Eric Weinstein on Edugenic Harm and Neurodiversity (Audio Content)

Eric Weinstein on Edugenic Harm and Neurodiversity is episode 200 of the Teach Me, Teacher audio podcast by Jacob Chastain with guest Eric Weinstein.

Eric Weinstein on Edugenic Harm and Neurodiversity
Information
Host(s)	Jacob Chastain
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	02:11:56
Release Date	3 March 2021
Links
Teach Me, Teacher Website	Listen
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Description

When I started Teach Me, Teacher in 2016, I did so with the goal to talk to great educators in my building. Season 1 of the podcast was entirely made up of the teachers I knew, and a cheap USB mic I plugged into my Mac.

Today, we have featured some of the top minds in education, such as Donalyn Miller, Kelly Gallagher, Hamish Brewer, Todd Whitaker, and Kim Bearden (among others.)

To add to this list in a major way, and to celebrate 200 episodes, I had the privilege of sitting down with Eric Weinstein—one of the major voices in the intellectual spaces of the internet. Eric Weinstein is an American commentator, the managing director of Thiel Capital, and host of The Portal podcast.

His story, and his son’s story, about being constantly overlooked, punished, and mentally abused by a system that is supposed to educate everyone, is powerful. It is a story we can all learn from, use to inform our own practices, and advocate for a better tomorrow in our schools.

Drawing on the parallel between iatrogenic harm (the harm caused inadvertently by the process of treatment), and what happens when educators make wrong decisions that hurt students, Eric makes his case for looking at educational malpractice through a lens of edugenics (harm caused inadvertently in the process of teaching.)

At the heart of this talk, is an honest look at what the brightest kids suffer through in school, and how many schools do not serve the neurodiverse in meaningful ways. This 2 hour discussion goes into both our histories, how they look similar and different, and how the many problems in education today may be the driving force for meaningful change from those who care the most… TEACHERS.

Transcript

Jacob Chastain 0:00 Hello everyone and welcome to teach me teacher podcast for educators where we the teachers become students ourselves. Here we learn with laughter, music and the latest research in experts across the field of education. But more importantly, we learn to honest conversations with real world teacher administrators in the classrooms are experiencing. To date. I'm your host Jacob chesty and enter daily Jimmy, you're listening to Episode 200 of the Teach me teacher podcast is a special occasion. So we had to do something a little extra brought on someone who I am a massive fan of. He is a fiend in the world of intellectual discourse. He's one of the people who coined the phrase, the intellectual, dark web. If you are familiar with any of these people who are kind of quote unquote, associated with the intellectual dark web, then you know who he is he has been featured on Joe Rogan. He's been on Lex Friedman's podcast. He's on his own podcast, which is the portal He's everywhere. He's been killing it over there on clubhouse app on Twitter and Instagram. His name is Eric Weinstein, you guys and we are going to be talking about neurodiversity. And more importantly, why schools are not equipped to handle neuro diverse students? Why are we failing them? And how we should be thinking about in this service is a long conversation. We talked about way more than that, in this conversation. But strap up, ladies and gentlemen, is a two hour talk where we dive deep into so many topics, Eric is not someone that you split into parts, nothing like that. So you get the full one. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I definitely did you know this is something that we want more of on the Teacher Teacher podcast, then I can definitely make that happen. This is kind of like a moment of intellectual discourse for education. And I think after you listen to this full episode, you will be on board with the a lot of concepts that we talked about here and be fired up to really serve our students the best ways that we know how but before we get to that conversation, guys, I want to tell you, this episode is sponsored by high demand the leading publisher professional books and resources for educators in their professional book risk fail rise, a Teacher's Guide to learning from mistakes by Colleen Cruz. And here's the thing we've talked about this book all month, we talked about it in a previous month. This is a fantastic book, you need this specifically right now because people are making mistakes. Mistakes should be in head all over the place in terms of online teaching hybrid teaching in person teaching everywhere. And what this book does is it normalizes mistake making in a way that is empowering to the teacher empowering to the students and really empowering to education because mistakes are where things happen if we punish mistakes and create this, this binary look at mistake making, we are not servicing students in the ways that they need to be served. So go check out this book is absolutely amazing. Go learn from mistakes, learn how to incorporate those into your life, go to hide them in.com. For more information, you can find all those links at Teach me teacher podcast.com. But guys, without further ado, let's go to my conversation with none other than Eric Weinstein, talking about neurodiversity in our classrooms, and how we can better serve our students. I hope you enjoy this episode. This is Episode 200. Thank you for everyone that has listened up until this point that has made teaching teacher what it is you guys cannot thank you enough. Let's get started. Already, Eric, how are we doing today?

Eric Weinstein 4:08 Good to be with you. You're out there in Texas. I'm here in California. So I think our various losses are your gains these days. So treat them well.

Jacob Chastain 4:20 Yeah, there is a changes happening. And I'm curious at what that ends up looking like for Texas. In the long run. You know, I'm not one of these particularly proud Texans. You know, there's a there's a certain Texan that people think about when they're like, yes, Texas, Texas, I just, it's just where I've always lived. I just don't my pride doesn't get associated that way. So I'm interested to see how people react as more and more people from your area come over here which seems to be happening.

Eric Weinstein 4:49 Let's mess with Texas and see if she calls back for a second date.

Jacob Chastain 4:54 Yeah, so a lot of people in the teacher space might not be familiar with you. I mean, if they listen to podcast Do you I mean, you've been on Dave Rubin, you've been on Joe Rogan, you've been on Alex's podcast. And I mean pretty much everywhere. So if they're in this space at all, they have come across your name. But for people that might not be familiar with your work or familiar with just what you do in general, what's, uh, how do you introduce yourself about your how you exist in kind of this intellectual space of the internet?

Eric Weinstein 5:23 Well, I usually go with the title of imposter. But when I don't use imposter, I usually use managing director or host of the portal. I'm the managing director of teal capital. And I host a podcast called the portal, which is basically about trying to find an escape from limited thinking and try to figure out if we're only looking at shadows on the wall, is there any way out of the cave, to actually understand what's going on? by training, supposedly, I'm a PhD mathematician focused on theoretical physics and applications to economics. I've been in finance space, I've sort of roamed around the technical universe, from computer programming, to differential geometry, to interest in particle theory, finance, economics, theory of welfare, immigration. And those those areas have been my life, I just sort of have tried to view technical interest as a passport, to all of the things that impact us as humans most deeply.

Jacob Chastain 6:36 I'm so interested in just how well you how deep that you're willing to go in a lot of these conversations. And I've, you know, one of the things that I found with teaching is that there was, there was a lot of podcasts at the time when teaching teachers started that there were not a lot of detailed conversations happening, it was like, every podcast was like 10 minutes, five minute like snapshots and still those crop up every day. And I was like, Where's the long form, I was like, education is so deep and varied, and there's so many nuances, and there's changes, and there's all of these elements and bigger concepts that affect education in a variety of ways. And I was like, how are we having conversations about these that are so short, and so like, I felt like it was almost like my own personal crusade to kind of, you know, I saw it was happening in the intellectual space, and just these longer form conversations that people were able to have. And I was like, why aren't these happening education? And, and more specifically, why aren't people that are, quote, unquote, you know, members of the intellectual side of things like why don't people talk about education so much. And that's why I was so excited when you were willing to come on the podcast, because it actually seems like you are wanting to at least begin this dialogue. I want to know what's interesting you in education to where you're, you're pushing for a broader conversation about this.

Eric Weinstein 8:04 It's an interesting point. I mean, I think that the issue about short form is that there really only two ways to do short form. Short Form either proceeds from a brilliant perspective, as in the micro story, for sale baby shoes, never worn. The, you know, that takes genius to write something that can break your heart with six words. The other way of doing it, of course, is to appeal to stock concepts. And that's what you do and you have no time to develop a story, you know, the, the person who's an idiot, you you make them a cheerleader, you know, even even if cheerleaders have at or above average intelligence, you appeal to a stock fiction. And so by using you know, the bad guy has um, handlebar mustache so that way you don't have to waste time on character development because all sorts of things are understood client side in the minds of your audience to mean things already. That's what really happens in short form is that all we can do is play around with the wrong ideas that have already been put in our head. And so if our head is filled up with malware, short form allows you to play with the malware. And you know, the only thing you can usually make out of broken Lego is broken machines. So those conversations are very dangerous. Long Form is different long form gives you the opportunity for frame break. And when someone hands you a frame it's of course impolite not to play inside of it, if that allows you to say what you need to say why breaker frame if you don't need to, but most frames come out of that malware. And so in general, if you think about trade disagree ability in terms of Big Five personality inventory The only place that you really get to see your top thinkers is in long form, because they that the only place that that interesting ideas can be made to make sense. So my interest in education is that I think that what you guys do is potentially, you know, close to being, if not the most important thing we can do as a society. And you're given tremendous responsibility for not programming the next generation, but giving them the tools so that they can self author and self program. And the question of whether that happens, or whether it doesn't, is a different question, but let's at least agree that the mission of a teacher is about the most important thing that is handed to anyone in a society, you know, the military defense of the Republic, if it's under threat would be, you know, something that might occasionally go above that. Health, you know, physician healing. And so you have this really interesting situation, that you've got a tiny number of professions that can lay claim to being the most important in a society.

Jacob Chastain 11:15 One of the things that I have consistently, I was frustrated with and still am, to a certain degree, it's a little different now that, you know, there's I've built a somewhat of a platform to attract the right minded people who want to have certain discussions and be a part of solutions and really analyze some of the, the the pillars of what makes good education. Before that, and still today, it's I run into people who are teachers that it's almost like they're, there's people who are extremely passionate about what they do, and they're very dedicated. And then there's a lot of people who have gotten into education for what I kind of say is the wrong reasons, you know, they the money. Yeah, definitely, because we're all we're all definitely slinging the checks around. But they it's just when a lot of people, for instance, like this teaching during a pandemic, for instance, has, I think, opened up a lot of eyes to education, but a lot of people in education realize that, you know, this isn't even close to what they signed up for. And they're leaving. And we always talk about teacher shortages, teacher shortages. But I think honestly, there's, we I've always felt passionate about changing the narrative of education, and

Eric Weinstein 12:33 You don't have a teacher shortage, you have a money shortage.

Jacob Chastain 12:36 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 12:36 If you offered enough money to teach properly, you would not have a shortage, labor shortages. Long term labor shortages do not exist in advanced market economies. The wage mechanism? I mean, I have to explain this over and over again, it's very strange. Whenever people refuse to pay for something, they have a shortage of it, and they complain about that. But let me complain about the Lamborghini shortage in my driveway. No, seriously, it's a serious problem. There are no Lamborghinis in my driveway. And, and I've wanted a Lamborghini. I mean, who doesn't want a Lamborghini? But why is it that I don't have a Lamborghini, I could probably scrape up everything I've got and plunk it down and just say, I need a Lamborghini. And I believe they would sell me one. So why do I have a Lamborghini shortage? Because I don't feel like paying for a Lamborghini. And we don't feel like paying for you. And that I think that is, well, first of all, a lot of you guys are dedicated and caring, and you want to leave a stain on human history. And every year you get a new crop of kids. Let's imagine you're teaching grade school and you have one class of 20 or 30, I don't know. You've got 20, 30 mines. And I remember the name of all of those people. And anything that they did, pretty much I remember from first grade on. So that's a hell of a payment structure. People are willing to take a deep discount in terms of their financial reward for their summers off, and the right to be remembered by the young minds that may turn back and say, you know, that teacher I had in third grade changed everything. That really opened my eyes, we were staring at a grasshopper and I started to see things I never thought were true. Blah, blah, blah. And it put me on a path. And now look at me, right? That payment variable is psychic reward. So you get paid in a blended payment stream. And that blended payment stream is some amount of job security so you have lower variation. If you have teachers security, 10 years something like that. You get your summers off which is super valuable in terms of labor, leisure trade offs, if you want them, many of you don't want them, you would rather work over your summers. And you have the ability to completely change the lives of everyone who passes through your classroom. And if you do that, well, you know what you did on this world in this world made a difference. So in part, that's why your money is so low. The other reason is, is because kids can advocate for better teachers, and they don't have much like, try turning a kid upside down and shaking the lunch money out of his pockets. There's not much so because we're not serving people who can actually vote and not serving people who can pay directly there. Is this indirect level do parents do? Do cities do do states? Do they care enough? And, quite honestly, we can look at your salaries and infer just exactly how much they do care.

