Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers? with Eric Weinstein | Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game they barely see? What if the most important ideas are the ones you’re not allowed to hear about? From Crick and Watson to nuclear bombs and AI, today we’ll cover it all with physicist, mathematician, and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.
Original Air Date: February 23, 2026
Transcript
00:00:00
David Eagleman: Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great scientists? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game that they barely see? What if the most important ideas are the ones you’re not allowed to hear about? From universities to public health, to Watson and Crick, and nuclear bombs, and AI, today we’re gonna cover it all with physicist and mathematician and iconoclast Eric Weinstein. So get ready for a great brain stretch. [instrumental music] Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I’m a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand how we see the world, and as we’ll discuss today, we don’t always see what we believe we’re seeing. [instrumental music] We usually think of science as a calm enterprise that’s cumulative. You have thousands of people testing hypotheses, you have vast amounts of data getting gathered, and knowledge slowly accretes. But underneath that veneer, sometimes things can be a little more turbulent because what happens sometimes is that scientific discoveries can quickly reshape economies, and alter what nations can do to each other, and redraw political boundaries, and redirect the future long before most of us even notice. In other words, ideas that begin on a chalkboard can end up steering history. But we very rarely pause to ask whether the way science is organized today is matched to the power it now holds. Who decides which questions get asked or which lines of inquiry get funded? How much of scientific progress depends on conformity, and how much of it depends on rule breakers who are willing to look crazy before they are proven right? These questions sit at the intersection of labs and nations, and they matter more than ever in a world where any single discovery could reverberate globally. My guest today is someone who’s spent years thinking about science from that high altitude. Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, a physicist, and a public intellectual who is unusually thoughtful about the architecture of knowledge, like how ideas are filtered by the system and how originality survives or fails inside universities. Eric hosts a podcast called The Portal, and he has a reputation for asking questions that make people uncomfortable and for refusing to treat existing structures as inevitable just because they are familiar. Today, Eric and I are going to talk about how discovery really happens, who it serves, and what might be required if we want science to live up to its highest ideals in the decades ahead. Here is my conversation with Eric Weinstein. [instrumental music] So Eric, Jim Watson recently passed away, and I know that you were close with him and you really admired him. Tell me about that.
00:03:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, I spent time with Jim, and for the time that we were together, uh, it was very intense. But J- Jim is in many ways my spirit animal, and, uh, one of the things that’s really important is to recognize who Jim was as a scientist, who he was as a writer, and to relegate everything else that he was to a tertiary status that, uh, shouldn’t distract us from the miracle that was Jim.
00:04:12
David Eagleman: Give me an example of that.
00:04:13
Eric Weinstein: What’s happened is that people who are not close to science have set up a memetic complex which Jim Watson auto- autocompletes somehow to a bunch of things that are much less relevant, so you know.
00:04:29
David Eagleman: Can you unpack that?
00:04:30
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Imagine that you knew Archimedes personally, and Archimedes had some sort of, like, personal hygiene problem. He didn’t brush, you know? Okay.
00:04:39
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:04:40
Eric Weinstein: So you imagine that everybody in Archimedes’ time would be, “Oh, the breath on Archimedes was so terrible.” And you’re like, “But that’s Archimedes.”
00:04:48
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:04:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, it’s important to recognize that that was Jim Watson. Jim Watson was a blinding figure of science, world science, American science in particular, and he autocompletes to some stuff that is far less relevant and, and salient. And so it’s important to me that, uh, we discuss Jim Watson and not be captured by when we happen to be having the conversation because this is a ten-thousand-year… A- as long as there are humans, and as long as there will be life as we know it, Jim Watson will be one of the most important people who ever lived.
00:05:23
David Eagleman: And when you say autocompletes, you mean in people’s heads, they think Jim Watson, and then they think XYZ after that?
00:05:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, well, well, yes, but again, we’re falling into the trap. So let’s briefly go into the trap and then only to emer– like, it’s a pitcher plant. Let’s go into the pitcher plant, help ourselves to a couple of deep gulps, and then get the hell out. Okay?
00:05:40
David Eagleman: Great. [laughs]
00:05:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so Jim Watson autocompletes right now to Rosalind Franklin.
00:05:44
David Eagleman: Ah.
00:05:45
Eric Weinstein: And if you w- if you ask me, if you care about Rosalind Franklin, you should be caring about Erwin Chargaff. Nobody talks about Chargaff. Chargaff-
00:05:52
David Eagleman: Quick interruption. So, so Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA, published that in April of 1953, and they ended up winning the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for that work. People then came out and said, look, Rosalind Franklin had taken the first- … photographs of, of the structure and didn’t recognize what it was, the double helix structure, but should have gotten credit. That’s what we’re referring to here. Just so everybody-
00:06:18
Eric Weinstein: Not really.
00:06:19
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:06:20
Eric Weinstein: R- Rosalind Franklin, uh, had taken, done the X-ray c- crystallography on nucleic acid and had this famous Maltese cross, which Watson and, uh, and Crick took to mean that, uh, the structure of nucleic acid was likely to be helical. Not d- double helical, but just helical. They were under suspicion by their colleagues of not knowing anything, of being so enamored of Linus Pauling’s great achievement in the h- discovery of the alpha helix, which ended up as the secondary structure of protein, that they were trying to copy Pauling and to shove nucleic acid into a form that it, there was no reason to think that it had to be that. And so the part of the re- the part of the problem of this story is that Rosalind Franklin was absolutely correct. There was no reason that DNA had to be helical. That’s good science. It’s very good science, and it’s a- an absolute cautionary tale why you can’t let good scientists run science.
00:07:22
David Eagleman: Ah, because you’re making a distinction between good scientists and great scientists.
00:07:27
Eric Weinstein: 100%.
00:07:27
David Eagleman: Okay. I see.
00:07:28
Eric Weinstein: Jim W- Jim Watson, in my opinion, was not a good scientist.
00:07:31
David Eagleman: He was a great scientist.
00:07:32
Eric Weinstein: He was a great scientist, and there, it’s not that you take good science and turn it up to 11 to get great science. It’s a different process.
00:07:40
David Eagleman: Okay, and you think of this as cowboy sci- is that what, is that correct? Do you call it cowboy science?
00:07:44
Eric Weinstein: Yippee ki-yay.
00:07:45
David Eagleman: [laughs] Okay, so, so, uh, let’s unpack that. So yeah, what does cowboy science look like? And actually, let’s continue this story in that context.
00:07:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, you see, Jim and Francis were, were searching a much smaller landscape because they were convinced that it was going to be helical.
00:08:04
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:08:04
Eric Weinstein: So they didn’t have to think about all the possible… Like, if you ever spend time with the protein data bank, my God, does nature get up to some fun architecture.
00:08:13
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:08:14
Eric Weinstein: Really.
00:08:14
David Eagleman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:08:14
Eric Weinstein: I mean, just unbelievably beautiful things. And they didn’t think it was going to be any of those things. So Jim and Francis were, in part, uh, not reasonable people, and they made a point of telling everybody that if you weren’t working on nucleic acid, you were an idiot, that they didn’t have time to go to seminars that were mere distractions. This is the difference between good science and great science.
00:08:39
David Eagleman: Exactly.
00:08:39
Eric Weinstein: What we’re doing is we’re driving great science out of academics and out of research so that we have this proliferation of good science, people that don’t do this, people who are not a walking HR nightmare.
00:08:53
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:08:53
Eric Weinstein: Which is a catastrophic decision.
00:08:55
David Eagleman: So just before we get to that, just for the audience, I want to mention, so Eric knew Jim Watson. I, as a postdoc, worked with Francis Crick. Neither of us knew the other one, but we both got to spend time with these two giants of-
00:09:09
Eric Weinstein: My God
00:09:10
David Eagleman: … of biology. Yeah. Okay. So, so you’re categorizing that as great scientists as opposed to good scientists. So what’s the problem that you see in academia in terms of support, o- of good science and not great science?
00:09:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, you need both. You absolutely need both, and one of the, one of the tasks for people in the great science model is not to crap all over their good science colleagues. And in fact, Jim was extremely kind, in my experience, to Rosalind Franklin, and I discussed her at great length, and he didn’t prettify the story. And-
00:09:48
David Eagleman: By which you mean making it prettier?
00:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, he was an ass.
00:09:52
David Eagleman: He met your daughter and wife, right?
00:09:54
Eric Weinstein: And he behaved abysmally towards them, but then he behaved in a very kind fashion as well.
00:10:00
David Eagleman: Like what?
00:10:02
Eric Weinstein: My daughter asked him a question, if, as I recall, in a crowded room at, I don’t know, age 12 or 13, about the origin of the organelles or, or how did mitochondria end up in the eukaryotic cell. Was it a, an infection? And he looked at her and he said, you know, this, this Nobel laureate, 88, f- world famous, like, “Oh, I don’t have any interest in that.”
00:10:28
David Eagleman: [laughs] Oh God.
00:10:29
Eric Weinstein: It’s like [laughs], you know, it reminds me of Miles Davis, uh, talking to a three-year-old kid who was seeking his, uh, uh, autograph, and I think that his famous line was something like, he looks up expecting to see an adult. He turns around, he sees this tiny kid tugging at his, uh, pant leg. He looks down and says, “Fuck off, kid.”
00:10:47
David Eagleman: Oh God. [laughs]
00:10:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Right? But then Jim came back, uh, you know, at some point and, uh, he said, “Which one is your wife?” And I said, “The economist who mopped the floor with you intellectually at dinner last night.”
00:11:04
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:11:05
Eric Weinstein: He said, “Oh, she’s very good.”
00:11:06
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:11:08
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause he, he was completely dismissive, uh, of her being female and all these things. And he said, “You want to know why your children are so intelligent?” I said, “Excuse me?” [laughs] He said, “Well, your daughter is obviously very intelligent, as is your son,” because he knew both of them. So even though he was cruel, he thought very highly of her. I said, “What, what, why do you think?” He said, “Well, you can’t just do it with one set of genes. You should thank your wife.”
00:11:31
David Eagleman: [laughs] That’s lovely.
00:11:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, but he was a misogynist.
00:11:37
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:11:39
Eric Weinstein: But women loved him. But he was very kind a- a- and active in promoting female careers. Like, you don’t understand the complexity of this particular guy. Was he a horse’s ass? He was. And I’m not, I’m not saying that’s great. I got a chance to tell him to shut up multiple times.
00:12:00
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:12:00
Eric Weinstein: And he took it. But you had to back it up. You know, you can’t just mumble something about racism or sexism because DNA and its implications are absolutely profound, and most of us haven’t wrestled with- And I, and I also believe that Jim came from a place of kindness and goodness that isn’t recognized.
