School System Failed Us! - How "C" Students Are More Successful Than "A" Students | Eric Weinstein

I want to go back to your learning disabilities. Sure. What what were they? How did you build confidence in yourself? Could you tell I'm [ __ ] smart, man? There's just some translation error. I was recognized for being decent as a student to begin with. Okay. And what happened was that that recognition translated to my being skipped a grade even though I was already young for my grade. So, I was like fairly advanced relative to the American system. You know, other people skip two, three, four grades. This was just one grade. But to then have my handwriting and a lot of these sort of executive functioning issues take over, you know, like no matter how beautiful a poem I could write, I would always be graded on punctuation. And so, it was just this precipitous fall from educational grace. And that having had a memory, like the only remnant of my being have having been a good student was that I was somehow weirdly young for this grade given that I was screwing up everything. And I was at a really good school, um which was hard to get into, that I'd gotten into before the superpower had fallen away. And so, there was just this like weird memory. And of course, in all the Cinderella stories, right? Cinderella's never really of lowly birth. She's always, you know, got something special. So, that was my little something special. And then when I found that I couldn't do music and I couldn't do math because you had to rely so much on, um calculation and that required writing things down and being very careful about it, everything melted away. And I just became convinced that I wouldn't be fenced out of anything. That I was just going to be so aggressive that I was going to eat the system that was trying to eat me. And I made education the enemy because that's what they were. They didn't realize it necessarily, but all of these people who prided themselves on being educators were just being incredibly abusive to me year after year. Just tearing me to shreds because it was necessary for their fiction that the good students were getting ahead and the bad students were not putting in enough work or didn't have a gift. And you know, when I found out still in high school at this point? Oh, even through college. I mean, I was determined that I figured I was going to drop out of college. There was a language requirement. I took French and I was getting nowhere. Like you were having a hard time learning it? An impossible time learning it. Because it wouldn't stick? Because the number of things I could not figure out from the spellings, the accents, the irregularities, why is everything gendered? Were you frustrated with the nature of the language? Cuz like so I'm I've heard you talk many many times and dude, your ability to logic through something is is really really That's why I'm saying Indonesian is special. Because Indonesian removes a lot of roadblocks. even saying like logic your way through like the following. Hey, I want to get a degree, it'll be useful to me. I'm also by the way I've already done the whole [ __ ] degree except for the language thing. So I'm just going to brute force memorize this thing. to do worse. I was I was going I don't think any anyone needs a BA to get a higher degree. So was part of it just the anger of the school system is the enemy and so [ __ ] these kids. I'm not going to get a degree if they're going to make me do something that I think is dumb? Well, I I I think that there's an aspect to that which is self-protective. Emotionally. This is dumb. motivating. Can you imagine that you're going to go up against the entire system and win? And you start envisioning your victory over a system that does not want you at the table? Yes. I mean, just try to try to imagine like being the blackest person possible at a KKK meeting and getting everybody singing your by the end. That's that's your goal. Right? You're just going to you were going to inflict yourself upon the world. And that that was necessary to build strength of character because when I you know, I got to Harvard in mathematics, there was no one remotely like me. You know, In their approach to the system is broken and stupid. These were like the winners of the comp you know, it was like a a tournament and people kept winning and so they kept advancing. You know, and every once in a while I think you know, I found out that Yo-Yo Ma didn't win any competitions when he was young. That's interesting. And I that was really distinguished because in general the way you got to be at Yo-Yo Ma's level was through a tournament model. And so what happened with me is I went to like the Museum of Science and Industry and I thought, "Wow, this is so cool. Uh I want to figure out how to become a scientist or a mathematician or an engineer or something like that. And then when I found out that you had to be really good at it, I just thought, "Well, that's unfair." No, literally. Like if the if the universe is written in differential geometry, what are the odds that I'm not going to learn the language in which the cosmos was written? There's just no way you're going to fence me out of that. So, I [ __ ] love that mentality so much you can't imagine. people don't like it. Uh I think that what you have to understand is is that like I'm sure that when I was singing, there are musicians that are cringing, you know? And they've got their hands over their ears