Jacob Chastain 16:01 Right. And this how all of this kind of came to be is really fascinating. There's an interesting book called The Rise and Fall of the great American school system, about kind of the standards of movement. And then how that transitioned into the accountability movement. And basically, the the business ification of education, and how this model has essentially created a punishment structure with no real tangible rewards so that people that stay in, you know, they like you said, they have they can they get job security, and we make differences, and we get paid in those ways.

Eric Weinstein 16:39 That's commie talk. Sounds like you want to leave children behind. And I thought we were doing something different. Look

Jacob Chastain 16:48 Oh, man.

Eric Weinstein 16:49 You know, this is just this is the madness. The madness is that the wrong people are at the top of education. And the movement for education is done in a particular way that makes so far as I can tell no sense. And we keep it sort of in a meta stable state. So every time you try to tweak it and adjust it, you know, you're sitting in a very high potential well, and you're trying to get over the edge to go down. But every time you go up, there's this resistance. And so it just stays in stupid.

Jacob Chastain 17:27 There is I have found that so one of the things that I'm really interested in is kind of your experience with just education from a personal standpoint, because, you know, we talked a little bit before the show, and just how you mentioned how you really didn't have Is it fair to say that you did not enjoy the majority of your education through the school system

Eric Weinstein 17:50 We have to we have to be careful here. I'm a person who's tried my hands handed, I don't know maybe eight languages. I play it probably five different musical instruments. I'm interested in math, physics, biology, computers, finance, love poetry. I am the ultimate candidate for education. And I think you guys are the most important professions. And I am desperate to get you more money. Now that said, I cannot remember a single positive year in a, an educators classroom, when somebody introduces themselves to me as an educator. My reaction is visceral, and it is wholly negative. It is, is basically like somebody saying, you know, I'm a prison guard with violent tendencies. It's not some sort of Ed fix. It's not some sort of childish vendetta. It's the recognition that you guys have a systemic problem that is at the level of pedophile priests. And in a world in which you cannot easily question entire systems. Nobody has actually defined the problem and the problem is what I would call Well, let's do it in parallel. We had this issue with medicine, when people had a doctor came in in a white coat with a stethoscope around the neck. And a nurse, you know, with a clipboard next next to the doctor. You had the sense that you were talking to a priestly class Otherwise, why the white robe and what we didn't really understand was a concept that became known as i estrogenic x I estrogenic. harm is the harm done by healers to their patients. I estrogenic harm turned out to be an enormous, I mean, just a spell bindingly large issue, and a lot of the procedures that we now have in hospitals to make sure we don't amputate the wrong leg or give you 10 times the dosage so that we're off by an order of magnitude, the checklist, all of these things come out of the recognition that healers were doing a tremendous amount of the harm to the sick, and the needy, we do not yet have a concept of endogenic harm, the harm done by educators to students, and that channel will change everything once once we define edgy, genic harm. If we're confident that this is a crazy idea, then you have no danger from it, you'll simply define the term and then you'll happily find out that the term is about 0.0001. We can congratulate ourselves and move on that teachers are doing no harm. I do not know what that's like. I cannot tell you how bizarre my understanding of the classroom is. It's just I mean, if you looked at my my record, I was a pretty good student in elementary school. Up until about fourth grade, I get skipped over fifth grade. I'm already young. So I'm a young fifth grader who gets instantly moved into sixth grade. I moved to the probably top rated middle and high school in Los Angeles private from a public school. I go to an Ivy League undergraduate school start at the age of 16. I have a master's degree by the age of 19. And I'm off to Harvard University with the top fellowship in my pocket to study the hardest field of mathematics at the top place. That story masks a completely different experience. I mean an experience the depths of depression and self doubt the inability to understand what was going on the constant feeling of drowning of suffocation of being hated of being hounded to being hunted. And I think that that, you know, people will find had Garry Kasparov on my show the great chess champion. And Gary is one of the most forceful human beings you will ever meet in your life a you know, Jewish Armenian Russian world chess champion. My personality is constructed to be able to go up against Garry Kasparov. Now you can say why what have you been through the Battle of Stalingrad now, I've been through the classroom baby in the classroom, you are so outgunned by your teacher, whatever your teacher says, right or wrong, fair or unfair, kind or cruel, underhanded or straightforward. goes. your rights are not the rights of an adult. They're not the rights of appear. You are effectively a captive in somebody else's self created world. And the only way I was able, I mean, one thing we you know, that happens is it in sixth grade, I end up in a guy named Bill Murray Wilson's class Bill Murray Wilson class, and Bill Murray Wilson was a lovely guy. I liked him. By the way, he had a Porsche, which we thought was pretty cool. So played the guitar. So that didn't suck. But But I, I couldn't understand anything that was going on in his class. I couldn't, I couldn't make heads or tails of the thing we were being taught. And it wasn't his fault. It was that somehow the symbolic load had ramped up from fourth grade. And I was in fifth grade for like a couple of weeks or something. Before they skipped me, and I started feeling it, then I knew that if I had stayed in fifth grade, I would have done terribly. And in sixth grade, I effectively failed. And the only reason I got into the swanky High School was because I was being evaluated on my fourth grade performance, which hadn't gone to hell yet. So you know, there's this massive cliff, where I was, you know, we used to have this thing that at Third Street elementary school called special class where the gifted kids, as we were called them were plucked out and we went to a special room and we did special things. So there was already an interesting caste system.

Jacob Chastain 17:50 They still have that, actually.

Eric Weinstein 24:22 Oh, yeah?

Jacob Chastain 24:23 Yeah, that's still very much in play. It happens more in elementary schools where kids they take, you know, the various, whatever test there's a few different ones that they do, and depending on the state, it changes, but we have classes in elementary that identifies gifted and talented kids, and then they get pulled by somebody and do what you just said, where they, you know, they kind of create this little cohort, so to speak of kids that ends up dropping off in middle school, they end up they end up being in what we call pre AP or honors classes in middle school, which is the idea is to get them into AP classes in high school and then they get their college credits, but that trajectories exactly what you're talking about is still there?

Eric Weinstein 25:03 Well, it's interesting because if I didn't have that, I don't think I would have a PhD from Harvard. Because what happened was around age 10 or so, from about age 10, to about age 17, I could not buy a bass hit educationally to save my life. I have a little bit more insight on that now, but let me just for example, read my final report card that I found going through some boxes recently. Sure. AP Physics mechanics Clark. First Quarter c plus second quarter b minus third quarter B Final Grade B minus calculus A B with Peggy Petra, Nina. First Quarter B second quarter c third quarter b minus Final Grade B minus AP European history with Mr. lander, b minus c plus b Final Grade B. The only a that occurs here anywhere by the way that my English grades from Susie Moser b minus b b. And the only a I get is in TV and film criticism by the way, Mr. Pendergast gives me an A, the only way I was able to get to the University of Pennsylvania was none of anybody's business. They were trying. They were trying to expand into Los Angeles. They had an East Coast presence and a funny name that didn't indicate it was a an Ivy League school. But that ability to somehow using test scores, my original test scores on the LSAT were 1280. Okay, but nothing to write home about. That failed person is the person who sits in front of you today. And that person should have gotten more D's and F's, but I'm excessively charming. And let me tell you something. charm is incredibly important. Because at some level, they don't. They know that what they're doing is wrong. They know that the system doesn't work for you. If I if I wasn't charming, and part of the reason like I'm looking at you wearing a T shirt. I am here in a jacket, and a button down shirt during quarantine. Because I can't afford to do what you do. I have to be so charming and so perfect. In so many ways and my diction. I have to be kind. I have to be funny. Because your your fingers were around my throat for seven years at least. And I can't tell you what the experience of that is the trauma. For some reason, my learning profile is always going to communicate the same thing to you. Holy cow, is this kid interested in the material? Oh my god, are these great conversations? Why is the piece of paper he turns in crumpled? Why does Why do the letters fall off the right hand side of the page? Why does he have random capitalizations? in his words? Where is this punctuation coming from? Does he did he learn from the MLA handbook or E Cummings? You know, and you're gonna say the same thing to me over and Eric, can you just do what we ask? And I can't figure out what you're asking for. And I can't figure out how to control all of these quirks that drama of the teacher who starts to hate the student because the student is revealing something and I think this is the key point about what neuro diversity does neuro diversity proves that the teacher is not doing what the teacher signed up to do initially. They've got the dream kit they've got the kid who cares about the material is doing outside work who's going above and beyond but cannot for the life of that kid figure out how to do what is asked and this comes to the one of the biggest scourges in all of education is egalitarianism. Now a gala terian ism sounds pretty good right? We have to be fair to everybody we have to be very inclusive. But what a gala terian ism means in practice is entirely different. And because it has a such a I mean, I think it's important to realize it has a feel good to it. If you don't understand that egalitarian ism makes us feel good, you won't understand how much evil can actually be actually be loaded into that Trojan horse. That concept means that if Timmy and Sally you know on one side and and and Tyrone and an Aisha you know in front and in back aren't being treated the same way is the kid who's neurodiverse The idea is some terrible thing will have been done to Timmy and Sally and I should Tyra. And so it can't be that we can recognize that something special is happening in some of our students chairs, we have to say I'm sorry. But if I treated you differently, I would have to be unfair to everyone else. And that is where you guys go terribly wrong. You've got to get over yourselves. You got to stop being fair to Timmy and Sally, and Ayesha and Tyrone, it's enough. The person in that chair, who cares more, who thinks harder, who works harder, who you cannot reach is not that kid in that chair is not the problem, you are the problem. You the educator who cannot figure out how to tell your lesson, you have a teaching disability. And the concept of teaching disability is so foreign. We say learning disability or learning difference? Well, you have a teaching difference, you're not capable. Now, on a report card, there are three components to what what the child gets as the assessment. There's what's ever going wrong or right with the child. But then there's what's ever going wrong or right with the fit between the teacher and the child. And then there's whatever is going wrong or right with the teacher. The student will bear the cost of all three inputs. And what you did is you bled all over every assessment. Every parent teacher conference, you told my parents the same thing. Eric is not living up to his potential. Eric needs to try harder. No, you have a problem.