00:12:17
David Eagleman: Is there anything that we can learn from the story of Rosalind Franklin and Jim Watson that allows us to do better science?
00:12:25
Eric Weinstein: I think so. I mean, I think that, um, recognizing that there are these different styles of science and that we need all of these styles of science, uh, would be very helpful, and that in general, I don’t think a Jim Watson would want to drive a Rosalind Franklin out of science at all. But the problem is, is that there is absolutely no place for this cowboy science within the standard framework. So if you look, for example, at the interactions with Chargaff, Chargaff is absolutely merciless to Watson and Crick. He calls them two pitchmen in search of a helix.
00:13:00
David Eagleman: Okay, wait, hold on. So first, tell us who Chargaff is and tell us what a pitchman is. I don’t know that term.
00:13:05
Eric Weinstein: So Erwin Chargaff is a Columbia professor. I believe that he came probably from Vienna. I think he spoke five languages, maybe English was his fifth. He wrote one of the most amazing books in the history of biology called Heraclitean Fire, which nobody’s read.
00:13:19
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:13:21
Eric Weinstein: And in it he tells the story of figuring out that the equimolar relations, where he figured out that the amount of the nucleotides was exactly paired when you chopped up whatever the nucleic acid was. So we had this– We had a f-
00:13:36
David Eagleman: Meaning, meaning you have the same amount of A’s and T’s, and the same amount of C’s and G’s.
00:13:40
Eric Weinstein: C’s and G’s, right.
00:13:41
David Eagleman: That was his discovery.
00:13:42
Eric Weinstein: That’s right.
00:13:42
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:13:42
Eric Weinstein: And so but there was no explanation for it, so it was what we would call a fine-tuning mystery. Now, isn’t it interesting that-
00:13:48
David Eagleman: What is a fine-tuning mystery?
00:13:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, that’s… Usually we, we encounter it in, um, in physics. Like is the universe finely tuned for life? If the proton were a little bit less heavy or a little bit more heavy, it wouldn’t work, and how is the curvature exactly? Everything is just so, right? And usually what there is is there’s an explanation, in this case, like the hydrogen bonds which enforce the pairing. It wasn’t an accident. And of course, people always– somebody will always say, “Maybe it’s a coincidence.” You can’t conclude that, right? So-
00:14:17
David Eagleman: Right.
00:14:19
Eric Weinstein: So what Watson and Crick did is they took that information of Chargaff, and Chargaff, I believe, came up with a Möbius band theory of, uh, nucleic acid, and he said if he’d only been able to work with a Rosalind Franklin, he would have gotten it. And Jim, to his credit, said, “If Rosalind Franklin had simply spent one day decamping from her adamancy that we didn’t have enough information to say it was a helix,” he said, “she would have gotten it in an afternoon.”
00:14:45
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:14:45
Eric Weinstein: An amazing claim that Rosalind Franklin would have gotten the double helix in an afternoon but for her insistence on being a good scientist.
00:14:54
David Eagleman: I see.
00:14:55
Eric Weinstein: And so you have to understand that the, what Jim was willing to acknowledge about Rosalind Franklin was in many ways incredibly complimentary. But, um, Chargaff writes very clearly that a, that these pitchmen, he means… You know, think about Silicon Valley, where you know, “Pitch me, bro.”
00:15:13
David Eagleman: Oh, okay.
00:15:13
Eric Weinstein: That he, he saw them as a couple of ne’er-do-wells. They didn’t know any biochemistry.
00:15:19
David Eagleman: [laughs]
00:15:19
Eric Weinstein: That’s what he says. He says they don’t know any bi… And, and, you know, after they get the double helix, he writes, “You can tell how late in the day it is in biology that such pygmies would throw such long shadows.” You have to understand that this… You and I, I mean, you knew Francis. I didn’t. I– and to be blunt, I think Francis was the more intellectually deep of the two. And I told you before that even though I thought Francis was smarter, I thought Jim was far more important. And they represented two halves of great science, and Jim was that brash… I think he was taken into the University of Chicago at age fifteen, so shout-out to the University of Chicago. Get, let’s get back to taking twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, and fourteen-year-olds into our universities. And the University of Chicago in particular is probably our top university with every other one falling off of some cliff, for God’s sakes. We don’t know why. That brashness that Jim had and that eccentricity that Francis had were essential in Chargaff’s… Chargaff, oh, I wish I could read. It just, he, he writes so beautifully. But he talks about the fact, he said the idea that the, the odds that two geniuses would fall into his o-orbit knowing nothing of biochemistry and solve this problem was so vanishingly small that it didn’t even warrant consideration.
00:16:52
David Eagleman: Wow.
00:16:53
Eric Weinstein: Wow. This is why peer review doesn’t work, right? So in, in large measure, the history of DNA and the history of the genetic code, uh, again discovered by someone outside the fabled RNA tie club. So all the top people were assembled to crack the genetic code, and the guy who was outside of it named Marshall Nirenberg was the one who cracks it ten years later in sixty-three. This is the greatest story of recent years, that you and I are within the living memory of Watson and Crick, and by the way, that book, The Double Helix. You know, great, great literature begins with things like, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or, “In the beginning,” or some memorable, “Call me Ishmael.” Watson began and ended that book-
00:17:40
David Eagleman: Saying he’s never seen Francis Crick in a humble mood.
00:17:42
Eric Weinstein: Modest mood.
00:17:43
David Eagleman: Modest mood, right.
00:17:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:17:45
David Eagleman: Yes.
00:17:45
Eric Weinstein: Perhaps he is with others, [laughs] but he’s not so with me or whatever it is. Oh my God, can that guy write.
00:17:50
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:17:50
Eric Weinstein: I mean, that was literature, man.
00:17:52
David Eagleman: Yeah. Agreed.
00:17:53
Eric Weinstein: So anyway, I just, I love Jim unapologetically. And I’m well aware of the total, of the total nature of the man, and I’m not gonna sweep any of that under the rug. And by the way, I don’t think we stripped him of his official titles at Cold Spring Harbor until two thousand and seven. And I don’t think we stripped him of his honorary titles until 2019 or something like that.
00:18:19
David Eagleman: Mm.
00:18:19
Eric Weinstein: And that, my friends, was the American system that we could be proud of, that a complete horse’s ass like Jim Watson would be kept within the system of our institutions and celebrated and not be seen as a walking HR problem waiting to happen.
00:18:39
David Eagleman: I mean, he was seen as that walking HR problem.
00:18:41
Eric Weinstein: He was-
00:18:42
David Eagleman: But not kicked out
00:18:43
Eric Weinstein: … a walking HR problem waiting to happen. He was that 12 times a day.
00:18:47
David Eagleman: Yeah. Exactly.
00:18:48
Eric Weinstein: But my point is we didn’t throw him out until very late in the game when we were determined to lose our mojo.
00:18:55
David Eagleman: Ah, interesting. Okay, and so coming back to this idea of cowboy science-
00:19:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm
00:19:00
David Eagleman: … it’s the Crick and Watsons, it’s the Nuremberg, it’s the w- ways of, of coming in from the outside and proposing something.
00:19:09
Eric Weinstein: Breaking the rules.
00:19:10
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:19:11
Eric Weinstein: It’s, it’s based on the middle finger. It’s based on being true to science and telling the national security complex, the national interest complex, your department, your funder to sit down and shut up.
00:19:27
David Eagleman: And by the way, we, we, you and I have talked about peer review before, but, um, y- one thing we know is that when Crick and Watson came up with this structure and they said, “Hey, we think it’s a double helix,” where the As and Ts and Cs and Gs are bonding to each other, they sent the typed manuscript over to Nature. Crick’s wife drew the, the double helix picture. They-
00:19:46
Eric Weinstein: Which is a gorgeous picture, by the way.
00:19:47
David Eagleman: Gorgeous picture. Uh, ’cause he was terrible at drawing and she was really, uh, uh-
00:19:51
Eric Weinstein: This is Odile?
00:19:51
David Eagleman: Odile, exactly.
00:19:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:19:52
David Eagleman: She was a good artist. Anyway, they sent it over to Nature, which, um, Crick told me at the time was a man and two boys, and they, you know-
00:20:01
Eric Weinstein: The editor
00:20:01
David Eagleman: … mailed the manuscript over, yeah, the editor, and, and, uh, and it got published. There was no peer review at the time.
00:20:07
Eric Weinstein: There was no peer review until 1965 to ’75. Th- this is a fabricated story, largely due to Merton, that was backfitted and retconned into outside reviewing and outside refereeing, which occurred, being turned into peer review. Um, but basically it’s a fabricated story of the history of science.
00:20:29
David Eagleman: Sorry, you’re saying the fabricated story is that peer review was introduced at some point, and then it was claimed that it was older than that?
00:20:36
Eric Weinstein: The s- the story is, uh, is that peer review begins with the founding of The Royal Society, and it’s been with science ever since.
00:20:43
David Eagleman: Ah.
00:20:43
Eric Weinstein: Which is not-
00:20:43
David Eagleman: But you’re saying that’s not true.
00:20:44
Eric Weinstein: No, it’s, it’s, it’s untrue, and the willingness of the academy to lie about that, boldfacedly lie about this.
00:20:53
David Eagleman: It might be ignorance, right?
00:20:54
Eric Weinstein: No, it’s not.
00:20:55
David Eagleman: Oh.
00:20:55
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause you-
00:20:55
David Eagleman: Well, it depends who you mean by the academy. H- had you asked me before you told me about peer review, I would have-
00:21:01
Eric Weinstein: But if I showed you-
00:21:02
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:21:03
Eric Weinstein: … the history of peer review, right? The, the academy wants to say that outside refereeing is peer review, and it isn’t. The double helix is a great example of something, I believe that in Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation, it could be sourced elsewhere, the claim was that Watson and Crick couldn’t be peer reviewed because there was too much information in the one-page paper. They, you know, as you know, they had a fight as to whether to write something very complete or something very incomplete, and you will notice that, uh, there’s a phrase, “It has not escaped our notice that…” You know this?
00:21:40
David Eagleman: Yes, yes.
00:21:41
Eric Weinstein: Yes. So more or less, that was a 20-page paper, “It has not escaped our notice that…”
00:21:45
David Eagleman: Right. Uh, by the way, for the audience, it’s they were saying it is, uh, given this double helical structure, it has not escaped our notice that, you know, you could unzip this and duplicate it this way, where each strand of the DNA then gets the complementary nucleotides on it, and you can do this amazing thing that way. Right. They just mention it in one line.
00:22:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, this… Have you been to The Eagle pub?
00:22:05
David Eagleman: I have not.
00:22:06
Eric Weinstein: You have to go.
00:22:06
David Eagleman: Oh, I’d love to. Uh, again, for the audience, this is where Crick and Watson burst into The Eagle pub. Was it The Eagle and Child or The E- whatever.