and like you wanted to hear where do you really hear this difference between even temperament and the Pythagorean temperament? Um you know, you hear it in the blue third. So, the difference between like Like that is the place in which the maximum difference occurs, that our third is wildly off. And so when I want to teach people about music, I've got this problem always. Which is I've got this these very exceptionally good people who say, you know, you're teaching people wrong, you're giving them the wrong ideas, this isn't helpful. And I have to say screw you to all the people whose playing I know is better than mine and whose whose stuff I love, but I'm not at I'm not talking to the people that they're going to reach. I'm talking about the people who are going to die never having a relationship with music. And this coffee mug may rescue some of them so that they will become the students of those great musicians. But what I'm interested is I'm interested in the losers. I'm interested in everyone who got left behind. You know, if I had a gang sign, it would be an an L in the middle of my forehead. If I if I ever make it to the Tonight Show, I want them to play me on with baby even the losers get lucky sometimes. It's just this idea of I will not be fenced out because of your hang-ups as an educator. There's no way I'm going to accept the D or the F or the, you know, Johnny can try better or, you know, Arena needs to turn in her homework more regularly. No, you're wrong. Those kids are not failing for the reasons you think. They don't think failing because you don't think they don't care. They they do care. They don't know how to do the things that come naturally to the kids you're calling the A students. And so I'm interested give me your F students. Give me the kids with the bad attitudes. Give me the kids with the learning disabilities you want to put in the corner and then you want to hold back. Because mostly you've misassessed those people. Maybe I think 15 to 20% of our country is filled with unbelievable learners who are being held back by educators. And nobody wants to take to the educators uh those kids are with me. And you got to get away from them because you're doing incalculable harm. And by the way, any parent who's listening to this who's got a kid who's not living up to potential is sitting there and getting closer and closer to the speaker, "What did he just say?" And if I say these are gifts, they're not they're not disabilities. Do not over medicate your children. Embrace entirely different ways of educating your kids. They can learn anything. One, I want to know how it's a gift, and two, are there actually places right now that people can go that specialize in educating people like that? Well, I think there's something called the Summit Center in the in Walnut Creek in the East Bay. Um there's a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. I think there's something called the Bridges Academy in LA. But there's an entire you know, what I found was is that there's a group of kids who meet in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to do LARPing. And I didn't know anything about LARPing. And the moms sit around bitching about the schools that their kids didn't get into and say, you know, uh you know, my son Arun uh is an amazing computer programmer. He started his first business, but we can't get into the swanky private schools because they took one look at him and they don't want him. And I'm thinking like, yeah, they don't want him. But all we have to do is to make sure that this kid doesn't develop some sort of wrong idea about his his gifts. And we have to inflict our best people on the system because the system doesn't want our best people. Your beef with the system I find particularly interesting. There's something about your um imagine God, let's see if I can recapture the words you used. Imagine taking on the whole system knowing you're going to win. It's not quite right, but that was certainly the sentiment. And that is that puts you in in a rarefied group. Most people are they're really broken by nobody believing in them. And I always tell people that the biggest gift anyone can ever give you, and it will never feel like a gift, but the biggest gift anyone can give you is doubt. The problem is it breaks most of the people that it touches. So, I liken it to the inner cities. The inner cities break virtually everybody that go through it, but the people that survive it come out the other side these extraordinarily driven um unbreakable people. And it's it's pretty extraordinary when you see it happen. But, how do we begin to get those people into a position where they can um and maybe it's reading the books that you listed or or going to the places, but I'm super curious if you know, like what is it about their method that they're teaching or or maybe more easily, what did you realize? What was the portal that you went through that allowed you to recognize your own struggles as an actual gift? Or was it just that it pissed you off enough that it made you fight? Well, for example, um like the first portal for me really was music. And it was specifically the blues, which it is for many people. The blues is some of the most emotional music. Many people in my day didn't even know that it was a codified art form in large measure, but um it was a 12-bar pattern. It was a formula. So, there was sort of on a piano it'd be your left-hand secret, which would be the progression. And