And not only do you have a problem, you know, you have a problem. And not only that I'm not the last of my kind. Because evolution selects for us. We keep coming and coming and coming at you. We might represent as much as 15% of your classroom. And somewhere in the back of your head, there's a voice saying I am destroying the future of our country. My job is to make sure that the people most likely to Zig when everyone else Zags, zag with everybody else. Because the economics of catering to one effing kid who over and over again doesn't follow directions doesn't seem to be able to understand but yet evidence is incredible abilities. For example, you will tell you will say well, you may you may have attention deficit disorder. Okay. How do you explain the fact that I spent 18 hours trying to learn some piece of mathematical physics when when I'm a teenager, you know, easily in a stretch? Maybe I could do that five days a week, I could spend 18 hours a day focused on one thing. And you're going to call it what attention deficit disorder? Do you ever feel silly to ever feel scared you ever feel like you want to medicate that person? You want to give that person a drug to change their neuro chemistry when you know that they may be kicking ass. And it would be better to literally drug the student to get them into a compliant mode. Rather than say, you know what, we may have something amazing on our hands. What do we do to cater to it? I don't know. We can't do that. Because Timmy and Sally, that won't be fair to me and Sally, and if Tyrone and his parents find out about this, we've got real problems. No, you've got real problems if you medicate the kid. And I hate to say this, but probably the greatest thing that happened to education during my time in the in the system was that Pink Floyd the wall came out.

Jacob Chastain 33:40 So I want to really dive into your I want to dive into what this experience was because this is I don't know, I feel like you and I almost have we have opposite experiences in the educational system in a variety of ways. Like I so my mom and dad were they were drug addicts, their whole life, their drug of choice, were prescription pills and things like that. So I never knew like in elementary school, like I would be waiting like outside to get picked up. Right? I never knew like if mom was going to pick me up that day. Or if we were going to swerve all over the road on my way home. So a lot of my teachers knew about some of this stuff. And they school ended up being a refuge and a lot of different ways and Middle School kind of when my family fell apart, not Middle School is very blurry for me because that was when a lot of home stuff was going on but high school my mom ends up going to jail. My dad's out of the picture. Her boyfriend gives me like a like $100 a week or whatever to buy food which I buy frozen burritos and ramen and just stash them in my apartment. I don't have a driver's license. And so I'm driving to school every day, and those a lot of those teachers though they were the ones who They they brought me in they they kept me sane in a lot of ways. But here's the thing. I failed classes all the time, partly because some a lot of the times I didn't show up to school. I had to retake math a million times in summer school at least a semester every year.

Eric Weinstein 35:15 Are you good at it?

Jacob Chastain 35:16 No, I'm horrible.

Eric Weinstein 35:17 You sure?

Jacob Chastain 35:17 The only well, that. So here's the thing. I had one math teacher, that I that pushed me in summer school. And I was really passionate. So in high school, I got really into Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, right. And the the religious arguments happening, kind of in the early days of YouTube, when, like the discourse was really kind of starting. And I was, I was fascinated by that. And I wanted to, I kind of cut my teeth a lot of ways in reading their books, and watching their lectures and debates and wanting to debate with people. And I brought this into the summer school class. And he started encouraging me to use that interest ball incorporating that that was the most fun I had ever had in math. But my whole life, I've had this belief that I was really kind of bad at math, or couldn't do that. But English. Meanwhile, I never really passed English very much. But my teachers I would do. So we had to, there was one project that we did where I had to, we had to recite poetry on camera, my cousin worked at a music studio, and I'd been playing drums and my whole life. So we went into the studio created this huge production, and wrote a song and did all of this. And so that was what got me interested in school. But if you're having me read, you know, The Great Gatsby or something like that, I pretty much checked out because I was in the library reading a brief history of time by Hawkins you know what I mean? So that was that was my education. But I have such I loved my teachers to such a large degree

Eric Weinstein 36:45 Let's talk about the difference in our experiences, because I'd love to figure this out. Sure. You're in public school or private school?

Jacob Chastain 36:53 Public. I'm in the same district I went to school in.

Eric Weinstein 36:56 What do you think accounts? Like One of my earliest memories of schools in first grade? I am thrown out of first grade. Bye, Mrs. Buck era, Mrs. Buck euro is incensed, because I have claimed that a spider is not an insect, and she is convinced that it is an insect. And that I am. I'm an idiot, I am disruptive. I have an authoritarian, anti authoritarian, complex, something blah, blah, blah. And I'm humiliated and forced to sit outside of the class. But first of all, maybe we should talk about our differences in ages. I'm 55, you?

Jacob Chastain 37:41 I'm 30.

Eric Weinstein 37:43 Okay. So, interestingly, education changed a bit, probably over 25 years. But my mom comes to pick me up after the kids are induced to humiliate me for being an idiot for thinking that a spider is not an insect. I asked my mom on the way home, I'm crying, I think holding back tears, you know, like, what do I have wrong that I think it's an arachnid. And she says, My dear, don't take this the wrong way. But your teacher is and is an idiot. Your teachers a moron. Now, I didn't always have the best relationship with my own parents. And by the way, here's my experience walking to school was that I, I think I walked to school from like, first grade or something like that. And I remember there was a tunnel under Third Street, where weirdos and drug addicts would hang out and they would spray paint, the mirrors that eventually got put in and they'd harass the little kids. And the urine was just I mean, it was a really scary walk to school. So I think you have to just appreciate that the time was very different children were given ridiculous levels of autonomy and responsibility, which doesn't seem to be the case. After a time Pat's goes on the milk cartons and the missing children bring all the kids inside. In my era, school fights were very, very regular. You were expected to have gotten into several fist fights. I know that many of my millennial friends have never been in a single fistfight. And teachers were absolutely brutal and they would humiliate students and there was no thought that this was abnormal. So part of what I remember is being humiliated for getting things right, being humiliated for not being compliant. And the thing that I want to emphasize is that my recollection of this is that it was wall to wall there was no break in the phalanx. There wasn't a teacher who said, Look, I understand you, I get you. I mean, I I'm still in contact with Mr. Mickelson. He was very decent. I liked him a lot. But when it came to instruction he had to, he had to screw me over. There was just no two ways about it. Anything else was unfair. So I'm very curious as to is this Texas versus California? Is this my experience in the 1970s? versus yours? When in the 1990s?

Jacob Chastain 40:22 Yeah, pretty much I graduated high school in Oh, nine. So but the i don't know, i that is an interesting question. Because I hear I, you're, I mean, put anything side by side, I think we suffered from different issues, I think you, you're, what it sounds like is that your intellect, the way the system was built for you, is it didn't allow your intellect to flourish in any type of meaningful way. So while everybody tected my intellect, yeah, hunted down to extinction. But why? It sounds ludicrous, though, right? When we're sitting here talking about this, it's like, we're talking about education. Like, if anything, our system should be designed to let you flourish like you, you're you. And I'll mention your son here. Because I know I, I've seen him off and I listened to your podcast with him and the kids. Brilliant, but the you know, you're you're a step above, where I'm at, like, I don't, I have interest, and I have things that drive me and a lot of different ways.

Eric Weinstein 41:28 I'm so moved by your story, I mean, your story is a story of triumph. And I think that one of the things that I'm trying to get at, and the reason that I don't start off being I started off is wildly pro education. I hear people say the statement that one special teacher changes, everything took an interest to cause me to believe in myself. I never met that person. Not once. And you know, my son duplicated many of the same features. He so his name is Dr. Weinstein. You saw him on the Lex Friedman podcast? Is that where you saw him, or?

Jacob Chastain 42:06 Yeah, and I heard him in your episode that you did on the portal with them.

Eric Weinstein 42:10 So you know, he's in middle school, and we find out that he's in trouble. This is at a school before he went to this one. And it was actually the most positive of his schools today. But he was a there was a mandatory assembly. And he went, and they had a special speaker come in, and speaker speaker was talking about consent. And speaker made the point that your consent is very important. And even though you're a child consent always matters. Do not think because your child consent doesn't matter. And you Only you can give your consent, and no one can force you to do otherwise. Does anyone have any questions? So he raises his hand and he says, Then why is this assembly mandatory? Okay, well, instant trouble. Nobody checked to see whether what they were saying was making sense. You know, it wasn't a textured message about in these cases, you have consent in these cases you don't. Nobody's ever answered the question, what happens when you have a bad authority figure? Like, you know, these are the sorts of who watches the watchers questions that every smart kid comes up with? And I think, why do I get the call? If there's a mandatory consent? And the kid asks the obvious question. I mean, who teaches the class? Like, here's how to deal with disingenuous speech? Or here's how to deal with hypocrisy on the part of your betters. He doesn't know he thinks he's there to learn, you know, that. There'll be a question where somebody will say, you know, the teacher will say that Oskar Schindler, you know, was the most important. Savior, Gentile savor, the savior of Jews during the Holocaust. And they'll say, actually, you know, am I right, that Raul Wallenberg, you know, is an order of magnitude different, boom, automatic, you know, call to the parents about disruption? Well, that thing is different than what you're talking about. I mean, maybe the idea is that we could compare these two things and say, had I been in need of saving from a more traditional angle? Maybe that plays into a savior complex that the teacher is actually in a psychodrama. And the psychodrama is, I can take the kid with drug addicted parents and a parent in jail. And I can be the white knight who rescues the needy child and lifts that child up. It may be that this actually has to do with the narcissism of teaching and If so, you know, I'm moved by story, I gotta admit, it's a hell of a thing you've overcome, sir. And hats off to you.

Jacob Chastain 45:11 Well, you know, what's funny about that is I, I, I've always said that like, even though education was such a huge role, like so, when I graduated, I didn't really know what I was going to do. I didn't have any money. So I was working. I lived with my girlfriend at the time, who became my wife, and we had a kid when I was 20. And I was just kind of on this road. But I stayed in contact with one of my high school teachers who taught me twice. She taught me freshman year, and she taught me my senior year. And we're still friends today. Now we're colleagues, we I've helped her do some trainings and stuff for her teachers. And she

Eric Weinstein 45:45 That's gotta be pretty amazing.

Jacob Chastain 45:46 Oh, it's, it's wild. Like it was. I mean, there she is. She's been a constant mentor. I was her a part of her first class, her first year of teaching. And there's, we have a lot of good memories together. But she, she's still this mentor. But you know what she did, though, she, I remember this lesson very clearly. Where she, it was like day one, day two, like, intro into freshman year, she put up this painting. And she was like, I want you to just write about it. And this was one of my very few early experiences. It feels my teaching today as an English teacher that I was allowed to approach this however I wanted to, and that day, I decided to I created some narrative. I don't remember what it was, but about whatever it was, and it was, it was a moment of freedom in my education that I feel this, I feel like that is what your story and story of your son kind of do you think is that what's lacking is a freedom to approach.

Eric Weinstein 46:45 Remember incidents that go in opposite directions, I'm sitting in an English class in high school. And the teacher says, Okay, I want you to just let your mind go, I want you to get into a disinhibited state. And I want you to learn about flow. And I'm going to read a passage and then I'm going to ask you questions, and there are no wrong answers. Great. teacher says, When I was a child, when I was a child, all world words were brightly colored. murder and harlot were dark purple. So then she illustrates whatever type of speech that is, I don't know whether it's simile or an analogy, or synesthesia, who knows, I don't care. Then she says, "Can anyone think of a yellow word? Eric." I look up, and I said, "Urine." Boom, I'm ejected from class immediately. Immediately. There are no wrong answers. I can't for the life of me figure out what is a teacher?