00:22:14
Eric Weinstein: I think it’s just The Eagle, isn’t it?
00:22:15
David Eagleman: Oh, maybe. They burst into the pub and, uh, in early 1953 and said, “We have discovered the secret of life.”
00:22:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:22:24
David Eagleman: I’d love to go see that.
00:22:25
Eric Weinstein: Goosebumps.
00:22:25
David Eagleman: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so by the way, I, one other thing I just want to make c- clear is that peer review is you write up a science paper, and you submit it to a journal, and then the journal sends it to several of your colleagues in the field, something like the, the jury system that we have in court, something like that, where your colleagues who are expert in the field also review your thing. The thing that scientists find frustrating about this is oftentimes peers are incentivized to stand in the way of something getting published. And also, uh, I would g- you tell me if I’m right, but I would guess that you would think oftentimes your peers are good scientists, not great scientists, and so they might block something, um, for, uh, uh, six months or a year or longer, um, because they want to see more of this or that. But the important part-
00:23:14
Eric Weinstein: Who are these people?
00:23:15
David Eagleman: Yeah. I, I, I would assume you’d say, and I’d agree with you, that the, the important part sometimes is just to get something out there. If Crick and Watson had been wrong about the structure, fine, it’s in the public eye, and then people can test it.
00:23:25
Eric Weinstein: Peer review is what happens when the world of your colleagues sees something. This is peer injunction.
00:23:34
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:23:35
Eric Weinstein: And it’s competitor injunction.
00:23:36
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:23:37
Eric Weinstein: And it’s one-sided, where you, generally speaking, can’t see them, but they can see you. Uh, what, what if somebody doesn’t like you? What if Jim Watson’s pissed off everybody?
00:23:48
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:23:49
Eric Weinstein: So my feeling is who the hell are these peers? Get them the hell out of my way. Let’s go back to the system that works.
00:23:54
David Eagleman: So by the way, what do you think of the preprint system now, where people submit things to, let’s say, arXiv or other free preprint services?
00:24:01
Eric Weinstein: I think it’s fascinating.
00:24:02
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:24:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Because I don’t know… L- l- let’s just talk about how funny this system is. First of all, it comes out of where? Where does the arXiv come out of?
00:24:12
David Eagleman: I don’t know.
00:24:12
Eric Weinstein: I believe it’s Los Alamos National Laboratory system.
00:24:14
David Eagleman: Oh, fascinating.
00:24:16
Eric Weinstein: Now, there’s a whole question- Going back to the founding of Los Alamos about security review, and I think that, uh, was it Bright who ran the voluntary board that said, “Look, um, papers on neutro– n-uh, neutrons and chain reactions are so dangerous that everything will be submitted, and we will figure out what’s safe and what isn’t.”
00:24:37
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:24:37
Eric Weinstein: So in part, you have to ask the question about whether or not this layer is there, uh, in– as part of security review because what if somebody wants to publish weaponized anthrax, or what if they want to publish something that’s relevant to nuclear weapons or…
00:24:51
David Eagleman: But, but the advent of the internet allows that anyway now, yes?
00:24:55
Eric Weinstein: Yes, but as you’ll notice, many of your colleagues won’t take something seriously unless it’s gone through channels.
00:25:01
David Eagleman: Ah, okay. Yeah, that’s right.
00:25:03
Eric Weinstein: And then the question is, who’s entitled to post there? Do you need a dot edu address?
00:25:09
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:25:09
Eric Weinstein: There’s a moderator group that turns down papers that people don’t recognize, so there is a review aspect.
00:25:16
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:25:17
Eric Weinstein: And let, let me keep going. Our taxpayer dollars pay for research, which is then put under a paywall by, let’s say, Elsevier. Then you’re forced to quote research, and if you don’t have a subscription, you can’t get behind the paywalls. You have to pay forty dollars per paper to see if it’s relev– Uh, this is nonsense. This is an old style, uh, control mechanism, and even the archive, uh, is refereed at some level. It has an endorsement system, and it appears probably to catch certain things and to relegate them to… I don’t know if you know that there’s this horrible thing called ViXra.
00:26:01
David Eagleman: I don’t know this.
00:26:02
Eric Weinstein: ViXra is archive spelled backwards.
00:26:04
David Eagleman: Oh. [laughs]
00:26:04
Eric Weinstein: And it’s, it’s where crazy people are sent.
00:26:07
David Eagleman: What do you mean they’re sent? As in if someone has an idea that’s-
00:26:10
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my friend Garrett Lisi, for example-
00:26:12
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:26:12
Eric Weinstein: … submitted something. He’s a PhD-
00:26:15
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:26:15
Eric Weinstein: … in physics from UC San Diego, and he’s told this is not right for the archive. [laughs]
00:26:20
David Eagleman: Wow. Yeah, just for the audience, the archive’s supposed to publish anything that’s-
00:26:24
Eric Weinstein: No
00:26:24
David Eagleman: … you know, reasonable science.
00:26:24
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.
00:26:25
David Eagleman: In theory, they’re supposed to. That’s the idea. That’s the idea is that it’s a open preprint server as long as it-
00:26:31
Eric Weinstein: You should ask Paul Ginsparg about that. Paul Ginsparg set this up, and he, he used a device like I, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
00:26:40
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:26:41
Eric Weinstein: And he said, “No, this is… Uh, we’re not trying to go around peer review. This is a holding tank for things that are on-only those things that are seeking peer review.” But the biggest question is what do we do with the science that is powerful, that goes against the narratives which have policy implications?
00:27:04
David Eagleman: The science has policy implications.
00:27:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:27:06
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:27:06
Eric Weinstein: For example-
00:27:06
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:27:07
Eric Weinstein: … Jim and Francis, together with Marshall Nirenberg, unlocked something which allows you, with CRISPR-Cas9 and other tools, to write code directly into nucleic acid. Now, most of us got locked down for two years because somehow twelve nucleotides coded for four codons, assembling four amino acids into a furin cleavage site that got spliced into s-spike protein in coronavirus, which made this virus very human transmissible. Now, my claim is what does that tell you about the leverage of this code? Who is allowed to do what? If you can shut down planet Earth for two years with twelve nucleotides, what are we talking about here? Why are we doing this out in the open? Why are we pretending that there aren’t military implications? Why are we pretending that there aren’t national interest implications and national security implications? This is the unforgivable sin of modern university science, pretending that what we’re doing is something that’s gee whiz interesting. Everybody should do science. Science is fun. You could be a scientist too. Bullshit. First of all, it’s incredibly hard. It’s incredibly demanding. It’s like telling a person who’s five ten that they can join the NBA. Yeah, maybe. There are people who are five ten in the NBA, but your odds are not good. Almost nobody belongs out here. It’s super dangerous. It’s super powerful. It’s boring as hell. It’s exciting as hell. We’re just not honest about what science is. We’ve got to break the dependence on the university system and the federal granting agencies of sciences to continue.
00:28:58
David Eagleman: So this is fascinating because what you’re– what you draw attention to that I really don’t know anyone else drawing attention to is this point that science is extraordinarily powerful, and therefore, it has the attention of, and maybe even the control of in some ways, organizations that are much bigger than what’s happening in the lab or in the university. And, and I think your point, tell me if I’m correct about this, is that most scientists don’t realize that. Most academicians don’t know that. They think they’re just doing a thing. But in fact, there’s a– there, there’s so much leverage going on that they’re playing in a bigger game without realizing it.
00:29:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Like, y-you know, let’s imagine you’re a computer programmer. You, you could program Tic-Tac-Toe, uh, or Checkers or something, and that would be amusing. Or you could program Wireshark and-
00:29:43
David Eagleman: What’s Wireshark?
00:29:44
Eric Weinstein: That’s exactly the point. You don’t know what Wireshark is.
00:29:47
David Eagleman: Correct. I don’t. [laughs]
00:29:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Wireshark sits on your network and sniffs packets, which means that any message that you’re sending around your network might be unencrypted, and we can just read whatever emails and messages you’re sending. But y– because you don’t know that there’s an application that allows you to read it, you just sort of imagine, “Oh, I don’t know, I hit send on email.” You don’t know about SMTP. The problem is, is that mostly what you’re dealing with is not a… Y-your computer is not a computer to you. It’s just an application serving device. But to somebody who lives on the command line, just the way somebody can live on the command line of DNA- They see an entirely different world. So my claim is, is that if you’re writing something like Wireshark, you’re very well aware of what you could be doing. And if you’re studying coronavirus, like the EcoHealth Alliance was studying coronavirus, or Ralph Baric in North Carolina was studying viruses, those people are very well aware of what it takes to humanize and weaponize a virus platform.
00:30:48
David Eagleman: And tell us who Baric is.
00:30:50
Eric Weinstein: A very talented scientist at the University of North Carolina. And, you know, we, we signed a bioweapons convention. I think we signed two treaties in the 1970s, which prohibit us from exploring offensive weapons. But a lot of what you hear is, well, we have to explore defensive weapons, and in order to explore defensive, uh, weapons against the weapons, we have to create the weapons to begin with so that we know what we’re defending against. So we’re engaged in high-level bullshit in order to explain what we’re doing messing around in a place like Wuhan, China.
00:31:30
David Eagleman: Oh, oh, you’re saying we developed the bullshit to cover our tracks at Wuhan? Is that what you mean?
00:31:35
Eric Weinstein: We don’t want to be caught off guard in a prisoner’s dilemma where we agree not to do something and the other party decides to cheat on their agreement. So we are cheating on the agreement that we signed.
00:31:48
David Eagleman: The agreement being don’t develop offensive weapons.
00:31:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that’s the spirit of the agreement.
00:31:52
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:31:53
Eric Weinstein: A word that is very rarely used in this capacity called pettifogging, where you can talk about arbitraging the letter against the spirit. We are engaged in arbitraging the letter of the Bioweapons Convention against the spirit of the Bioweapons Convention. But we are not doing this at a credible level. We are telling tall tales that are not befitting of adults, let alone scientists. And so what we have is we have these sort of storytellers in chief. So Francis Collins was a storyteller in chief. Anthony Fauci was a storyteller in chief. That allows people like Peter Daszak at the EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric in North Carolina to do the scientific and administrative work that are engaged in our bioweapons program, where we take… See, if you just had something called NIID, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, it would be too clear that it was probably something military related. So if you throw allergies in the middle of it, you get the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Oh, these people are gonna cure me of hay fever.
00:32:59
David Eagleman: And so y- your view-
00:33:01
Eric Weinstein: My view is that we just went through a national security, national interest exercise that was catastrophic for science, that there was a world science experiment, and the world looked to us as scientists to say, “What the hell is going on?” We let the world down.