your right-hand secret would be the scale that nobody taught you. Right? Um it's not the major scale and it ain't the minor scale. And if you think about um I always do this as a descending scales. The major scale descending is Joy to the world, the Lord has come. But, the blues scale descending sounds like the beginning to a song called Messin' with the Kid. D D D D D D D D D and once you learn that scale, you realize how much of the stuff that you love was not in either the major or the minor. And you learn about these blues blue notes, and you learn about seventh chords, and you learn about how to put some grit and distortion in your guitar if you've got an amp. And it's an alternate world. So, the the portal in music that was a big breakthrough for you in terms of blues anyway was that there are these left-hand right-hand secrets um in in a very simple scale that once you learn that, you've sort of got them. You know, maybe 80% isn't the real number, but it's like some big percent that you can very quickly song unlocks that. And then, you know, for example, there was Because you realize how many songs you love are actually only four chords. Right. And then there was this weird Vivaldi piece, which is classical, you know, unapproachable classical music that went something like I I haven't played it forever, so I don't know if I'll remember it. And I thought You know, that wasn't perfect. It's super rusty, but wait a minute. I can play that almost instantaneously. I don't need to wait. Maybe my technique is going to suck. Maybe I'm never going to make it to the Carnegie Hall stage. I don't care. That song is beautiful, and it makes me feel good, and there's no one who can fence me out. I have my grandfather um that Brett and I both talked about to thank him for because he gave me this guitar and my mom was dead set against it. She said, "You're giving that guitar, it's just going to give him an inferiority complex." And my grandfather said, "Oh, all he needs to do is tune it. If he can learn how to tune it, he never has to play it." And he was such he was such a genius that he figured out how to get this thing into my life. And I tuned it, and then after you tune it, you say, "Well, I wonder if it's good for anything." Right? And then you start finding all of these techniques and hacks and and the craft behind it and you realize you're behind the radio. It's like when you program a computer, you're on the other side of the screen that the person who's just using the apps is sitting, you know, they're sitting in front of a half-silvered mirror and you're looking at them like you're the FBI and they're just sitting there, you know, typing away. They don't even know that their computer is a computer. They can't find the place where you program the computer because now it's hidden. So, there's just this entire hidden world of everything. Like when you learn a language, why don't you learn linguistics along with the language that tells you why, you know, what is word production and and and morphology and and the orthography and what's the evolution of these things? You know, nobody tells you there's a book called the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language or the Loom of Language and that these books are like scrolls. They have all this extra information that people think, "Well, we can't bother the students with it." Are you kidding me? That's That's the sugar for for people like me. I'm going to get in behind that. I'm going to hack the hell out of it. I I wonder though, so when I think about and in fact, maybe I can um give you insight into what it is like to be, I'm guessing, one of those teachers. The shortcuts and things that you're talking about, the portals, the ability to sort of understand the rules of the game. Would you say that that's a fair way to say that? Rules of the game? That once people understand that they are a computer is coded, it's not this mythical box, that there is a prompt line somewhere that you can go in and once you understand the rules and you can begin to edit the code and so on and so forth. You have to really understand how it works. Is that fair? Uh I don't know where you're going with it, but I'll play with that. Okay, so if that's roughly fair and trust me, this isn't a trap, but I'm I'm thinking so cuz what the the perspective I want to give you is somebody who has has come to embrace that realization as fervently as you, but far slower and with less um like being hit with the awe and the wonder of like having this breakthrough moment with a guitar or whatever. So, I'm guessing the place the teachers are coming from is they don't get that same like big aha moment. It doesn't feel like a violent stumbling through a portal. What it feels like is an insecurity trigger of this is another thing that I have to learn and understand and be able to convey and teach to people. And I think it speaks to um when I think about the education system and mad love to everybody that's out there teaching because I used to teach. It is [ __ ] brutally difficult. It is a time suck of all time sucks. It is It will It will test your limits as as an intellect quite frankly and certainly as a um leader of minions, especially if you have uh you know, students at an age where they can properly rebel. Uh so, it it certainly isn't easy, but it when you're in there trying to make it happen and you're realizing like this is intimidating and it's scary to try to put these lessons