Jacob Chastain 47:42 You know, what's so hilarious about that specific? that specific assignment, your response that with yellow? So in my class, I don't know, have you ever heard of workshop teaching? So there's a this is where this is kind of like it comes from if you feel like doing some research on this, I'd be willing to send you some stuff, but Donald graves, Don Murray, Lucy Caulkins, these are kind of like the three giants of what's considered workshop teaching in writing. And it's where you approach writing through process rather than prescriptions. So rather than teaching someone to write a five paragraph essay, you approach it through what is the writing process what a real writers do, and then creating the climate as much as possible with 25 kids in a classroom to be conducive to that and the writing teacher becomes someone who sets up a lesson that lasts 10 to 15 minutes, kids then set goals based on their writing, and then they proceed to go through their writing in whichever way they choose. And that means there's no specific product, the goal is to publish. But there is no set deadlines. Of course, teachers vary on this. But the idea is that the teacher, so after I teach, I'm consistently conferring with students, so I'm sitting there, and I'm asking them about their pieces, with no goal, no agenda as much as possible. And I'll sit with them. And so if you were writing a piece, I would go Alright, Eric, what are you working on today? And you might I mean, just hearing from you, you'd be like, nothing, or like, I don't know. Or you might say something to that effect. And I have students like this and I have, we have these conversations and my role that I see myself in during these moments are to not try to put a student in a perceived bubble of what they should be doing. So we might be in quote, unquote, a poetry unit. I could care less if that's what they're writing. I want them to I had one kid, he I couldn't get through to him one year, and he was struggling and struggling. And I found out through another teacher that he loves building things he hated. He hated reading, hate all this. And so I asked him what he likes to build and then he popped off immediately was like, Oh, I'm working on this sewing machine. I was like, Why do you what do you what was the problem that would just dive into it? He ended up writing his notes about how he was his his progress of make fixing the sewing machine. So his piece that he quote unquote, published was his thinking on paper. And as a writing teacher, I'm like, this is. So hearing that story. What does that sound like to you? Do you think that would work for you in this instance, where?

Eric Weinstein 50:27 Imagine that I'm your student?

Jacob Chastain 50:29 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 50:30 How do I do in your class?

Jacob Chastain 50:31 I think you would do fantastic.

Eric Weinstein 50:33 Then what the heck is going on? I mean, literally, I'm duplicating so many of these things with my own kid right now. I mean, there's no way you can look at my kid and say, that's an average kid. He just doesn't know. I mean, I know that. He's been like this since he was four. If I tell you the stories of them at age four, I can't even believe that myself. He's always been that way. My sense of it is that somehow, whatever is causing you to do long form podcast, and whatever is causing me to do long form podcasting, we are self selecting. So you know, you talked to my buddy. I don't know how to pronounce the last name. Well, Roche, right. Yeah. He's, I get along great with him. I think if I were in his class, I'd be getting straight A's man. What I'm trying to figure out is why did I never meet even a single version of you. My son was in the last class of a teacher at a different school. She had had a long career. A friend of mine, a college friend of mines wife had been in one of his first classes and my son had ended up in her last class. My son was a great kid in that class. She literally threw his computer down and broke it. She threw his laptop down. When she retired, they did some sort of a special goodbye because she'd done her entire career at this school in San Francisco. There was an entire laughing video montage put together about all of the students that had passed through her class and all the wonderful stories. And the one story that everybody was laughing the most about was how she had supposedly taken a child's backpack and defenestrated it literally threw it out the window of her class.

Is it true? Is it not true? Ha ha ha ha. Okay, well, she took my kids laptop and smashed it. I still have pictures of the broken screen. My kid had to leave the school. My kid was the sweetest, most wonderful kid. My kid was creative. He turned in a Lou Reed style performance piece for a vocabulary exercise with a band behind him using all the words in that book ever. I mean, a dream kid. We had to leave the school. We're talking from two different planets. You tell me what's going on? i? I can't. I'm almost to the point Jacob where I don't believe you.

Jacob Chastain 53:29 Well, so here's, I'm to the point to where I. So I'll maybe maybe this might give some enlightenment. So I, I have an interesting story about how I got into teaching. And maybe this can reveal some things about

Eric Weinstein 53:44 Wait wait wait, I just want to set up the problem before you go there so that we don't waste our time on the wrong I want to hear your story. But I wanted to make sure I'm not talking about specific trouble relationships between students and teachers. In my case, it's been wildly wildly negative. It's been uniformly negative. I want to understand why the uniformity.

Jacob Chastain 54:07 My so I, like I said, I think this might my origin story into teaching might lend some advice because here's the thing my friends do not speak as highly of their education. One of my best friends, he's dyslexic, and he hated school. He absolutely hated it. And he's, he's one of the most artistically creative human beings I've ever met ever right? Like, I mean, he the school system failed him. I have another friend who hate he's one of the he's a bright star also very creative, hated school failed his last year senior year so when we all graduated, he had to stay into another year. And so I they have those stories, and I didn't have it. So when I I didn't go to college to be a teacher. I I kind of knew I wanted to but it was one of those things, you know, I'm a creative person, like I said, I've been playing drums my whole life, I thought I was gonna be a rock star, I still think I'm gonna be a rock star. But you know, that was my friend. That's right bride behind this cameras, my drum set got the acoustic guitar over here. So we, I, that's what I've always wanted to do. So when I got out, I was just recording a lot of music and doing a lot of that. And then eventually I was at a job that was kind of closing down in in the state of Texas, you can get into an alternative certification program, if you have a certain GPA. And then you can go take the test, get into a program where you're a probationary teacher for a year. And then if you do good that year, they can hire you on you become a certified teacher. And that's what I did my door open into education was my teacher that I mentioned earlier from high school, she brought me in so I start my note, this is 100% true, I start teaching eighth grade social studies. I'm an English teacher now. But I started with eighth grade social studies, which here in Texas is US history. I was I'm pretty good at history. I'm very well educated on it. I have no idea how to teach these kids that day, when the first day in a public education classroom, I had zero experience, because of the way I got certified. This is the case for a lot of teachers. Now I am very driven. I'm very inspired by certain things. I had a connection to my school because of the leadership that was there. So you know what I did? I had people who were better than me, watch me all the time, correct me constantly. Give me advice on approaches and pedagogy to go after I read consistently and not just popular teaching books, which there's a very healthy market for I read the research of how people learn and what has changed in our approaches to reading and writing. And I just kept doing that over and over again, this podcast started because I wanted to talk to people that were smarter than me, so I could learn and become better. So my here's the thing, though, if I didn't have that aspect about myself, I wouldn't have fixed the gaps that I clearly had starting out as teaching. And you, go ahead.

Eric Weinstein 57:04 You're self-critical, and open.

Jacob Chastain 57:07 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 57:08 Yeah.

Jacob Chastain 57:08 And I think that unique skill set combined with my obsessiveness, I get obsessed with stuff, often. And it it led to me becoming the the teacher that I am today, which by no means am I perfect, but I think I have a wider view than a lot of people and I'm willing to experiment and take research into the classroom.

Eric Weinstein 57:30 Well you're self-selected. We're here because you have a podcast that's pretty large for the teaching space. So you're clearly a mold breaker. And I don't disbelieve that there are mold breakers.

Jacob Chastain 57:42 But what I'm saying, go ahead.

Eric Weinstein 57:43 Yeah. No, after you.

Jacob Chastain 57:45 No, I was saying so my point of that is, I think that's kind of where I'm at. I don't think a lot of people are like that in education in a lot of places, and I think it's in part due to I don't think the system itself really encourages this when when teachers get sent to professional development. I mean, you it doesn't encourage this they talk about accommodations, but it's always in almost like a deficit model. You know what I mean? Like it's not we don't talk about neuro diversity in the sense that what I what I know about in all of this is my own research my campus and my district as much as I love them didn't give me this information. They're not they didn't equip me for that. So I'm I think what the space I'm in is an outlier. So I think to go back to your original question is, I think this universality of what you're talking about is because their education by and large is still a victim of this idea of we're putting kids in a box and we're sending out these factory workers which just isn't the case for you and your son and various other students like you.

Eric Weinstein 59:00 Well, let me let me tell a story just to riff with you because by the way, I love that you're a musician I'm just experimenting with coming out of the closet

Jacob Chastain 59:08 I know I love by the way I love can I this is I don't want to derail the conversation. But when you were talking to I think it was on Lexus podcasts actually you the way you talked about Hallelujah, and had that whole conversation I that's you were the first person I heard I was like, he gets this salt like I had like a moment with you I was like that's You're amazing. So maybe another day we can talk music.

Eric Weinstein 59:31 songwriter whose name is escaping me actually was inspired to take on hallelujah at a lyric level that went syllable for syllable phoneme for phoneme any any reference to my stuff and just show how much beyond even that I perceived. I was just like, what, how grateful you are when somebody not only takes you seriously, but even gives you critique, and shows you a world beyond what you would notice yourself. So that was really, that was really moving to me. Let me tell you about me as a bad guy as an educator, because I've been a bad guy educated. I was on fellowship, from the Office of Naval Research for three years at Harvard. And then my fellowship ran out, because it was a three year fellowship, and you weren't expected to finish in three years. So I find myself teaching the introductory calculus sequence at Harvard University. I make up a test. And I administer the test on the material, and all hell breaks loose. Why? Because I made up a test according to my own sense of what was important. It was it was based on what was in the class. But I had not understood that there is a concept that there are a students, B students and C students at Harvard University and the A students have to get A's the B's students have to get B's and C's students have to get their C's. And what I had done was to ask questions that revealed some of the C students were really at the top and some of the A students were simply regurgitating procedures. And then when you actually tested them, they didn't understand the material, because they were just unwrapping problems that had been wrapped for them to unwrap. So the department comes to talk to me and says you cannot do this. And I said, What do you mean, of course, I can do this. And they said, Well, this is not what you're supposed to do. But look, you're a research mathematician, person will remain nameless. You know that what I'm doing is totally valid, mathematically. said yes. But that's not the point. I said, What is the point? That this is not a class for mathematicians, if somebody's going to be a mathematician, they shouldn't be in this class. I said, "What?"

No, this is a service class for pre meds. Our job is to weed out the people that the biology department wants weeded out of the pre medical curriculum, you know, trajectory. I said, we are in service to the biology department because they have an idea of who should go to medical school and who should not Yes. But that's not mathematics. So well, if we don't do what they tell us to do, they will teach mathematics for biologists. And we will lose this inside of the university. So we will teach this as they want it. Because this is not for mathematician, I said, what if somebody were to find out that they don't want to go to medical school and want to become a mathematician? Well, it's too late, they should be in another class. So we already know that if they came from a high school where they weren't exposed to this, that they're never going to actually get exposed to real mathematics. Yes. So we go through this whole song and dance, basically, the bottom line is Eric, get with the program, or find something else to do. Okay, you know, what I did? I buckled to the system, they were squeezing harder and harder. And I didn't like the feel of it. And I said, cut it out. I'm here trying to do a PhD in mathematics. You're telling me to do the wrong thing. You know, it's the wrong thing. We've had the conversation where you know, it's the wrong thing. And I know it's the wrong thing. But we are trapped in the system. And that system says that we need to take some of the least creative, least interesting minds that know how to cram stuff and do it in a regular fashion and make sure that they get into the medical schools that their parents expect. And we need to take some of the smartest kids and we need to give them a C and A what I did. I did the wrong thing. Because I couldn't afford to do the right thing, Jacob.

Jacob Chastain 1:03:46 So I think a lot of people are like that.