00:33:22
David Eagleman: So let’s unpack that. In what ways did we let the world down?
00:33:26
Eric Weinstein: They wanted to know where this virus came from.
00:33:29
David Eagleman: So there’s a tension between national security interests and what they’re able to tell the public and what academic scientists even know.
00:33:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you remember when OJ was gonna look for the real killers?
00:33:41
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:33:42
Eric Weinstein: So we’re gonna find the origin of this virus if it kills us.
00:33:45
David Eagleman: But do you think the people who knew about national security and bioweapons were the people doing that or other academics who, who really didn’t know until-
00:33:55
Eric Weinstein: We have two groups. The first thing I wanna know is I wanna put, uh, Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak on the stand, and I wanna ask them a ton of questions.
00:34:02
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:34:03
Eric Weinstein: And I wanna do that to Francis Collins, and I wanna do that to Anthony Fauci, and I want those questions to be asked not by random senators and congressmen. I want our best heterodox pro-science thinkers coming up with exactly the right questions, and I don’t want it time limited by, oh, you know, the f- five minutes allotted or out. No, if this turns out to be something that came out of a lab, how many people did we just kill? I wanna know. Z- Did we kill zero? Good news. Did we kill millions? I wanna know. This is so bad, and w- I don’t think people understand within the academy that, you know… Let’s imagine that you’re doing development in zebrafish. You say, “Well, science is basically working. Of course people are going to have issues because it involved, uh, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and of course there’s stuff going on with bioweapons. You’d be naive to think that’s, that’s not…” Okay, well, you, you allowed people to say that public health was science. Public health is not science. Public health involves noble lies. It involves coercive activities, nudging, uh, to use the Cass Sunstein concept. Um, it’s important that science cancel its credit card that it’s given to public health. No, that’s not us. You’re on your own. You screwed up. We didn’t screw up. What’s more, we know how to get to the bottom of these things. We can figure out a Hudson. And when the public looked to us, and w- and we sat there with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins’ hands around our throat for funding, and we said, “Yes, boss.” But we’re not supposed to have a boss. This is what academic freedom is about. This is what public-spirited science is about. And yes, you can do some stuff in terms of national interest, but when you allow something potentially to get out of a lab and infect an entire planet and kill millions, and then you inj- inj- force people more or less through coercion to inject themselves with something that you’re not explaining well, you need to answer an infinite number of questions from the world’s smartest people, and they need to know that they have a job on Monday if they do their job on a Friday. You and I know people inside of the institutions who would have been very capable of shouldering that burden. There was a lot of fear inside of the universities. That this was a bioweapon, and then we pretended the people who said that on the internet were stupid.
00:36:36
David Eagleman: Mm.
00:36:36
Eric Weinstein: They were crazy. They were conspiracy theorists. How could you possibly imagine that this came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology? My God, are you a racist? And, and The Lancet, you know, fell behind. We had, like, you know, 77 Nobel laureates saying, “Please don’t shut off the grant of poor Peter Daszak.” And come on.
00:36:57
David Eagleman: Mm.
00:36:58
Eric Weinstein: This is just not adult level fiction.
00:37:00
David Eagleman: Because if we could do it over again, you’re saying we should look at all the hypotheses, keep everything on the table-
00:37:05
Eric Weinstein: I’m saying that scientists have a right to be in a more than equal relationship to the national interest complex.
00:37:13
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:37:13
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] We are not your employees. We’re not here to do your dirty work. We’re not here to cover up your mistakes. We are public-spirited individuals focused on truth, and don’t ever ask us to lie like this ever again. Ever.
00:37:29
David Eagleman: Who was asked to lie, though? It w- you- you’re saying in terms of shutting down conversation about did this come out of a lab?
00:37:35
Eric Weinstein: Jay Bhattacharya was asked to lie. Let’s just start there.
00:37:39
David Eagleman: Great. Uh, th- unpack that.
00:37:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We have three fringe epidemiologists from fringe schools, Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford. These crazy fringe epidemiologists, uh, who require, uh, I think from Francis Collins’ email, a swift and devastating takedown of their ideas. Swift and devastating takedown of their ideas, David. I mean, this is c- this is madness. I talked to Jay. Jay’s a friend. Um, Jay asked me, “How did you learn how the universities actually work so early in your career?” I said, “I stumbled on it by making discoveries.” [laughs] I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, I was at Stanford,” I think he said, “for 35 years of my adult life,” something like that. And he said, “I never had any idea how this worked.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “It wasn’t until I said, ‘You know we don’t do this for any pandemic?’ This is not the standard operating procedure for any pandemic.'”
00:38:41
David Eagleman: What’s not the standard operating procedure?
00:38:42
Eric Weinstein: Whatever we did in the face of COVID.
00:38:44
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:38:44
Eric Weinstein: Two weeks to flatten the curve, masks yes, masks no. Like, this… You know, I, I had the Hong Kong flu in the end of the ’60s. It was a full-on pandemic. That’s what happened during Woodstock. Woodstock t- took place during a pandemic, right? We, we don’t remember the Hong Kong flu.
00:39:04
David Eagleman: Right.
00:39:04
Eric Weinstein: Right? We’re not even allowed to call this the Wuhan flu or the Wuhan virus. So their point was, what are we doing? We w- as epidemiologists and virologists, we know that we have protocols, and we’re not following them. What’s happening? This is where Francis Collins says we need a swift and devastating takedown of the ideas of these fringe epidemiologists. Suddenly, Jay Bhattacharya goes from being a darling of Stanford University, I think with an MD and a PhD in economics, some guy who was, like, totally unassailable, to some fringe lunatic with an email. You’ve never had this, David. You’ve never had this treatment, and if you’ve ever had this treatment, you’ll never forget it. It’s like y- you say something, and it’s treated like farting in church.
00:39:53
David Eagleman: The point is that there are national security interests. Jay went against that-
00:39:58
Eric Weinstein: He didn’t know that he was doing that
00:39:59
David Eagleman: … without knowing it and, and found himself shut down.
00:40:02
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. The point was that he was just trying to do what he knew how to do. He was saying, “I’m an expert. Let me contribute my expertise. We don’t do this.”
00:40:13
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:40:14
Eric Weinstein: This is not standard operating protocol. So nobody pulled Jay aside and said, “Hey, we may have created this. We have a little bit of an issue of sensitivity with our Chinese partners. I can’t tell you everything. It’s a need to know basis.” You see, in general, you have people who know what a special access program is or an unacknowledged special access program is, and you have people who complain about conspiracy theorists.
00:40:45
David Eagleman: So tell us what that program is.
00:40:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, I’m just saying it’s a category of secret stuff. An unacknowledged special access program is some black budget thing that we don’t even talk about and we don’t even acknowledge. It’s a covert operation. It’s deniable if it’s ever discovered. The right question about Wuhan and COVID is did this in- involve a covert operation? Did this involve a special access program? And did it, in particular, involve an unacknowledged special access program? And when, when you ask that question, you’re clearly indicating that you have knowledge of the architecture of how we keep secrets as a nation. We are entitled to keep secrets. We have to keep secrets. But somehow science and something called SSP or state secrets privilege have collided, and now the world thinks that we’re not very good at our job. And my feeling is, is that we should say, “Hold my beer,” and we should let our friends at Geospatial Intelligence, the CIA, the NSA know that we are not in the business of lying about science at this level.
00:41:56
David Eagleman: So l- let me just zoom out to the big picture. The, the difficulty is that you have scientists, academic scientists like me, for example, who, uh, I, I would say I’ve been… I, I’m very naive to this. It’s at the interface where there’s all these problems because it’s not that I or my colleagues to my knowledge ever said, “Hey, we’ll do your bidding.” But, but you’re saying w- just being naive is enough of a problem.
00:42:26
Eric Weinstein: Great point.
00:42:26
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:42:27
Eric Weinstein: So for example, we, we’ve known each other a long time, and one of the things that I loved was Mr. Potato Head
00:42:35
David Eagleman: Thank you.
00:42:35
Eric Weinstein: Now, Mr. Potato Head has a great idea that the brain is an all-purpose computer with default peripherals. Uh-
00:42:41
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:42:41
Eric Weinstein: … correct me if I’m wrong.
00:42:42
David Eagleman: No, that’s perfect.
00:42:43
Eric Weinstein: So now I’ve got my olfactory default peripherals in my nose and my mouth, I’ve got my visual default peripherals in my, uh, eyes and ears that pick up frequencies either of light or of sound waves, and I’ve got my skin. But the question is, what if I wanna start umwelt hacking? So I take the things that I can’t perceive, like ultraviolet or infrared light, or polarization, let’s say, and I start coming up with new peripherals, and I jack into the general all-purpose computer that is my brain. Okay. That is such a cool idea, which I just loved, right? One day, somebody shows up and says, “Your lab is locked.” Why? We’re concerned that what you’re doing is, is that you’re developing something that equips a soldier to be able to perceive aspects of the battlefield that are currently not available to our adversaries. We believe that what you’re doing is creating a technology that allows for total situational awareness of a soldier on a battlefield to be able to see the battlefield in a way that no one else can, and therefore, we are going to restrict your technology. You didn’t think Mr. Potato Head… It’s a goofy name, right? It’s just you talk about this stuff and you do science. This is how you get into trouble. Mr. Potato Head is an amazing military concept.
00:44:05
David Eagleman: I see. So this is how scientists accidentally bump up against this sort of thing at some point in their career, possibly.
00:44:11
Eric Weinstein: Let’s imagine you’re not part of the Manhattan Project, and, uh, during the Manhattan Project, we tried to create disinformation that didn’t call attention to the fact that uranium and plutonium were particularly promising for fissile material.
00:44:26
David Eagleman: The Manhattan Project being where the world’s great physicists all gathered in the middle of New Mexico in Los Alamos.
00:44:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, they were actually more distributed. They were at the University of Chicago-
00:44:34
David Eagleman: Mm
00:44:34
Eric Weinstein: … and Oak Ridge, and Han-
00:44:35
David Eagleman: True.
00:44:35
Eric Weinstein: So but y- yes, the majority of them, uh, were in this group of white badges, I believe, at Los Alamos who had access to the super secret information. And one of the things we did is we engaged in haystacking, which is that we, we talked about many more elements than we thought were relevant in order to allow our a-
00:44:55
David Eagleman: Haystacking means you throw out more information.
00:44:57
Eric Weinstein: You have a needle-
00:44:58
David Eagleman: Oh, I see
00:44:58
Eric Weinstein: … you wanna come up with a haystack in order to hide it. So imagine that you’re, like, some guy who’s not contacted by the Manhattan Project, and you say, “Actually, you know, it’s really just [laughs] uranium and plutonium that we should be focused on.” You’re doing science as far as you know.
