in the story as a scientific publisher whose missing fortune Weinstein would like to run down against Epstein’s mysterious one. He does not believe Epstein ever ran a hedge fund, or was the money adviser people claimed. Fridman wants the heroic action, the 1930s-Germany question: what do you do at MIT that is not virtue signaling. Weinstein says he is not being heard. Map the silence. Map it in Washington, the Bay Area, New York. The number of dogs that do not bark should be telling you everything. Fridman hears disappointing weakness in people he thought were heroes, not a conspiracy. Weinstein tells him he is so afraid of the word that he will not call a conspiracy a conspiracy.

The 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai is the concrete picture he wants. Something like twenty-six people on multiple teams converged from around the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players and vacationers, and killed a man in a hotel room. Dubai’s security chief put the closed-circuit record together as a video. After COINTELPRO, Operation Paperclip, and Operation Mockingbird, Weinstein says, not believing in conspiracies is idiocy. If evil wants to operate at scale, it must not want to be investigated. The most efficient investment is a world in which no one can afford to say the word. There is a special radioactivity around it. Provable conspiracies, admitted conspiracies, mundane price-fixing cartels, all exist. The one-liner “he is a conspiracy theorist” takes you off the board. Responsible conspiracy theorizing would use the same rules you use for any other topic. Americans, he thinks, are too timid even to learn the history of the ones already proven, including the 1971 break-in that unearthed a conspiracy inside the FBI.

The MIT problem, as Weinstein tells it, is that Epstein showed up as the only person capable of continuing a U.S. scientific tradition. That tradition was combative, free, and rich, and it researched the way a rich society researches. Then came the 1970s, William Proxmire, and the Golden Fleece Awards: the idea that scientists were welfare queens in lab coats, that there must be more transparency and oversight. The national culture of American science, the thing that had produced prosperity, security, and power, was lost. A tiny number of funders still offered a modicum of risk-taking: Fred Kavli, Yuri Milner, Peter Thiel to an extent, Howard Hughes with a different grant structure than the NIH. When a charismatic billionaire said here is a hundred thousand dollars, go research something crazy, people who wanted to take risks said yes.

That money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the endless-frontier compact among government, universities, and taxpayers. The government welched. Universities became psychopathic: everyone still remembered what it would mean to be moral, but there was not enough money to be moral, so they treated each other as a source of protein. Epstein said come to my world, we can do it like we used to. Almost none of Fridman’s MIT colleagues, Weinstein claims, have the religious commitment to science that would go down with the ship. The Galileo story matters because occasionally you have to say there is not enough money in the world to buy the legacy you want to leave the planet. Science, he says, is one of the things worth dying for. He is not eager to martyr himself. He has already destroyed himself economically over it.

Fridman, citing the turtle master in *Kung Fu Panda*, asks what battle is worth fighting. Weinstein has one: the Moses thing. It is time to leave the planet. The world has just been introduced to the problem of a virus; wait until fusion devices, and understand what it means to have one interconnected planet with no uncorrelated experiments anywhere else. Everyone who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming should work on the plan he or she thinks best. Elon Musk wants rockets. “Eric says I don’t think that’s a smart plan” is a mishearing. Regular Eric says all people who have hope should do that thing. It may not work. It may look silly. That is exactly the kind of fight worth fighting, the same reason he went on Brett’s Unity 2020 effort when he did not think it had a hope in hell. Do the things that make you feel dumb and childish and that possibly have a chance.

His own bet is geometric, and he is trying to figure out when to release more of it. A video has hundreds of thousands of views and a strange reaction: physicists with Ph.D.s who do not speak the language of manifolds, bundles, and curvature. He had not realized how local his Cambridge, Massachusetts, dialect was. He is waiting, in part, for the boomers in charge to get weaker, and he does not know that theoretical physics will exist after them. Feynman, in a story Weinstein loves, was asked the greatest thing that ever happened in math and said Tartaglia’s solution of the cubic, because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound that the ancients had failed to do. That is orchard logic. It opens a psychology that says maybe things are possible again. Van Halen started a revolution and Roy Buchanan did not, because you could follow tapping. Once there is a principle, percussive guitar has a next step.

Asked what he is grateful for today, he names small things. His wife, Pia. Their health. Friday night Shabbat dinner, saying grace. The bottle of water on the table, placed there because somebody cared. He still has strength for the fight, and he cannot believe he is not more beaten down. Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing. He and Pia fought over geometry and economics like the first half of a buddy movie, cats and dogs, sexual tension you could cut with a knife, and then they came up with geometric marginalism, an intellectual tango, one of the most romantic periods of his life. Earnestness trades at a discount because it is easy to make fun of. His motto, as they close in disagreement, is long heroism, short martyrdom, and he tries to remember the second half. Fridman leaves him with Cohen: maybe there is a God above, but it is a cold and broken hallelujah.