Eric Weinstein 1:03:48 Well, I think everybody's like that. If I had protested, I would have a very noble last stand. And I would have ejected myself from everything that I was doing, I would be replaced by somebody who would follow orders. And what I'm trying to tell you is it's not a question of saying, I can't understand how this happens. But can we at least agree that we have evil. As educators, we educators have an evilness to us. And we need to talk about our own evil the way in which we do knowing harm. And the way in which we do not stand up to the system. We don't empower anyone to stand up to the system. Let me tell you, other snippets from it from education My son is applying to school. He doesn't get in to any kindergarten that we apply to in New York. We're applying for private schools because this school that he's slated for it was not going to be a good fit for him. They give an IQ test at a place called St ends. It's a very special weirdo school in Brooklyn. And it came out of nowhere, and then it sort of took over the world for a period of time had very controversial founder. But it did so well in producing graduates through non standard fashion. And one of the things that they do is they had a non standard IQ test that you couldn't prep for. So we took this kid in for his, his meeting. He goes in, they have an interview, they have this IQ test that's non standard comes out, then they say the parents come in. So we go in. And the woman says, Oh, my God said, What are you saying? It's like, your son is amazing. He's amazing. You we've never seen something like this, you have to understand we get your kid. I said, that's great, because we've been looking at other schools is you can't go to another school, you can't send a public school, you can't send them to another private school or independent school. You he has to come here. I said, Why? Because they'll kill him. They won't understand him, they will kill him if he goes anywhere else. Wow. I mean, this is really far away from where we live. But if that's what you're saying, and this has got such a unique reputation, so we said, we wait for his acceptance letter he's rejected. Haha, I mean, it's just over and over again, these are our interactions. Why tell us that our kid is amazing, and that he can't go anywhere else to reject him. I just don't understand. He's had a few teachers that have really inspired and one would who was incredibly tough on him and didn't give them the best grade. But a teacher that he really, really respected as having an internal, it's not it's not just a question about I deserve x, or I deserve y. It's about I understand my teacher, I understand what my teacher is driving at. And I respect my teachers rigor, my teachers, care and concern that the problem that we keep getting into is that we keep taking educators literally at their word, if I can give you another example of this, trying to we were trying to find the right school. And we kept hearing about diversity and inclusion, diversity, inclusion, diversity inclusion, mean, you can sort of just say diversity inclusion, tm, because it's an invariant phrase that gets uttered over and over again. So every time I heard it, I always asked the question, does diversity and inclusion apply to neurodiversity? And the answer is well, only up to a short point. But if it goes beyond a certain point that then then your child is not for us. I said, Why? Isn't that the most important part of diversity and inclusion, you're failing to include the diverse the neuro diverse person? It's like, well, we can't accommodate that. I said, Oh, so it's not diversity inclusion, it's racial diversity and inclusion and sexual orientation, diversity inclusion, it's gender or non binary diversity inclusion. But when it really comes right down to it, the most important form of diversity and inclusion is something you are open about is not included. You have no means of dealing with this. My guess is that 15% something like that of the population is neurodivergent. From the expect, I don't think it's a tiny minority. And I think that this twice exceptional designation, which has recently gained favor is interesting. But I also think that what we're doing is we're we're allowing certain types to define normal. So do you have normal color vision?

Jacob Chastain 1:08:35 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:36 I am technically colorblind. As is my brother, we have the same color difference. But it turns out that in times of war, when you need camouflage spotters, you hire people like me, or enlist them. Because we see contrast better than you do. So the population of people who are supposedly colorblind is retained in the gene pool because it actually has advantages. Now, if I said to you, look, Jacob, I'm sorry, I know that your contrast blind, I wonder what this looks like to you. Then the idea is I would be color normal, you would be a hyper colorist, you see, you know, it's like synesthesia, you see things that really aren't there effectively, you know, it's freakish that you, you're distracted by all the different colors. This idea that one group of people gets to tell another group of people, you're on the spectrum. And my feeling is, wait a minute. Are we talking on a computer? Who do you think programmed your computer? Who do you think developed your vaccine? Who do you think makes everything in your society go around? It's the people you've decided on the spectrum.

Jacob Chastain 1:09:46 I'm uniquely connected to this because my son, he's autistic, so I have had a really interesting experience watching him as an educator. Because so that my son, okay, so he's obsessed with McKenna. things he loves computers, he loves washers, he loves vacuums things that he can take apart and put back together. And for instance, he loves. So he loves tricking our washer into thinking that the lids close so he can watch it. And he does these YouTube videos where he talks about it. And he will reference these washers, by their model numbers and washer model numbers, if you didn't know are very long. So he'll say he'll say it just flat out. And then he remembers all these things. So these you these unique capabilities he has, however, I am perfectly aware, you know, being a teacher that I've seen students with autism kind of go through the system, that unless there's a knowledgeable teacher, standing with that student, and working with that student, not standing physically, but being someone that supports them. There's a lot of people that approach them as if they are something to be fixed and put into this so called normal versus capitalizing on that neuro diversity and the unique strengths that they give them. And there's studies that have been done on this but know what this is not I can get 100% tell you, this is not talked about. In educational circles. We don't have there's no PD there's nothing like this. But this is this is the essence of what education is I feel like is capturing these differences of kids and giving them the tools to manage because of the narrow diversity rather than punish them because they don't fit in this straight line.

Eric Weinstein 1:11:28 How old is your kid?

Jacob Chastain 1:11:29 He is seven, he's about to turn eight this month actually,

Eric Weinstein 1:11:31 Have you tried computer programming?

Jacob Chastain 1:11:34 Not yet. It's so he plays I don't know if you're familiar with Roblox at all. But he, it's a online game. But you can basically there's a bunch of system, like different games you can go into, we can also make your own. So he designs, he loves doing phone drop tests, he watches YouTube videos like that. So he designed basically an area where he made these crude phones in the game. And then he did like these huge drop tests in this program. So it's definitely something that we're looking forward to.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:03 You know, the thing about it is that when I programmed computers, I become incredibly rigid as a human being. So you know, it's also the case that we can either play to these things, or we can find other things like music is a wonderful example of something where very often the more formal something is, the more emotional it can be. And I often give the example of Taco Bell's cannon is really almost not music, if you look at it, it's basically algorithmic. It'll break your heart, but it'll break your heart according to an algorithm. I'm, I'm really much more interested in people on the spectrum, I don't have the tools to deal with somebody with hardcore autism, maybe, but I'd love to learn. And I'm not at all positive that some of these things are mistakes. I think that in a weird way, you know, my family motto is you can have my learning disabilities, when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers. We love this stuff. And, you know, there are extremes where it's almost, you know, it's very difficult, I can tell you that their sensory issues, their stimming, some of this stuff kicks in with asynchronous development. And I think it's wonderful that we're starting to see more awareness about all of the ways in which the brain self assembles, because it doesn't have enough instructions to assemble itself. So it has to be assembled according to experience. And I do think that there are there are profound burdens. That may not the burden may be so large that there is no benefit. But it's also the case that a lot of these burdens aren't caught, at least you know, that you're dealing with somebody with superpowers, and likely super deficits. And, you know, the key in education is allowing the superpower to live to pay for the Super deficit.

Jacob Chastain 1:13:54 I think we're afraid to say anything has a deficit. Like I think that's a fear that educators have.

Eric Weinstein 1:14:01 I can't tell you a deficit story. It's a good one. Sure. I'm struggling through my Ph. D. program at Harvard. And I realized that it's just, I mean, I'm the only guy in the department who's not naturally good at math. I mean, I'm sort of good at math, but I'm sort of terrible at so it's not really clear what is good at math. So I go over to the Educational Testing group at Harvard, and they administer this test, and I get my results back. And it's pretty high up functioning on test after test. And suddenly one score plummets to below the third percentile. And then it goes back up. And I said, What is that? And they said, Oh, that's kinesthetic reinforcement. I said, What is kinesthetic reinforcement? So we gave you a list of Kurdish words, because we assumed you didn't know Kurdish and then what we did is we had you write some of them out and we saw whether or not writing them out helped you or hurt you. And every time you had to write something out, whatever that motor neuron process was, the feedback between your hand and your mind destroyed any memory of the word. And my jaw dropped. And I said, Are you telling me? They said, Oh, my God, they knew they knew what I was putting together. And they said, You have been forced to take notes? I said, Yes. And they said, and in being forced to take notes, did you fight it? I said, always, but you were forced, yes, that was part of my education, that well, that notetaking destroyed all memory of what you were being taught instantly. Are you telling me that you put me through years and years of school when I told you, I didn't want to take notes. And you insisted that I engage in a process, which left me through my dysgraphia without being able to read my notes. And you also erased everything as it was going into my mind.

Jacob Chastain 1:16:04 I, you know, it's funny, I only take notes in meetings, when I know someone, I only take notes in meetings when I know someone's going to be there that'll actually judge me for it. Because I don't take notes. I can't if I take notes, I will not remember what we talked about. I'm a I literally, this is how I learned in general, I think this is why I read so much and consume so much literature about teaching and just stuff in general is I consume as much as possible. And I keep it all in here and I let it process and then at some point, it clicks, and then I have this knowledge that just gets wedged into my brain forever. But I was always forced, much like you to go into a notetaking thing or to follow the, the this standardized approach to learning because someone at some point said, This is what you do you take notes when someone's talking. And that's, I don't know, it's just it's a strange thing. So I'd be curious, I've never had that test, obviously. But I'd be curious if I had the same sort of process going on there.

Eric Weinstein 1:17:03 Very strange, and I have to say that, oh, gosh, you know, there's just so many memories of the comical nature of taking a child and telling him he's a moron, day in and day out. I mean, there's this new audio application called clubhouse I've been experimenting with and there was a room about learning disabilities, dyslexia, and the like, and ADHD, and schooling. And I went in there, and they pulled me up on stage. And I started talking about this, and somebody just said, Let's, let's cut to the chase, he said, the thing that I was scared to say out loud, it's child abuse. Telling a neurodivergent neurodiverse. Child, you failed. If you had a kid with no legs, and you kept saying, you know, Jane, you're just you need more heart. You've got to run faster. You got Stop whining about your lack of legs and realize that if you will it, you can do it. And there, you know, the difference between winners and losers is will Well, I believe that maybe Jane can run on her two little stumps. I believe Jane can do amazing things. I believe in prosthetics, I believe in no shortage of things. I believe that if you allow something to happen, Jane can do something. But if Jane doesn't have legs, she's not going to generate legs. She's not a salamander. And some have this positive kind of Tony Robbins, or Oprah, you know, manifest this and like Shut the hell up, stopped. Or another one is like you can do the work if you try harder. And I said, Okay, let me fill up your house with molasses. And I bet if you really try, you can get to the kitchen. And I'm going to come up with a workday for you based on the idea that your house is filled with air rather than molasses. And I'm going to say what's the matter? You're not trying hard enough? And I just have this idea of like, Well, why don't you let me do what it is that I know how to do? Why can't Why are you so into this weird, authoritarian fetish? Like you know what you're doing? Because you obviously don't you just, you, the teacher, are underperforming what I can do for myself in self education. And why is it that you're clinging to this authority that you wish to have over me? I mean, I became friendly with the the violinist Joshua Bell, I mean, one of our absolute top soloists, and Joshua was I mean, look, this guy is as good looking as they come as talented as they come. He is awesome. So as generous as can be, my daughter was taking violin. He says, Why don't you watch me perform this Bernstein piece on Plato's symposium, and then come meet me in the greenroom after the performance. So I can tell your daughter a little bit about what I'd done. It's like, are you kidding me, this is a dream. So she gets dressed up, she looks fantastic. She's meeting this unbelievable icon. And we're in the green room. And he's, he's just taking the time and making her feel like a million bucks. And we get on to the subject of violin teaching. And we hit this issue that in high school, he had been put in the back row of the orchestra because the music teacher did not recognize his gift. And suddenly, the whole facade cracked, just for tiny little moment, where this incredibly wonderful, generous human being was back in that room, in the back row of the orchestra, saying, I don't want to be rude to anyone else. But something is clearly going on with me that's different. I mean, this is like the fact that Jimi Hendrix, you know, was with Little Richard and I can Tina Turner. And, you know, Charlie Parker was stuck in j machines orchestra and Dizzy Gillespie, you know, is, I think, thrown out of his account, basically, or Duke Ellington for playing Chinese music because of the out notes that he was playing. Why did Jimi Hendrix have to open for the goddamn monkeys? Right? He did. And, you know, it's not like everyone. So the idea is he strings his guitar upside down and backwards, and he plays with his teeth. And he uses non non constant time signatures. And way too many tritones. I mean, it's like, get these people the hell out of the way, if you don't understand what you're dealing with, at least do no harm. Why don't we have a blank room? For Kids who aren't understood by their teachers? Why don't we at least just have a room where we do no harm and babysit the child and say, here, just read or play with blocks or do something, anything other than constantly subordinating, the most academically oriented child to the most rote memorization oriented child.