00:45:15
David Eagleman: Ah. But if I were that guy, I might receive a phone call.
00:45:17
Eric Weinstein: Or you might find that none of your work-
00:45:20
David Eagleman: Oh
00:45:20
Eric Weinstein: … is published.
00:45:20
David Eagleman: I see.
00:45:21
Eric Weinstein: That suddenly the referees, uh, keep sending things back.
00:45:27
David Eagleman: I see.
00:45:28
Eric Weinstein: Requires further data. Promising, but incomplete.
00:45:33
David Eagleman: Got it. Yeah.
00:45:34
Eric Weinstein: So my point is that you haven’t bumped up against this yet. It’s just you haven’t thought enough about how powerful you are and how powerful national interest is and the way in which science and national interests interact.
00:45:49
David Eagleman: So let’s get back to cowboy science then. So what does that look like? What does that mean to you to be able to do something outside of the standard channels?
00:45:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, one thing it means is, is that if a cowboy bumps up into the national interest complex, the national interest complex comes and tells you, “Hey, you’re riding on the range here in, uh, in New Mexico or Nevada, and, uh, we, we got some aerospace stuff going on, and maybe there’s some nuclear stuff. We need your cooperation.”
00:46:17
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:46:17
Eric Weinstein: “You, you should not train any of us if you can’t talk to us later.”
00:46:21
David Eagleman: Us being scientists.
00:46:22
Eric Weinstein: You should not train somebody at my level if you can’t have a conversation about national interest.
00:46:29
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:46:29
Eric Weinstein: If you think that you can’t trust me with a secret, then don’t train me.
00:46:34
David Eagleman: Hmm. You’re saying the problem is scientists get trained, and then they might find something.
00:46:41
Eric Weinstein: A mentally retarded eight-year-old child would not be able to believe some of the lies told by Tony Fauci.
00:46:46
David Eagleman: Like what? Give me an example.
00:46:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, two weeks to flatten the curve. What, what was that?
00:46:51
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:46:53
Eric Weinstein: Or we don’t need masks, we do, we don’t, we do, we don’t. Clearly based on whether or not, um, there was a failure to replenish PPE, um, after it was drawn down, I believe during the Bush administration. Like, we didn’t follow surge protocols or, or the idea that it was racism to ask whether or not something, uh-
00:47:14
David Eagleman: Emerged from a lab in China
00:47:15
Eric Weinstein: … emerged from a lab in Wuhan. All, all of this stuff is nonsense, and it’s absolutely insulting. Or vaccines are safe, full stop. No, they’re not. Water isn’t safe, full stop.
00:47:29
David Eagleman: So let, let me understand what this… What do you see as a solution to this?
00:47:33
Eric Weinstein: First thing is-
00:47:34
David Eagleman: Yeah
00:47:35
Eric Weinstein: … think twice, three times before you train somebody at public expense.
00:47:39
David Eagleman: But, but you don’t wanna not train brilliant young physicists. So what’s a better solution?
00:47:45
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. No, no. I do wanna not train… If we have, if we have a Klaus Fuchs, I don’t want him trained.
00:47:51
David Eagleman: I’m sorry, who’s Klaus Fuchs?
00:47:52
Eric Weinstein: The spy at Los Alamos. If we have somebody who’s not patriotic enough to understand that in the w- in the wake of Los, Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, and the Teller-Ulam design, that physics is not kidding around.
00:48:05
David Eagleman: Hmm.
00:48:06
Eric Weinstein: Don’t train that person.
00:48:07
David Eagleman: How do you determine-
00:48:09
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. Give him an interview
00:48:10
David Eagleman: … especially a 16-year-old kid.
00:48:12
Eric Weinstein: Give him an interview.
00:48:13
David Eagleman: Okay. Hmm.
00:48:15
Eric Weinstein: You know, look-
00:48:15
David Eagleman: Okay. Yeah
00:48:16
Eric Weinstein: … I have a different view of science than anyone else on planet Earth, so you happen to be foolish enough to invite me to sit down, so here’s… You’re getting something. I think that we are intellectual ninjas. We are dangerous. What we do is important. It’s not cute, it’s not fun, it’s not interesting. It’s life and death. Particularly within six months, between 1952 and 1953, from November to April, everything changed. And it changed in physics, and it changed in biology.
00:48:46
David Eagleman: Because of the discovery of the neutron 52?
00:48:49
Eric Weinstein: The Teller-Ulam device in 1952, in November, and the explosion of Ivy Mike, which was a successful thermonuclear test in the Pacific with a three-stage weapon, and because of the discovery of the repeating structure of nucleic acid perfectly suited to being a data store translated by ribosomes into protein, which are the machines that determine everything in the world that matter, right?
00:49:15
David Eagleman: This is the structure of DNA paper in 1953.
00:49:17
Eric Weinstein: Structure of DNA leading to the central dogma, um, of translation of DNA into RNA and RNA into protein, and the genetic code. We have power that is inconceivable, and if we are going to have national interest issues, we need to have those national interests issues out early, not late. I don’t know why we’re inviting the Chinese to staff our labs. Is that because we have an agreement with China that we are somehow going to avoid war? But our graduate students are not graduate students. They are workers. It, it is a cryptic labor program for the universities, and the best and the brightest is not that because we compete in a labor market. It’s the best value, not the best minds. Furthermore, the American product, the cowboy scientists think Bruce Willis is a, in, in a lab coat. That product has high variance but much, much higher mean. We are the best in the world at science and engineering, full stop.
00:50:27
David Eagleman: We being America.
00:50:28
Eric Weinstein: We being America and our friends.
00:50:32
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:50:32
Eric Weinstein: The French are the world’s greatest mathematicians. You know? Some of our friends are f- are Russians. The West– Something happened in the West and in Japan. It just didn’t happen in the rest of the world.
00:50:47
David Eagleman: What is that?
00:50:47
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, the Enlightenment, the scientific method, some compounding effect from-
00:50:53
David Eagleman: Hmm
00:50:54
Eric Weinstein: … colonization. Maybe it had to do with the exploitation of the Third World. I don’t know. But something happened where the West got insanely powerful.
00:51:04
David Eagleman: Mm.
00:51:06
Eric Weinstein: And the US, in part because of World War II and the mismanagement of Europe by, uh, by Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and others, became the dominant scientific power the world has ever seen, and we’re great at what we do. We’ve got all these scientific employers who just lie, lie, lie as long as the day is long about how Americans are lazy, and they’re stupid, and they can’t do work, and we have to look at the fact that we’re being beaten by India and China. We’re not being beaten by India and China. We’ve– We have to worry about England and France, and by the way, India and China are gonna get there, particularly India’s, you know, choice of the IITs and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. China’s buying up our talent left and right. We’re laying down on the job. My old office mate, Michael Kratsios, I think is the head of the Presidential Council on Science and Technology, as well as the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so PCAST and OSTP. I believe that was a job previously held by Isidor Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics. I love Michael Kratsios. He’s a friend. He’s a great guy, but we are not taking science and the destruction of science in the US as the seventeen-alarm fire that it is. We need to get money and our own people, and we need to shove them down the throats of our employers with government help, and we need absolute scientific dominance, and it needs to be much more public-spirited, much less under the thumb of the, uh, national security community, and it needs to be friendly to the military. We cannot pretend that we are not military adjacent.
00:52:56
David Eagleman: How could it be friendly to the military and not aligned with the national security interest?
00:53:01
Eric Weinstein: We have to align with the national security interest. The national security community is not as good as we are.
00:53:08
David Eagleman: There are two things that I’m-
00:53:09
Eric Weinstein: It is
00:53:09
David Eagleman: … trying to understand, which is, so one issue is that science, I’ve always loved viewing as an international fellowship. I can travel anywhere in the world, and if I meet someone who studies science like I do, we can talk, uh, sometimes just with equations. Whatever it is, we get each other so deeply and fundamentally. But it sounds like on the other hand, you’re saying it’s, it shouldn’t actually be a union.
00:53:34
Eric Weinstein: I had the same feeling.
00:53:35
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:53:35
Eric Weinstein: And then suddenly all these physicists in Iran met an end during the recent war. When I go for a talk, um, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which by the way is the nicest part of Bombay, really just beautiful, I have to go through a military checkpoint to go to my string theory talk because it’s in Navy Nagar.
00:53:57
David Eagleman: It, it– What is that?
00:53:58
Eric Weinstein: It’s in the naval base.
00:53:59
David Eagleman: Oh, okay.
00:54:01
Eric Weinstein: Science is not what you’re trying to make it out to be. We’ve got this naive sing-song view of science, which we love.
00:54:08
David Eagleman: Yeah.
00:54:09
Eric Weinstein: Right? Because when you’re doing science, you don’t care where somebody was born.
00:54:12
David Eagleman: You know what I think? It’s so much of the territory of science, if I were gonna make up a number, let me just make up ninety percent of the territory really is the sing-song international fellowship stuff.
00:54:26
Eric Weinstein: Kumbaya, my friend.
00:54:27
David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. You could go anywhere and talk to people about zebrafish and the neurons and what’s going on, but, but I, I see where you’re coming from. There is this ten percent, what– I’m making up the number, where it actually really matters, and suddenly it’s serious stuff, as you said, life and death stuff, and, and that’s where we can’t put that all under the same umbrella. Because in other words-
00:54:48
Eric Weinstein: It’s a giant problem, David. So let’s, let’s imagine that you care about, uh, four-manifold topology. No known problem. Let’s imagine you care about elliptic curves. Suddenly you have to do it at Fort Meade because it’s involved in cryptography. The naive singsong thing, none of us should hold that perspective.
00:55:12
David Eagleman: Could we hold that perspective by saying, look, m- I mean, I, I think I would say most of the stuff I do, maybe not the potato head, uh-
00:55:20
Eric Weinstein: You didn’t think about the potato head
00:55:21
David Eagleman: … central substitution. You’re correct, I did not think about that. But let’s say plenty of other stuff that I’ve done about sleeping and dreaming and brain plasticity and vision and visual illusions-
00:55:30
Eric Weinstein: You know how important sleep is to our tier one operators in Delta Force and Ground Branch at the CIA? We don’t, you don’t know. I’m, I’m just saying.
00:55:43
David Eagleman: I agree. I don’t know the things that I do when I’m stepping on something that matters.
00:55:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, my point is we can’t afford this extended childhood as scientists.
00:55:55
David Eagleman: I, I think that’s an excellent point. Here’s the part I’m trying to understand though, is it sounds like you’re saying we need to mature as scientists to understand, wow, there’s real national security interests here. But I think I’m also hearing you saying we don’t want to be bossed around by national security interests.
00:56:13
Eric Weinstein: Correct. No.