Jacob Chastain 1:22:32 So, I have a part of your authoritarian, I think we can hit on something with that in just a second. But I was thinking of why you were telling that story it was. So this idea of teachers basically not getting over this authoritarian thing. So this is a debate that we had. I'm a department chair and my campus. So we have these department chair meetings. And we were having these debates that were ludicrous to me, but we were debating. So right now we're we're in Texas, we've pretty much been face to face since August. But we still have some kids online. So I most of us teach online and in person kids right now. And there was this big debate over how much we should fail kids online. And so here's here's it gets. So it gets so much worse than that, because we're sitting here talking, and a couple background stories about this campus where the lowest performing Middle School, socio economic class, we, most of our kids live in apartments, which means a lot of them are transient, they come in, they come out, they do all of this. They miss a lot of days for a variety of reasons. So you take these kids who are now having to learn online, from teachers who have never had to do this before who probably have spotty Wi Fi, because the infrastructure is designed to support this. We give out hotspots, but hotspots only work if the infrastructure is there to hold all of this. So you have an equity issue. And then we're going well, they're not turning in this so do we give them zeros for this six weeks grade that'll destroy any motivation and there was teachers who were adamant that if we even raise it up to a 60 so fail them with the six let's say they did nothing you give the kid a 60 that way if they do start doing something they at least have a chance to pass for the semester. They were adamant that a 60 was giving too much to these kids even though it's already failing it only thing it does is do this and so we're having these conversations and I'm sitting there like I can't even believe that this is even a conversation so I that authority complex definitely. I think it's entrenched into a lot of teachers. And but here's the thing for when it comes to why some of this I think perpetuates even to teachers who might know they're doing bad like they know they're not serving kids like you are serving Like your son or not serving kids, students like mine, like my son, I think a lot of that is honestly, a response to just the standardized testing of everything. Because when teachers get evaluated, they look at their scores, I have data meetings where I, they expect me to hit certain percentages in the state of Texas, to get your school out of trouble. so to speak, before the Texas educational agency comes in, you have to hit a certain percentage of scores, white kids have to hit a certain population, African Americans do Hispanic second language learners, all of that you have to have certain percentages.

Eric Weinstein 1:25:38 Wait a second. What's the difference in the in the targets for white Americans and black Americans?

Jacob Chastain 1:25:44 Massive. So the numbers that we are looking at, so are at the end of this school year, when they take their standardized tests, what their goal is, we have to get 60% of white students to pass the test at meets grade level, and African Americans are around the 40% range. So you have this mat. That's real. That is the actual percentage.

Eric Weinstein 1:26:11 I'm sorry. So the idea is Why? I mean, I don't even know what level to worry about this, should I be asking that the white kids have less of a burden on them? Or should it be asking that the black kids be expected more and by the way, the African American contribution to American culture is so profound. And it's not all God's children got rhythm? It's a question about across the board. This is one of the most generative communities we've ever had, right? Maybe the most generous By the way, hillbillies are pretty close. In terms of culture, hillbilly culture is amazing. And I say this as a guy in awe of the production of culture. My belief, for example, is that musical intelligence is fungible into STEM. If you have a community that can play music, I believe you can do stem. And I could be wrong about that. But I, I play some music. And I'm a guy who does lots of STEM subjects. And I look at the way in which, you know, there's it's almost like a dictionary between Why do we accept such low standards for our most brilliant community?

Jacob Chastain 1:27:26 It's, I mean, it's baffling. It's baffling that this. But this, here's the thing, though. So you have these meetings. So even if we don't take it at this huge level, right? Because I think that's kind of like the macro view, the the micro is, when push comes to shove, teachers are responsible for hitting the standardized percentages, and I'm sure every state has a little bit different one they have to hit.

Eric Weinstein 1:27:49 You hit on something that's that I actually just didn't know and don't understand. So let me just be very clear. Sure, I have been trying to get the Chinese Communist Party out of our nation's labs since the late 80s. To the present. We staff our nation's laboratories in our universities, with foreign talent, because there was a secret study done in the 1980s inside of the National Science Foundation in collaboration with the government University industry research Roundtable, which did not want to let the market function to fill our nation's laboratories with our own people. And in researching, and I cannot believe I am saying this, the fear was that we are going to have to dip into populations, like women and minorities. I want black kids replacing Chinese foreign labor, in our labs under the guise of an exchange program, which is nothing of the kind is known to be nothing of the kind. I do not wish to constantly help the Chinese Communist Party in its attempt to learn everything that we're doing and to get the benefits of our freedom without having freedom over there. I would like to starve them for the benefits of our freedom so that they are induced to undo the massacre of Tiananmen and everything that followed. Okay. black kids are incredibly important to me, not out of obligations, not out of guilt, but out of greed. I want our black kids in our labs, kicking ass. And my experience with black America is basically that it is among the most generative communities, it doesn't take a lot of shit. It thinks about things in totally different ways. And I'm just hearing about this that you have different standards for self identified black kids.

Jacob Chastain 1:29:39 By the way, I was wrong about the percentage I just pulled it up. It's 32% is their target versus 60% for white and Hispanic is 37.

Eric Weinstein 1:29:47 I shouldn't be on this podcast.

Jacob Chastain 1:29:49 You, this is exactly why you're on this podcast

Eric Weinstein 1:29:52 No, my thought process is just too different. I can't understand what the

Jacob Chastain 1:29:56 But this, so here's the thing. This is why I'm excited. That and that this is the important conversation that's happening right now is because this is stuff that we need these conversations to occur because I'm guarantee there's people listening right now that didn't know those percentages. And like I said, there's this is Texas so there's they're going to be different in different places.

Eric Weinstein 1:30:17 We're such bigots.

Jacob Chastain 1:30:18 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 1:30:19 We are officially, structurally, bigots. And the idea that we don't go after our own people and say you, not only can you do this, but you are our hope and your future. Look, I'm going to make this point, nobody seems to get this I cannot figure it out. When you have an underserved population, you have a population that is known to be brilliant, and hasn't performed in an area, you get excited because of diminishing returns. There are only so many times you can mine Ashkenazi Jews. And you know, and and Tamils, and whoever the hell else is a high performer, okay? You already know those populations. So you're at the point of diminishing marginal returns. But if you gain access to like, particularly black neurodivergent kids, black Dyslexics and stuff, you're talking about the first few people, you get, you know, sort of the 8020 rule of these peredo principles. Where you get huge wishes, if you if you know, I always make the point actually prospecting for oil in Texas, you're not gonna find a ton of unexplored Texas, Texas and Oklahoma have been explored to death. That's like Ashkenazi Jews and South Asians. Okay, we need in particular, and I guess I have a particular bug up my system about black America because people expect so much less out of black Americans. And I can't figure out for the life of me like they haven't done enough. Like they haven't proved over and over and over again, how brilliant that community is. And we implicitly have an idea that they're too stupid to do science. And I want to, I want to sort of surface that and force people to actually say it, because my frustration is that's the community that I'm probably counting on more than any other community also females. Because I think that females and disagree ability is a big problem that at some level, we need to teach how to be disagreeable to people who have culturally been expected to get along and disagree a belt, it doesn't mean that you're just a prick. It doesn't mean you're a jerk. It means that you don't say sure when everybody else is saying, sure. You know, if there's a consensus, a consensus is best to exploit if a consensus is wrong, that's like the best situation possible. And teaching people consensus thinking and best practices and team efforts. We've got a mania for teams, this idea that you know that there's no great man or great woman theory of history that everything is in this is in the Zeitgeist and it's just a question of which particular person stumped, it's like, this kind of radical egalitarianism needs to be hunted to extinction, we have to recognize that many of the best minds rests on female shoulders and on black shoulders, in particular in STEM. And whatever it is that's keeping people out. We've got to figure out how to get exposure, particularly culturally, to high end concepts. I've been, you know, dealing with a bunch of black Americans focused on STEM on this clubhouse app. And one of the things that came back to me was, you know, Eric, we weren't exposed to the same things that you were growing up, and I said, Great, let's get, let's get a Klein bottle to start showing up as iconography in in hip hop videos, so that kids want to learn about non orientable surfaces in differential topology, let's figure out iconic imagery that is a cryptic language that isn't that beckoning people. But the other thing is, is that teachers and schools need vastly more money, vastly more money, and we have to recognize our own hypocrisy. We don't care about kids. And we don't care about our educators. And we don't care about them having the tools that they need. We don't care about societal renewal. And we draw off on these things as if we care, but we clearly don't because the proof is in the pudding. And, you know, over and over again. There's a lesson from the New Orleans police department, which is the New Orleans police department at some point was so corrupt, that police were ordering hits over police radio. That's how bad it was.

And the guy who took over did something very interesting that I learned from and he said, the first thing we do with all of these bad cops is that we read salaries, you can't actually do anything if people don't have skin in the game and something to lose. If you pay people very little, you're basically courting disaster. So a teacher, I don't think a teacher should necessarily, you know, be jetting around on a golf stream. But I do think that we should just recognize that if we choose to skimp on education, we should expect higher incarceration rates, we should expect lower productivity, we should expect that we will be teaching our children to speak Mandarin out of necessity rather than choice. And we should recognize that we're going to have to pay higher taxes and that we're going to have to demand more out of teachers. But I also think that we have to face the fact that we are in our attempt to be fair, revealing ourselves to be racial bigots and misogynist by not expecting more technical output from communities that have thus far been underrepresented relative to their pro rata share of the pie. And I'm tired of taking the shit for believing in these communities. I think those of us who believe in these communities get called names. Because we don't want to lower standards. We don't want to say, okay, you know, your presence here is so, so needed, that we're willing to bend over backwards and do what we would never know. The issue is we need to get more money and into an earlier point in the pipeline. And we need also to cater to cultural norms, particularly with black Americans. So that one, we're not taking people who are coming from a family that's been struggling financially and putting them into the new precariat, where they're struggling as a multiple postdoc, or adjunct faculty, these need to be well paid positions in teaching and research. And we need higher standards, and we need more money for schools. And we we've got to also face the fact do we Why give me the rationale? Why do we expect less out of black Americans? I don't get it.

Jacob Chastain 1:37:07 I think it's, it's, it's a part of the this antiquated system, the whole system like so I'll give you a clear example. Well, one, one of the things you talked about was, you know, the, there's a definite and there's studies of this, it's called, you know, the education to prison pipeline, you know, they build prisons based on educational scores and areas, which is insanity, to me, that that's even something that is something that exists. black boys are labeled there with their they're labeled, you know, ATD, ADHD sped far more often than white boys are. And I, there's talking to a lot of black educators about this, and people that are willing or interested in putting in the work to changing a lot of this is it this system is designed in a way to meet the needs of very few, right, and it's if you don't play the game and stay in this, this, this very tight bubble, we we send you off, we label you we set you in another classroom, we, you know, we we basically just lower the standards for you. Right? in classes, right? It's like, Oh, well, they they have this. They have they're labeled this. So you know, we, you know, we can't force them into the certain areas. And it's frustrating for teachers who are wanting to do this work. I think a lot of people, we've teachers, but their head against this system. And they're frustrated, because a lot of people feel powerless to change something so large, and so deeply flawed. And I think this is partly where a lot of your frustration is coming from where you're like, you're you're visibly enraged by how messy This is. And it's so easy to it's so easy to to be like, well, it just burn it all down. And maybe that is the solution. But I I'm so interested in. You know, I think conversations like this are a starting place, but there has to be actionable things that we can put in place to where we do empower our most maligned kids and the kids, you know, that are quote, unquote, like you said, you know, where they're basically getting child abuse every day in education, where we support these communities that are not being held up. I have students, for instance, that they come from, we serve a very diverse population. We're predominantly Hispanic, but we get kids from Africa, we have kids from the Middle East. And they read the star test, for instance, our state test, there was this one piece that talks about snow and it had some jargon in there about snow. And unless kids had interacted in this way, they didn't have any background knowledge. You had to count on them doing some dictionary work, right because a piece on a standardized test doesn't give you enough back Grant information. So a lot of kids struggled on this. And because that's such a small way that something can be implemented, and kids can fail, essentially in the system, just because their worldview did not meet what was being done here. And that that's, that's a deeply flawed system that leads to these percentages that leads to us holding down the most struggling of groups in society. And this is where the work comes of what on earth did we do?

Eric Weinstein 1:40:33 Can I make a recommendation to you? Sure. The National Society of Black physicists has a new president. And his name is Stefan Alexander. He's a particle theorist and astrophysicist, out of Brown University. Also an amazing saxophone player who wrote the jazz of physics, we have a rare opportunity. And Stefan is the son of a taxi driver from the Bronx, coming out of the Caribbean, and brilliant as the day is long, and just also passionate and inventive. So he wants to try to do new things. Consider having Stefan on it, he's got a very compelling personal story, but he's also he's gonna shake things up. If he's given what he had, would he be willing to? Come on? I'll ask him. He's, he's, uh, you know, we've been trying to crack this code and try to figure out how to get people. I mean, I'll be let me be very direct with you, please. All of this stuff about fairness is a turnoff. Is not that fairness doesn't matter if it really does matter. But it makes it sound like everything is eating your oatmeal. You know, we've been unfair. We've been big, it'd be okay. Whatever. Yes. Some to some extent. Some of us are really excited about shaking education. We're excited about people on the spectrum. We're excited about communities that have not yet shown what they can do. And I believe that there is secretly a bigotry, which says, Yeah, we all know that these were the only way to get diversity and inclusion is to relax standards. Right? It's, it's, it's a, nobody will admit to it, who's in the diversity and inclusion movement. But in general the idea

Jacob Chastain 1:42:27 I think the inference is clear.

Eric Weinstein 1:42:28 What?

Jacob Chastain 1:42:29 I said, I think the inference is clear.

Eric Weinstein 1:42:31 Well, the implication may or may not be, but what I'm claiming is that those of us who actually believe and look, maybe I'm wrong, there's there's nothing. I know, I know of no principle that says that all people are exactly as intelligent in every way as each other. That's clearly not true. But I'm actually super excited that we've got something massively wrong, and there's a huge wish. And then getting access to these communities will be exciting, provided it's not done through diversity and inclusion, diversity. And inclusion is sort of an A third authoritarian movement that puts a gun to your head and says, You're for diversity and inclusion, aren't you, because what we need to do is to make sure that we reserve spots because of equity, and equality of outcome, which is, I'm going to pass over that in silence, I think every smart person should understand the danger in saying something like that. Some of us really believe that there's a structural problem, and that the benefit from that is enormous, not necessarily because of diverse perspectives, and all of this stuff, just because some huge number, think of think about these as oil fields, think of them as neuron fields, some giant percentage of the world's neuron fields are offline, and bringing them online. You know, for whatever reason, historically, China, with an unbelievable percentage of the world's population can't buy a base hit in the sciences. Now, that's going to change some, but in part, it's not that they're dumb, it's that they haven't had access to some of the things that were developed in the West. But perhaps more importantly, freedom turns out to be a really important ingredient to progress. When you tell people what they can't do all the time, it's very hard for them to innovate. So in part, one of the things that we want to do is to force China to innovate, in part because we'll get the benefits of that innovation but in, in part because we're going to shove freedom down their throats. If they if we deny them the benefit of our freedom, they will be forced to loosen up and to liberate the Chinese people from authoritarian rule, which may be good at the moment because right now they're getting the benefits of two systems. They're getting the benefits of our freedom to innovate, and they're getting the benefit of their authoritarian ability to execute. Right? So they can execute better than we can. And they can innovate as well as we can, because we just basically hand them our innovation. I think if you got Stefan on the program, and started talking geopolitically about the importance of trying to figure out, and you know, I have to be open to the idea that I'm wrong about black Americans, but I don't think I am, I believe that this is one of our most generative and brilliant communities, and we treat them like they can't do. And then we start talking about diversity and inclusion and equity, which, okay, maybe you could say, for a time limited period, that if you had role models and more black faces in positions of authority, that that culture would change. And I can make an infant industry style argument and a path dependence argue, but it's really just offensive to me that we give up on people at the level of standards,

Jacob Chastain 1:45:57 When it comes to you know, So all of this for people who, maybe they're just not involved in these discussions. And this concerns me in so many ways, which is why I empower my goal, as an educator in a lot of ways is to meet students, wherever they are, and for their uniqueness and find ways to empower them through that whatever that unique piece of them is, right? When they walk into my room. They, we, they read what they want, and they write what they want. And now I'm a guide, and I try to nudge them in certain ways. That in ways that they I feel like they can be empowered and, and really do something with their thoughts and their emotions and their beliefs. You know, I'm teaching seventh graders. So there's a lot of variety there, I actually looked up with my kids this year, which is, which is hilarious because of COVID. it shut everything down mid year last year. So I got the same kids twice. So we already had this really great just connection and relationship. And it's been amazing to watch them grow over two years. And I have, you know, I'm writing my second book called rightfully empowered, which is this idea that we have these top down approaches these authoritarian views on what writing instruction should be. And it sounds funny to put it that way. But it's there are when you are teaching students to use their voice. And this is really where my passion comes from is the people that are the group that we're training or not training, but educating. They're the ones that are coming up with the innovations of tomorrow. So if we if they are not equipped to handle these conversations of what does it mean, when you say everyone gets equity of outcome? or What does it mean, when you have force? Yeah, when you have this? When you force diversity, in terms of from an authoritarian standpoint, what does that look like for the future of kids where they're raised in a system that robs them of any ability to be against the norm. And if you are, hopefully, you're either very intelligent or charismatic, so you can build your own business, and then you do your own thing that way. But how that that's where this, that's where it fires me up, because this entire conversation and what we're hitting on here is, I really do believe it is the it's the difference of where education is going. And I feel that there is change coming because I think it's becoming ever more apparent that this system is flawed, and it's broken, and we're not supporting the people that need it most.

Eric Weinstein 1:48:31 But it's stable. We can bitch we can moan about this. But until you actually have a really difficult conversation, like do you really want to listen in equal parts to me and Oscar Peterson playing the piano? You'd be crazy. You don't want equality of outcome. Trust me, if Oscar Peterson alights on the piano bench, I'm going to shut up and listen. Right? I don't want that equal time. It's just, it's stupid. Right? And, you know, the problem is, is that it's it's picked up this patina of kind of forward thinking that, you know, I had, I had my brother, the biologist at Evergreen State College driven out of the campus because he refused to go along with black racists is a guy who was against racism. Anti racism is didn't mean racism has been defined to be anti racism. And people who are anti racist are defined to be racist. And then the idea is, we're all supposed to shut up and pretend that this is normal, because the lunatics have taken over the asylum. I don't know what that's about. I do believe that, in part, the income inequality we're seeing in the acid inequality is so profound that we need to do something about it. And we need to actually start to look at what is causing it and how to redress that so that you don't have advantages plowed back into the system that just become further and further advantages. You've got a runaway positive feedback loop. I suppose what I really believe is is that we need to be getting you know, I don't know deep learning and and crypto and quantum computing ideas and and all sorts of new business ideas to seventh graders, we need to be getting this into people's hands much earlier, we need to start fetishizing almost our spectrum community, we have to figure out what to do with Asperger's and autistic kids that celebrates them as Hey, we need you to disrupt our classroom help you. You know, by the way, the thing that you said about your kid, sometimes I'm in touchy feely mode, and I want to talk to people and I want to hang out in an extroverted way. Other times, all I want to deal with is formal systems. Right? And, and there's a weird way in which the two of them interact for a long time our child would do the classic thing of looked down at his shoes, when he was introduced to a new person, you know, and mumble a few things. And some points. You have to you have to learn what an introduction is. He said, What is that? I said, Well, you, you make eye contact, you don't hold it too long. You stick out your hand, you firmly squeeze the hand, but you don't squeeze to demonstrate your strength. You hold it a little bit longer than seem sensible. You release it. And you say Dr. Weinstein, nice to meet, you know, some text day. I think we went to a restaurant and we're all sitting around waiting for our table. And he sees this collection of kids next to us. And he goes over and he does his thesis, Zev Weinstein, Hey, you guys want to play a game? Can I organize one. And suddenly the kid who couldn't do anything socially, was organized some some other families, kids into some game, and everybody was having a blast. And I realized, okay, I just needed to explain what an introduction is, at a formal level, and an unlocked a very social personality. I guess what I feel is that education is working for almost nobody. And it would be better if we started from the idea that we are a failed system. And that occasionally, something magical happens, then to start from the idea that we have to figure out what to how to fix what we're already doing. But like one of my questions is, I mean, I graduated high school and started college at 16. My daughter didn't know that she could take her senior year off she did. She's in college and happy as a clam.

I believe that we can compress education, and that we need to go back to a time when we used to send people regularly to university. I mean, I have a cousin who started college at 14 at Harvard, I don't think that this is peculiar and weird, or you have to be some sort of a super mind. I think what we've done is we've loaded up middle school and high school with a lot of unnecessary stuff, a lot of people can cut through this much more quickly. And that this is more about I don't know making sure that teachers have jobs or the kids have something to do and babysitting than it is about the idea that only a brilliant person can go to college at an earlier age. I think that a huge number of people can go to college at an earlier age. And I think that in large measure, we need to rethink college relative to YouTube. I mean, do we need a college equivalency degree? I did a study a while back and and part of it had to do with trying to find Is there any advanced degree that requires a bachelor's degree? There appears to be no advanced degree that requires a bachelor's degree. That is interest therapy. There are PhDs with no bachelor's degrees there jadis with no bachelor's degrees MDS with no bachelor's degrees, dentists with no bachelor's degrees, we could not find a single degree where the BA is actually its prerequisite. And I think we have to open a very dangerous question is the bachelor's degree, the administrators degree for getting money into a university which is leveraged through student debt, which is saddled on a young person who is barely in a position to sign their first contract and what we do is we immediately push a product on that person for which they have full responsibility and even bankruptcy is not sufficient to discharge student debt. Thanks in part two in 2005, Joseph Biden and others signing legislation That effectively dooms student debt to be treated in this different fashion. And I think that what we have to recognize is is that as educators we have become predators and this predation by fetishizing education by not being able to measure its benefits, I agree that it is delivered a benefit in the past. But we have to ask how much student debt Why are we not putting students in a position to evaluate whether or not a college equivalency degree in an accelerated education not leveraged through debt is a much better proposition than telling them that they should go to college, they should finance it through debt in order to do it, and put themselves in the crosshairs of a collector? Why don't we admit that we've become monsters? That's my question to you, Jacob.