00:56:13
David Eagleman: So-
00:56:15
Eric Weinstein: We need to be… All right, I’m really glad we’re having this. This is a very difficult conversation, so nobody I’d rather be having it with than you. People don’t understand my perspective on universities, on science, and national interest. Great science and good science are continuing to happen inside of universities. There’s much less great science, there’s much more good science. But I am at talks regularly at Caltech and UCLA, I pr- probably should be going to USC. I don’t see any of the tech leaders who are opining about science at any talks that I ever go to. It’s just academicians. There’s nobody from outside. So I am a huge defender that the universities are not over. Standard thing in my tech circles is, “Yep, science is over. Universities are over.” Not true. Far from true. I am also a major critic of science, saying the public can see that we blew it on, on COVID multiple ways. We’re not honest about things like the measurement of inflation, I can promise you that. And they’re detecting that there’s a hidden hand and that scientists are somehow not a- acting in the public interest, and I believe that there’s really something to that, and that we scientists have to talk about that. I believe that the national interest community and the national security community are extremely important. I believe in national interest and I believe in national security. I believe that many people in that community are not good enough to be our bosses.
00:57:40
David Eagleman: Ah.
00:57:42
Eric Weinstein: And I believe that we are not good enough to be our bosses, because part of being a grown-up in that idiom is to say, “I think about quarks. Quarks make up nucleons, and nucleons make up nuclear weapons.” So yes, I don’t know whether something I’m going to discover might have a security implication. So more or less, we’ve got all of these contradictions. We’ve– We’re, we’re not playing at an adult level, and that– I want our national security community to get better. I want scientists to be full partners. I want us to be pushing back on particularly bad national interest people and saying, “Don’t ever force me to repeat these lies to the public.” And nobody’s even having anything remotely like this conversation. So far as I know it, I’m basically having it with myself on podcast.
00:58:28
David Eagleman: Would you see this as being a, a, a self-maturation among scientists and among national security people? Or would you see a, a somebody in charge of that, the, the president or whoever saying, “Okay guys, everyone get to the table”?
00:58:41
Eric Weinstein: I think Michael Kratsios should be relocated to some terrific office, because I think he’s a, an able and capable person.
00:58:49
David Eagleman: Tell us about him.
00:58:50
Eric Weinstein: It doesn’t matter. He’s not a leading scientist. That office, that team that advises the president should not be selected for on presidential loyalty to Donald Trump, full stop. I’m sorry. I understand that Donald Trump has been treated in some ways unfairly by the outside world, and that he has a reason to surround himself with loyalists. Science is not loyal.
00:59:13
David Eagleman: Okay, but sorry to interrupt you-
00:59:13
Eric Weinstein: You can ask scientists minorly to hold off on something or to play ball, but you cannot ask them to just lie, right? We need somebody with universal respect. The JASONs, PCAST, and OSTP, and the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Board need to be top people and team players. And a lot of-
00:59:46
David Eagleman: Team players with one another.
00:59:49
Eric Weinstein: Team players with the national interest community.
00:59:53
David Eagleman: Okay.
00:59:54
Eric Weinstein: And this is gonna sound contradictory, but it isn’t, massive individualists. It’s a very tricky thing. You know, Leo Szilard, who wrote the original letter to start off the Manhattan Project, wasn’t allowed into the Manhattan Project because he was too independent.
01:00:13
David Eagleman: So you’re saying the solution is, uh, what, what we need is a, a maturation across both communities, um-
01:00:22
Eric Weinstein: 100%.
01:00:22
David Eagleman: But, but I wanna make sure I understand what would be the path there that you, that you might see. I mean, maybe you think it’s just a difficult, thorny problem, but do you see-
01:00:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay
01:00:32
David Eagleman: … when you squint?
01:00:32
Eric Weinstein: Suddenly Donald Trump invites a list of the top American scientists, not good scientists, but very often great scientists, to Mar-a-Lago, the same way, uh, all our friends in the entertainment world, the business world, the finance world, the tech world have gone. And he says, “We are going to have a scientific renaissance, full stop. There’s no way we are going to continue to destroy our seed corn for technology.” We need to know, I hear you guys are suffering, I hear you guys are precarious. I wanna know why nobody stood up to Fauci and Collins the way we needed them to. What does it take to get academic freedom? We understand that we’ve tasked you with protecting the nation and making us rich and powerful, and you’re not participating. How do we get you back to second homes? How do we get you retirements? How do we get you raising three to four kids on one income with help in the house? You’re, you’re our A-team, man. So my, my feeling is, suck it up, open your pocketbook, shut your mouth, learn to deal with science as what it is, and learn to deal with scientists as equals and team players. And don’t ever, ever, ever, ever take the world’s smartest people and feed them a B-minus lie and expect them to shut up or repeat it because you control whether or not they can function. It is time for the scientists to mutiny, not against the United States of America, but to mutiny against our agreement with the national interest complex. You guys broke the deal. We had something called the endless frontier. You passed something called the Mansfield Amendment around 1970, which removed military funding from blue sky research. You’ve been eroding us ever since. You passed the Immigration Act of 1990 based on a fraud that you perpetrated through the National Science Foundation in the Reagan era under Eric Bloch. Enough. Enough. You are going to treat scientists properly. And, and if you don’t, expect them to move to China, and then you’re gonna deal with American scientists helping the Chinese. I, I, I just really don’t know. Is there no one in the national, um, intelligence complex, the national interest complex, national security complex, who has thought about the fact that we are destroying ourselves? I just don’t grasp it.
01:02:57
David Eagleman: Destroying ourselves in terms of not helping scientists blossom and thrive?
01:03:02
Eric Weinstein: What do you think about a million dollar salary per year?
01:03:07
David Eagleman: For scientists.
01:03:08
Eric Weinstein: For a scientist. What do you think about bonuses that look like bonuses granted to investment bankers? Right now, I think there’s a million dollar prize for solving P equals NP, and a million dollar prize for the Riemann hypothesis.
01:03:25
David Eagleman: Hmm.
01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: Like, I think you’re missing a few zeros on that.
01:03:28
David Eagleman: You’re saying it should be much more.
01:03:29
Eric Weinstein: Reach deep into your heart and into your checkbook, and when you get serious, come back to me with a number. How, how dare you? I mean, who are these people?
01:03:40
David Eagleman: Hmm.
01:03:40
Eric Weinstein: A million dollars for the Riemann hypothesis? Wow.
01:03:44
David Eagleman: Yeah, and your point is if, if they offered way more than that, let’s say it was $50 million for doing that, you, you’d attract more people there, and it would be more reflective of what the value is.
01:03:53
Eric Weinstein: Tell me something. You’re interested in AI. When do you think the large language model thing reached its point of just unbelievable discontinuity with respect to the intellectual underpinnings? What paper would you associate with-
01:04:07
David Eagleman: Uh, uh, 2017, Google Brain publishes the Transformer model.
01:04:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Now, that paper is called Attention is All You Need.
01:04:15
David Eagleman: Yes.
01:04:15
Eric Weinstein: How many authors are there on it?
01:04:18
David Eagleman: Three? I don’t remember. I don’t know.
01:04:20
Eric Weinstein: I think it’s eight.
01:04:20
David Eagleman: Oh, okay.
01:04:21
Eric Weinstein: What are their names? Any of them.
01:04:25
David Eagleman: Oops.
01:04:26
Eric Weinstein: Tell me something. What are some names that you associate with Google?
01:04:29
David Eagleman: Probably all the ones that come to mind are the executives.
01:04:32
Eric Weinstein: Give me-
01:04:33
David Eagleman: Yeah.
01:04:33
Eric Weinstein: Who, who are you thinking?
01:04:34
David Eagleman: Well, you know, Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt and so on.
01:04:37
Eric Weinstein: Anyone else?
01:04:39
David Eagleman: The people at Google X, for example.
01:04:41
Eric Weinstein: Maybe Jeff Dean.
01:04:44
David Eagleman: Okay. I mean, I would name Jack Hidary and Adam Brown and other friends of mine who are at X, but-
01:04:49
Eric Weinstein: Shout out to Adam Brown.
01:04:50
David Eagleman: Yeah.
01:04:51
Eric Weinstein: Quantum gravity going on at Google.
01:04:53
David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly.
01:04:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay, wait, wait. But what my point-
01:04:54
David Eagleman: And of course, Demis.
01:04:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:04:56
David Eagleman: Yeah.
01:04:56
Eric Weinstein: But my point is, this is what we’re doing. People create value, and, you know, I wanna hear, okay, he got plane rich from that paper.
01:05:11
David Eagleman: Hmm. By which you mean he could afford a private plane?
01:05:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:05:15
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:05:15
Eric Weinstein: You know, he, he used to fly from LAX to, to JFK. Now he flies from Van Nuys to Teterboro.
01:05:22
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:05:22
Eric Weinstein: I used to swim naked with Raul Bot off of his place in Martha’s Vineyard. He was a Harvard professor, Casper Grausteen professor, and he had a second home on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s normal. Professors on Professors Row, it was named Professors Row because professors could r- afford the houses there. We’ve had a massive blowout of the genie coefficients. I want scientists to participate in the world they created for everyone else.
01:05:48
David Eagleman: One question is, in the same way that you mentioned Fuchs before, it’s very difficult to determine during somebody’s career, first of all, whether they’re a patriot or they have other interests, and it’s also difficult to determine who is going to make contributions and who is not.
01:06:05
Eric Weinstein: Really?
01:06:06
David Eagleman: It is, because science is such a complex road. I know so many smart people, surely you do too, who spent their lives doing hard work on things that happened to never yield something, and other people who are playing the… What was that game with, where you uncover squares with mines?
01:06:22
Eric Weinstein: Minecraft?
01:06:23
David Eagleman: Not Minecraft, it’s the Minesweeper, I think it was named.
01:06:26
Eric Weinstein: The Minesweeper, I’m sorry.
01:06:26
David Eagleman: Yeah. Uh, where, you know, you happen to click on a square, and something huge opens up. And that, unfortunately, is a matter of luck sometimes.
01:06:35
Eric Weinstein: I have a totally different view on that.
01:06:36
David Eagleman: Okay, tell me yours.
01:06:38
Eric Weinstein: When somebody gets really lucky really early, it often changes their brain chemistry. It changes how they swagger, how they approach the world.
01:06:46
David Eagleman: Hmm.
01:06:47
Eric Weinstein: So in part, really good fortune really early in life-
01:06:51
David Eagleman: Is a good thing.
01:06:52
Eric Weinstein: Can be.
01:06:52
David Eagleman: Yeah. That’s what happened with Crick and Watson.