Jacob Chastain 1:55:55 I don't know. I don't know. I

Eric Weinstein 1:55:59 Are you familiar with Sugar Baby University.

Jacob Chastain 1:56:02 I am not.

Eric Weinstein 1:56:04 Are you familiar with sugar dating?

Jacob Chastain 1:56:06 No.

Eric Weinstein 1:56:07 The sugaring lifestyle? Sugar Baby University allows young women and some young men to get out of college debt free by dating, wealthy, generous benefactors in college, who give allowances and gifts. I highly encourage you to check out seeking arrangement, or my episode with Kimberly Dela Cruz, who, herself I think was started college at 16. Another person who's doing that because of family difficulties, loaded up on debt at 16, I believe. And more than 10 years later was $50,000 in debt as the spokesperson for sugar baby University. Now, I am not condemning people who choose and elect to engage in what I consider to be adjacent, you know, sex work adjacent behavior. How, if that's what they want to do, but what we're doing is we're tricking people into college education, we're tricking them into debt. We're tricking them into making terrible decisions to study things that will not be useful in their careers that will not really add up. We've created non scholarship fields, and we're demonizing anyone who attempts to save the children from us. So I know I'm going to be called racist. I know I'm going to be called problematic. I'm not going to be called misogynist. I know I'm going to be called sex negative. I'm going to be called a prude. Okay, Boomer, etc, etc. Okay, get your long list of epithets, load the gun and keep firing it firing and firing now when you're completely spent. Let me ask you the question. Does that protest too much? Isn't the real problem that we the adults, we the educators are vampiric Lee siphoning off the future, in order to cover for the fact that we can't actually make it as a society without China's help. We can't have luxury automobiles, without stealing from the future are old people can't retire. Our universities are chock a block filled with administrators. We have not renewed our faculty, we've come up with a system of orbiting adjunct faculty, we effectively have taken one of the greatest things that we have as a nation, which is our educational system. And we've turned it into a transfusion system, where we subject our own children. And the reason that I'm adamant like this, is the boomers in the silence did this to my generation. And that was horrible. And they did it then again, to their own children, the millennials, and that was psychotic. They basically sold their own children, particularly their own daughters into gray area, sex work over and over again, look at the two companies seeking arrangement and only fans and watch their rise. These are growth occupations for a world in which young people do not have good options. and old people hold a lot of the cards, given our 78 year old president, Mitch McConnell, who's in his 70s Nancy Pelosi is at this is preposterous, okay. We need to bring back mandatory retirement not based on age, but based on how long have you had a career if other people are in a holding pattern and you've had a career for a long time, we need to get you the hell off the stage. In that sort of a world. They're now coming from my child's generation, my children's generation, they're coming for Gen Z. This will be the third generation that they've parasitized and I love my millennial audience, my podcast audience is dominated by millennials. They're some of my favorite people. They're not my kids. I am willing to go into full warrior mode to stop the boomers in silence from predating on Gen Z. And these people are, I know that they may not have thought they were bad, but they become really bad people. Look at the graphs on any university, Sky High administrator, huge ramp up, non renewal of tenured positions. The faculty is aged incredibly, not current adjunct faculty and use everywhere.

Foreign students are actually the labor force, they're not allowed to organize, they don't have rights, this entire thing is going to blow. And we're handing everything to our chief up and coming geopolitical competitor. So the reason I came on this, I don't belong on this podcast, I know you're supposed to talk about best practices in the classroom, and how we can do a better job. But I'm claiming that actually, the biggest problem is, is that the teachers of our nation, the educators of our nation, have become one of the greatest threats to American democracy, and the privilege of addressing people who undoubtedly got into this game for totally different reasons. Probably because they wanted to help people probably because they loved this the students, probably because they wanted to make a difference in people's lives, and were willing to take a massive pay cut that they knew was coming coming in. I want to say, look, I was one of these people, I was a bad guy. And I was a bad guy, not because I had a better choice, it was Sophie's Choice, I could either toe the line, and keep my foothold inside of the system. Or I could make a stand and be ejected from it. And I think what we've got to do is we've got to collectively act and say, the most difficult words: "The problem is me."

Jacob Chastain 2:02:09 This is, you do belong on this, this needed to happen. I appreciate all of your knowledge and just insight into this. This is this is you know, I usually split episodes up, this episode is going in its full version because this entire conversation, this is the change, like when you know, we talk about educational change, we talk about, you know, it but a lot of it is is lip service to a system that we're not addressing these bigger issues. And I feel like you cutting to the reality of this, the the malpractice, so to speak of educators and how we are complicit in a lot of this, this is this is real change. This is real information that we need to address. We need to have conversations, right, we need to continue long form discussions about this. Hopefully, there are more people like you who are willing to come and speak to educators rather than talk about us because that's what in all honesty I get. I hear a lot of podcasts where people talk about education, they talk about this, but they rarely talk to educators. And that's, you know, if if I'm the person that is my cards, luckily enough to draw and to kind of be the voice in this than it will if it's someone else, I will back them and support them. The whole question of this is are we are we willing to have the conversations and put in the work to do this but Eric, if people wanted to stay in contact with you follow you if there's educators here who when it keeps going, where do they go? How do they stay in contact with your work, sir?

Eric Weinstein 2:03:39 They can go to ericweinstein.org and sign up for the the portal community and that will give me their email address. I'm expecting that some of the things that I have to say may get me kicked off Twitter up and coming so look for Eric r Weinstein on Twitter. And look if you're on clubhouse I'm I'm on clubhouse. I'm starting to come up on a million followers. I'm not there yet. But it's that's really surprising Instagram, I think I'm Eric our Weinstein. The portal podcast is the RSS feed. I'm very worried that what I have to say is going to get me kicked off of social media upcoming. And it has to do with the fact that we're entering a time of non reality where if if you try to talk about the more difficult issues, all of our terms of service and the trust and safety groups operate as a star chamber, nobody knows the rules because the rules don't exist. And I have no intention of piping down. So I will try to be out there. But I will say we'll reusch and Stefan Alexander are two people that I'm counting on. I think the summit center for twice exceptional kids in Walnut Creek with Dan Peters is a great resource to know about. There are people who are dealing You know, there's a book The dyslexic advantage that I think is super important. I think it's very important to look at Jennifer Fried's theory of institutional betrayal. And the trauma that is induced when institutions fail those who are in their care, I think coming to understand there's a paper I wrote called how and why government universities and industries create shortage of technical workers, something like that, that spells out the treachery of the National Science complex, particularly against women and minorities, but against our own people on behalf of employers. The story of education, you may be looking at a book called The manufactured crisis. There has been no norm Matloff at the University of California Davis is one of the people along with Michael title bomb who has been fighting this fight. And if you can find Ralph gamry, who headed the Sloan Foundation, a bunch of us have been talking about this coming disaster for a long time. It's certainly not just me. But in general, we're always outgunned, we're always outnumbered, it's always referenced to a story that doesn't make any sense and doesn't really exist. So I would say, try to find me on all of those places, if you can, and, you know, recognize where the energy is, I'm not trying to say all teachers are bad, I'm saying that we are put in the system of selective pressures, which we cannot escape from, and we're becoming bad people, the longer feel free to continue to do what you need to do to keep your job but consider raising your voice and saying, He's not wrong about everything, if I'm willing to say these things. And I've got two special people that I want to just shout out. Barbara Lippman green, on my father's side of the family and Jean Ruben, on my mom's are two educators. In particular, Jean died recently, and was a union organizer of teachers and the number of teachers who showed up to his funeral. It's really amazing that there are heroes, and there are people who fight the good fight, who try and who are never going to be featured on television, they're not going to have huge podcasts, there are plenty of people to point to who've tried to make a difference, but maybe the situation that we're up against, we're not equal to. And so the thing that I would say is, we used to be able to fight and win wars to put people on the moon. And to do amazing things for our economy that reached everyone, we can get back there. But in large measure, I don't know that we can do it without a radical shift in our education. And we may not be able to simply educate our way out of this using standard tools. I think they're amazing things to do. I would love to come back on and talk at some point about radical approaches to education. I gave one talk in TEDx in Hillsborough, which unfortunately, has terrible audio, but it is a radical take on education. The power goes far beyond the Khan Academy, trust in yourself, teachers. And for God's sakes, if you've got neurodivergent students, students who are dysgraphic, dyslexic, ADHD, etc, etc, etc. Consider that you don't want to be in a position where the person's memory of you and their name. Your name is in their head as an abuser. At least cut them some slack and consider being unfair to all of the students around you because you won't be unfair to those those some of those kids are the people that we need. And I if I have one plate, please don't go into another goddamn parent teacher meeting telling them that they can. Your kid can do better. No, maybe the problem has to be on your shoulders as well. Maybe it's not a good fit, and maybe you have a teaching disability and turn, turn the mirror towards you and say, Is this my problem? Or is this the kids problem particularly with kids who are on the spectrum with Asperger's or full blown autism? Some of those kids may be the most important people we have and good luck.

Jacob Chastain 2:09:37 And that is it for this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you hear the excitement in my voice because what a conversation what a talk what a deep dive. This is everything I ever wanted this podcast to be and with your help. We can continue having great people like this on the podcast bringing the heat so to speak bringing these educational conference to the next level, you know, he mentioned in the talk that teaching teachers about, you know, best practices and stuff like that. But there's there's a middle ground here toward teaching teachers, I think uniquely supported by some of the most passionate educators on the planet. And I think we can keep having our feel good episodes and keep having our best practice episodes, and diving more and more into conversations like this, where we're not just paying lip service to education and serving students. But we are actually fighting for the change that we want having complicated discussions that take longer than 30 minute chunks or hour chunks or whatever. really diving deep. So if you enjoyed this episode, if you're new to the podcast, whether you're coming from Eric's audience, or you just found it because it was trending somewhere, welcome. We publish episodes every single Monday without fail. Most episodes are done in two parts. But like I said, at the top of this, this is not an episode that you split into parts. And it was a special occasion for the 200. So I thank you guys for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review hit that start button in any of your podcast app. It really does help share this episode. With people everywhere I respond to nearly every dm or email I get if I don't it's because I looked at it and then I got distracted somewhere else. So feel free to message me again. Let's get this conversation started. Let's bring on some more people a gentleman hit that subscribe button. If you want to check out my personal work you can do so on amazon.com You can find my book teaching teachers my personal memoir, where I share a lot of the stories and more of what I talked about in this episode. And really, it's my love story to public education. So if you want to check that out, I would be grateful for those of you who do that. Thank you for listening to this podcast shout out to Hyman for sponsoring this podcast. And as always, ladies, gentlemen, have a good one.