01:06:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, it didn’t happen with Crick because Crick was in his thirties. It happened with Watson because he was like-
01:06:59
David Eagleman: 30s is still pretty good, and-
01:07:01
Eric Weinstein: Come on.
01:07:01
David Eagleman: Yeah. Well, Crick was one of the great scientists of the latter half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.
01:07:07
Eric Weinstein: Crick was an old man, my friend.
01:07:09
David Eagleman: No, he wasn’t.
01:07:10
Eric Weinstein: He was in his 30s.
01:07:11
David Eagleman: It’s different in biology. You know that.
01:07:12
Eric Weinstein: The whole thing has shifted. Well, but you don’t know why it’s different in biology. See, I, I-
01:07:17
David Eagleman: It’s because it takes years to get a feeling for the organism.
01:07:19
Eric Weinstein: No, it doesn’t.
01:07:20
David Eagleman: It-
01:07:20
Eric Weinstein: Let me, let me explain why it happens in biology.
01:07:22
David Eagleman: You tell me your opinion. Yes.
01:07:24
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:07:24
David Eagleman: Tell me
01:07:25
Eric Weinstein: … the American Society for Cell Biology, ASCB, worked with me, and I went around and I got to ask, I don’t know, 20, 25 of the world’s top, um, principal investigators why things were the way they are. Oh, boy. We were not allowed to publish our findings in Science until we took out our findings from the paper.
01:07:49
David Eagleman: W- uh, tell me, what, what kind of stuff?
01:07:51
Eric Weinstein: One of the things that we collected in interviews with principal investigators is a discovery that when they did an analysis, they found that an unusually high number of female principal investigators changed their research patterns after the birth of their first child, that they found motherhood so fulfilling that it competed with what they were doing previously to run their labs. The claim was we then decided to push academic freedom closer and closer to the point of geriatric pregnancy so that we would not be surprised that female principal investigators who had previously been all out in terms of their research would have zero or one children, but not multiple children and not get bogged down. And if you actually go back to the ’50s and you look at some of the most successful female biologists before women’s liberation, they were often fairly well-to-do and had help in the house.
01:08:57
David Eagleman: Hmm.
01:08:59
Eric Weinstein: And we interviewed some people, for example, who had a child and the next day brought the child into a playpen in the lab despite the pre- presence of radioactive markers and mutagens to show how serious they were. So my claim is that, um, we’ve developed a, an entire rationale for why it now takes so long to become a full professor in biology, but it actually has different reasons. And when we put these quotes, ’cause I recorded these on microcassettes, when we put these quotes into the paper, Science Magazine, which is one of the top journals in biology, said, “You’re gonna have to take out these conclusions or we can’t publish it.” So I have a publication in Science, and the only reason that I have a publication in a top journal is that my co-authors agreed to take this, the findings out of the paper. This is how the game is really played. People say, “Well, Eric, you know, you’re, you’re, uh, you’re against peer review because you can’t pass it.” I have peer-reviewed papers. The issue is, is that I know what it is. They won’t let you publish the most interesting stuff if it disrupts the field.
01:10:20
David Eagleman: So this brings us back to the, the main theme of cowboy science. So what should that look like, or what could that look like? First of all, we agree that there are great scientists and good scientists. This is your framing of it-
01:10:34
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
01:10:34
David Eagleman: … which I agree with. The great scientists, th- those are the ones that you want to do the cowboy s- science, whereas the good scientists are the ones sort of, you know, doing the hard, good work, but not coming up with the giant new frameworks on stuff. And they-
01:10:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, they could.
01:10:48
David Eagleman: They could, but I’m- I’m just trying to frame your framework in a hopefully-
01:10:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:10:52
David Eagleman: … accurate-
01:10:53
Eric Weinstein: But, but again, I’m not against-
01:10:55
David Eagleman: You, you have nothing against the good scientists. Those are, yeah.
01:10:57
Eric Weinstein: The good scientists might come up with something you don’t expect.
01:10:59
David Eagleman: They might click on the square in Minesweeper that opens up something.
01:11:01
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
01:11:02
David Eagleman: Exactly. Okay. So, but, um, how do we encourage cowboy science? How do we make sure that the Jim Watsons and the so many others like him-
01:11:09
Eric Weinstein: We need national… We, we need national interest exemptions from the Civil Rights Act. We need slush funds. We need a lack of oversight. We need to be able to determine who the smart people are based on our own determinations, and screw off if you don’t agree with us.
01:11:27
David Eagleman: How is that consistent with national security interests?
01:11:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what we did before. We had a bunch of really crazy people.
01:11:35
David Eagleman: Good crazy, I assume you mean.
01:11:35
Eric Weinstein: Good crazy.
01:11:36
David Eagleman: Yeah, okay.
01:11:36
Eric Weinstein: Mostly.
01:11:37
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:11:38
Eric Weinstein: But the- these are strong spices, right? If you look at Elon Musk, he, he makes his own rules every chance he gets. Our guys made their own rules. We had Elon Musks in science.
01:11:53
David Eagleman: Who, who are you thinking of when you say that? What are some names you have in mind?
01:11:55
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. Alexander Grothendieck, Isidor Singer, Sydney Brenner. Um, see? You got reverent. Sydney Brenner.
01:12:03
David Eagleman: Yeah. I knew him as well at the Salk. Yeah.
01:12:05
Eric Weinstein: Amazing.
01:12:05
David Eagleman: Amazing guy. Yeah.
01:12:07
Eric Weinstein: See, I’m not supposed to know who that is, but, like, these are my heroes. These people, in general, they need to not ask mommy and daddy whether they can fund somebody. They need to not worry about their students being able to get a job. They pick up the phone and they say, “My student needs a job,” and that they put it down, and there’s not some process.
01:12:26
David Eagleman: Hmm. I, I wonder about the… Let me give you a quick analogy. In Silicon Valley, what I see are startups, young startups. You got three people in a garage, things are going great, and then you see what happens as companies mature, when they become Google and Facebook and Amazon and so on, and they have to, or they feel that they have to put the rule books in place and make these giant manual-
01:12:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, there’s a number. I think it’s, like, 15 employees, and suddenly the rules change on you.
01:12:50
David Eagleman: Yeah, that’s right.
01:12:51
Eric Weinstein: That’s what I’m trying to say.
01:12:52
David Eagleman: Right. So how… Okay, so how do we get-
01:12:54
Eric Weinstein: We need national interest exemptions for science.
01:12:56
David Eagleman: Oh, I, I see. You’re saying the national interests They’re the ones who in, in this future, in this utopia that, that we’re trying to get to what it could look like, um, they watch, they see who the young scientists are who are doing something very bold, and they say, “You have an exemption, we’re going to-“
01:13:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:13:16
David Eagleman: I see.
01:13:17
Eric Weinstein: If there’s some… Okay. If there’s some C elegans researcher who also wants to have her own OnlyFans account, uh, I may not be thrilled with that as a life choice, but I don’t wanna tell her that she has to leave the academy because, uh, she’s behaving inappropriately. If people wanna take drugs and go to Burning Man, they need to take drugs and they need to go to Burning Man. If people wanna tell a joke about two imams go into a bar, they need to be able to tell a joke about two imams go into a bar. Get out of the way of great science. We know how to do this. We need to go back to being the United States of America. We need to fire Claudine Gay from her professorship at Harvard to send a message, we don’t do that anymore.
01:14:04
David Eagleman: We don’t do which?
01:14:06
Eric Weinstein: We don’t protect plagiarists and pretend the people… I remember getting my Harvard alumni magazine, and I think that the cover article when Claudine Gay was being announced was a scholar’s scholar, and I knew from that, it’s like you’re trying too hard. We know who’s good, more or less. We don’t always get it right, but imagine 50% of the time we get it right. Let us do our work.
01:14:31
David Eagleman: Let me make sure I understand one thing though. So if you say, “Hey, these scientists over here are really brave and bold and smart, and we’re gonna give them national security exemption-“
01:14:42
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
01:14:44
David Eagleman: W- what does that exemption mean? Does that mean they-
01:14:45
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, that they don’t have to hire according to some…
01:14:49
David Eagleman: Here’s, here’s the question though. If they, if, if let’s say one of these brilliant young scientists comes up with the next thing, the next thing that can be turned into a great big weapon, the, the exemption means that they’re free to publish that or they’re not free to pu… What does it, what does it mean?
01:15:04
Eric Weinstein: Look, I think it’s important to understand what I’m advocating.
01:15:07
David Eagleman: Yes.
01:15:07
Eric Weinstein: I’m advocating that we begin a new relationship based on the fact that the national interest complex welched on the last one. We had an agreement. You broke it. The agreement was called the endless frontier of Vannevar Bush. Okay, so you welched on a series of tacit agreements, fine. You’re, you-
01:15:27
David Eagleman: And the agreement was scientists can do anything they want.
01:15:30
Eric Weinstein: The agreement was that more or less science was a rebellious, fiercely independent part of the national interest complex. The national interest complex agreed to fund us through universities, that that would be where they would do their, the lion’s share of their research, that we would have academic freedom, that they could call on us in times of war, that they would not call on us frivolously. We have an agreement. It’s a series of interlocking, tacit understanding, some of them made explicit, most of them not.
01:16:02
David Eagleman: I see. And that has changed. But you’re saying, let’s get back to that. Let’s get back to-
01:16:06
Eric Weinstein: That’s the spirit that we want.
01:16:07
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:16:08
Eric Weinstein: We wanna get back to the spirit of the endless frontier. So endless frontier take two, given that you welched on our last agreement. So I think we need to reassert ourselves and say, “We’re not playing ball.”
01:16:19
David Eagleman: And endless frontier part two looks like what though? It looks like, hey, here’s a brilliant scientist, I’m going to make sure that they have what they need to do their science.
01:16:28
Eric Weinstein: We train people we plan to employ. We stop pretending that we are going to train you up only to abandon you to say, “I can’t believe you ever got the idea you were going to have a research career.” You see, if you, if you look at Norman Steenrod, who was a mathematician active in, I don’t know, the ’40s and ’50s, all of his students survived to become professors. He has twenty-three or something, except for the last one around 1972, ’73. And if you just take N and you raise it to higher and higher powers, y- you can’t keep having twenty-three offspring and expecting them all to become professors. So you need something like youth social employment, where most of us don’t end up producing anyone. But you need to employ them, and you need to stop pretending that the graduate students are students, particularly foreign exchange students. They’re not. They’re workers. They’re workers who do not have protections of workers because you’ve classified them as students. So-
01:17:35
David Eagleman: But, but the idea is the situation we’re in now is those students are very unlikely to become professors someday because there’s just too many of them and too few-
01:17:41
Eric Weinstein: And we’re training our rivals.
01:17:43
David Eagleman: Hmm.
01:17:44
Eric Weinstein: I, I… Look, nobody has thought this through. This is a lot like what happened with USAID. USAID was a slush fund for the CIA and the State Department. So you, you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense. Why are we f- funding a transgender opera in Bolivia? I would imagine we are trying to topple the Bolivian regime, and trans issues are fabulously divisive, okay? Now, you can decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but w- we didn’t just fund that stupidly, right? That was an issue of statecraft. Okay, well, science is also an instrument of statecraft, but science is also just science. So what I’m trying to say is that rather than having these colleagues who put their finger in their cheek and say, “Gosh, gee will, you know, gee whiz, you sound like a conspiracy theorist,” it’s like, for God’s sakes, man. You’re part of the national interest complex, act like it. The Department of Energy is the Department of Physics. It’s the old AEC turned into the Department of Energy by Jimmy Carter.
01:18:49
David Eagleman: What was AEC?
01:18:50
Eric Weinstein: Atomic Energy Commission.
01:18:52
David Eagleman: Got it.
01:18:54
Eric Weinstein: You know, so the idea is, well, may- maybe it’s oil and gas. Really?
01:18:58
David Eagleman: [chuckles]
01:18:58
Eric Weinstein: Is that what they told you? Y- we have a, a fake cryptic system, and it used to work when there were smart people who could do the crypsis, and then around about 1970, it all broke. So we’re now like fifty-five years into a cryptic system that’s getting weaker and weaker all the time. We need a new Vannevar Bush, and it needs to come through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, OSTP, and it needs to go through PCAST, and it needs to go through the National Academies Complex, and it needs to be a highly elite… And, uh, the elite have a terrible name because the people we’ve been calling elite aren’t… So elite surgeons still have a, a great name, or elite athletes have a great name, or elite tier one operators in special forces have a great name, but the elite has a terrible name because that’s what we associate with Davos people gathering on their private jets to tell us to lower our carbon footprints, right? So basically, we need to go back to public-spirited elite scientists who are very well compensated, very well protected, who are public-spirited, who do not allow themselves to get pushed around trivially, but w- in a pinch know how to behave as patriotic Americans, and we need to lead the West, and we need to help out our European friends and our Japanese allies. Uh, this just isn’t that hard. It’s just nobody gets it.
01:20:23
David Eagleman: So what would you see as the path, the, the best path for us to get there?
01:20:27
Eric Weinstein: Hold a conference of smart people. Do it quietly.
01:20:33
David Eagleman: Like in Asilomar, where you’re inviting the… Who exactly? Do you invite the national interest people as well as the scientists?
01:20:39
Eric Weinstein: You figure out who knows how to play.
01:20:41
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:20:42
Eric Weinstein: And you do it as a closed conference, and everybody checks their phone at the door, and you have the people in the fields that really matter. I want cryptography people. I want people who do fundamental physics. I want people in molecular biology. And you say, “Look, we had a deal. What is our new version of that deal?” Because it’s not poverty. It’s not being precarious. It’s not begging for a gr- “Oh please, Tony Fauci, continue my funding.” We need to tell Fauci and Collins to take a hike when they are behaving counter to the interests of the United States of America and counter to the interests of science. The public needs to be able to rely on us for ground truth ninety-eight percent of the time, and the two percent that they can’t, we gotta be very careful. I understand that you have, you know, weaponized anthrax. I’m not saying be naive, publish everything, science, science, science. But for the most part, we have to be absolutely reliable. And, and we need to save theoretical physics first. Fundamental physics is in such bad shape, and you can’t peer review your way out of it because all the peers are infected with the same mind virus. So you’re just gonna get more of the same if you keep saying, “Peer, peer, peer.” You need to ask, okay-
01:22:10
David Eagleman: You’re referring, for example, to string theory here.
01:22:12
Eric Weinstein: I’m referring to particle theory of the standard model. The basis of general relativity need to be advanced, and neither of these theories is measured by their fundamental constituent, called the Lagrangian or the action. Has really moved in fifty-two years. We ca-
01:22:36
David Eagleman: And has it not moved because it’s so successful, or you’re saying it-
01:22:38
Eric Weinstein: It’s very successful.
01:22:40
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:22:40
Eric Weinstein: But imagine that you knew twenty-three of the sixty-four codons in biology, and fifty-two years later, you still knew exactly that number of codons, and you didn’t have the rest of the genetic code. Enough.
01:22:59
David Eagleman: In that analogy though, those twenty-three are still correct. We’re just looking for the remainder. But is, is that how you see the-
01:23:05
Eric Weinstein: Pretty much. The standard model’s amazing. But you know, again, Crocodile Rock is amazing, and that came from the same exact era, and I cannot stand listening to Crocodile Rock on repeat for fifty-two years.
01:23:19
David Eagleman: But is it that it’s a hard problem, and that’s why the other, uh, codons haven’t been figured out?
01:23:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a very hard problem. But it gets a lot harder when you only listen to, suspiciously, ten leaders of the field who all are interchangeably convinced of the same wrong things.
01:23:41
David Eagleman: Which is like string theory.
01:23:42
Eric Weinstein: Quantum gravity was not what we were… Well, it’s not even string theory. Who said quantum gravity was the task that we all needed to get on in nineteen eighty-three, eighty-four? Who, who, who said that the standard model is ugly? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Who said that we stop l- listening to our colleagues and we call them names as opposed to saying, “Well, do you have a different idea?” I… There is no world in which our physics thing makes sense except for a security context. So either we now have the world’s worst accidental, um, culture in fundamental physics, or we have a security regime in which we’re not supposed to actually advance, and what we’re doing is safe.
01:24:30
David Eagleman: Does that mean that in that model, that somebody has broken through that wall, and they met security on the other side?
01:24:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, there was this… Well, we don’t know. I mean, I, I’m, I’m almost positive that we don’t have a fundamental theory.
01:24:42
David Eagleman: Okay.
01:24:44
Eric Weinstein: But you know, we know that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were in the White House during the Biden administration, and they said they were told, “Don’t invest in AI startups because we’re not going to allow them to continue.” And these guys said, “Well, what do you mean? It’s just based on math. You can’t outlaw math.” And they said, “We will classify math just the way we classified fields of theoretical physics.” Hmm. Okay. So nobody knows what that means. Didn’t sound like it was just nuclear physics. I highly recommend everyone go to a website run by Alex Wellerstein, who’s at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. And he is, I think, the world expert on the atomic security. And you can learn all the things we did around science, around nuclear weapons from his sites. So we can just know. We don’t have to guess or speculate as to what it looks like when national interest and science run into each other. We can say, oh, here’s what happened.
01:25:52
David Eagleman: Like scientists’ ideas were shut down from the public, that kind of thing? Or what are we talking about?
01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: Newspaper stories were spiked. Disinformation was distributed in the scientific literature. Volumes were taken off of the shelves that were thought to be advantageous to the enemy. Review boards were set up that would intermediate between journals and researchers in case somebody submitted something that might have security implications. So we know exactly what it looks like when the national interest complex decides that something like neutrons is too dangerous to simply do as gee whiz science. Right? And so as a result of this, if you tell me, well, Eric, that’s conspiracy theorizing, I’m just going to tell you, go find a blog called Restricted Data, knock yourself out, and tell me why you imagine that secret facilities, secret protocols, secret agreements aren’t all through national interest interfaces with the scientific community. Because clearly we know that that has been the case. We have it documented eight ways to Sunday. Why are you claiming that this is somehow the product of an overactive imagination? You’re just not well-read.
01:27:15
David Eagleman: But in some sense, you’re in favor of that, right? In the sense of the, call it the 2% of science that you think for national security interests should be masked, you would or wouldn’t be in favor of-
01:27:29
Eric Weinstein: I’m in favor of getting rid of the G. Willikers attitude towards science. It’s garish. Science is fun enough. Science is too important. We have the right to national security interests, and we have the right to not have national security interests completely destroy our credibility with each other, the public, and the world. And so the issue is, I want a high-resolution relationship where we think a great deal about these issues. We continue to going back. If it can’t be done in an open environment, take it into the national labs. If it can’t be done in the national labs, do it in an unannounced facility. But what I don’t want is I don’t want us training up super smart people who can see through the lies, not being told that they’re part of some sort of agreement that they never signed up for, and sitting there getting destroyed through, let’s say, covert influence campaigns where suddenly, you know, every time you say anything in public, there’s 150 accounts that suspiciously never have people behind them that are constantly snarking at you. I mean, whatever this thing is, it’s intolerable, and we should put a bullet through it. We should drive a stake through its heart and kill off whatever this thing is in favor of a reasonable agreement between the scientific world, the tech world, and the national interest world.
01:28:58
David Eagleman: And your point is that if scientists grow up understanding that that’s the situation, that the stuff they do matters, then we can deal with this in a different way.
01:29:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and if you’re not okay with this, there are plenty of careers for you.
01:29:09
David Eagleman: Yeah.
01:29:10
Eric Weinstein: If you want to believe that somehow science is just about open inquiry and gee whiz. Look, I’m all for cowboys. I’m all for hyper-independence. I view Ayn Rand as a collectivist. I am off the charts individualist, but I’m not stupid. And so my claim is, is that an Oppenheimer, a von Neumann, a Feynman worked within a world in which they respected the national security complex. Put somebody at the top like a Leslie Groves and you’ll get compliance. But you can’t have this as some sort of low-level administrative thing. This is life and death to the United States and China is going to eat our lunch. I guarantee it. They will hire our best people away because we are in some sort of a mental spiral where we’re going straight down the drain because we don’t think that a scientist should be able to check in at the Four Seasons without thinking about it. That they shouldn’t be able to fly business class. That they shouldn’t have a retirement and a second home. And I just, I want the people who think that that’s garish and that this is like, as the phrase goes, welfare queens and white lab coats. I want them to choke on this particular furball. And I want them to recognize, no, what you did is you took the world’s greatest scientific community. You asked them to keep you safe. You asked them to keep you rich. And you told them to stay outside while you held a party. Enough. It’s over.
01:30:41
David Eagleman: That was my conversation with Eric Weinstein. So wrapping this up, generally when we talk about science, we think of discoveries as having a pretty simple structure. A paper gets published or a breakthrough gets announced. Maybe a prize is awarded. But the truth is that underneath every insight is a huge scaffolding of institutions and incentives and traditions and also unspoken rules. That scaffolding shapes which questions feel askable and which ideas feel risky and which paths seem invisible until someone insists on walking them anyway. Conversations like today’s remind us that science is not just a method for understanding the world. It is also a human system with pressures and power dynamics that influence its trajectory. Paying attention to that system, questioning how it works and who it serves and how it evolves, this might be as important as any single experiment. Go to eagleman.com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my Substack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time, I’m David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