together. I went through school. I used sort of brute force. I was good at learning. They probably did reasonably well in school, which is why they continue. They got decent grades. They know how to play that game. And so, their entire life is about I've gotten good at this very finite thing. And people want to protect that sense of ego. And if their ego isn't that of being the learner, it's deeply more troublingly that of being the teacher, the one who knows. students are you going to sacri- How many students do you get Do you have the right Like what It's interesting. So, you and I you and I um I don't know if we see this exactly the same and you are uh you have a righteous indignation that I find intoxicating, but I don't have. Okay. And so, um I heard Sam Harris talk about this one time and he said, "Maybe something broke in my brain when I was meditating and I I so I don't get this anger." And remember I was telling you before we started rolling, people love it when I get like enraged about something. But the only things I can get enraged about are things that I was doing myself in my own life and it pisses me off. It's about me. No, there's an ada- there's an adaptive aspect to my voice. I am I am aware you mean? To the aggression? are cameras rolling and I now have a platform. And I have the ability to go back and save myself. So, that's who you're talking to. You're talking to to the parents who are going to take their kid and they're going to say, "Where is your algebra homework? You forgot it at school again? You tore in a a ripped piece of paper? Did Did you not read the directions? Did Where are your notes? You know, I didn't know that I have this issue called kinesthetic reinforcement that when I take notes, instead of strengthening the pathway in the mind, it's so difficult for me to write that it erases whatever notes I'm taking. So, I wiped out the fancy private school education by taking the notes that were illegible and I didn't remember what was going on in class. And I only found this out when I was in graduate school at Harvard by the most precarious circumstances possible. I mean, my my view is is that my PhD belongs to every learning disabled family in the country because so so far as I'm concerned, the difficulty of getting through the system and surviving it is is that you're constantly causing a problem for every educator. And so, I am compassionate with the problem right up to a particular point. And that is the point where you say, "You know what? I don't have time for this shit." And I'm sorry, but you're getting a C. And I I some something in me knows that I'm doing you wrong, but I'm not allowed to do you right. I can't figure out why I'm allowed to give you an A in this class because you turned in some other project that I was not expecting. Because you showed brilliance. You You showed something else. And somehow, because of my needs for my job, I have to give you and your family the bad news that you're taking it for the team. And so, my righteous indignation is intended to start a blaze. If there was one thing I would love to do, is to liberate the families that are going through this nightmare of looking at their kids and saying, "Wow, you're really just you're not getting it. Don't worry, there'll be something in life for you." Like, why are you giving up on your kids? If those kids are smart, like this race and IQ thing, I cannot stand this race and IQ thing. I I understand the idea that IQ is somewhat predictive. I understand that you can correlate it with various things. IQ is such a crude measure of all of the things that we really deeply care about. And I can't help, you know, my friend Nassim Taleb is brutal on this topic. He is not a nice person when it comes to this issue. But my energy is with him. How many people are we going to throw in the dummy pile? You know, I think about Louis Armstrong a lot. And I think about Louis Armstrong and the fact that we white Americans remember him as a novelty singer. Like, "Hello, darling." And that's not what he is. He is the He is the singular genius who wrote our national classical music. And he invented it, for my money, modern jazz as we understand it. More or less single-handedly as an orphan out of New Orleans. Now, we can't acknowledge his genius. We can't acknowledge that this is an actual straight-up American genius like none other. I mean, like I don't know, maybe Art Tatum and Charlie Parker and a a tiny number of people who are just completely out there. But, we are so wrapped up in this nonsense about what makes a good student and what makes a first-class mind, we don't see. Like, let me just give you the simplest one that I give a lot. People call me colorblind. And I say, "Oh, do you feel bad because you're contrast blind?" And they say, "What?" I say, "Well, I don't think you see contrasts as well. So, if we ever need to depend on camouflage and spotting the enemy, you're going to really need me around. That's why my trait is retained in the gene pool. And I understand that color is something that gives you an advantage a lot of the time. But, don't think that we couldn't have driven my colorblindness out of the system if it didn't confer an advantage. And you don't have that advantage, and you don't even know that you don't have that advantage. Well, the same thing is true for most learning disabilities. The learning disability portion of the gift is the price paid. And you're not letting me use the other part. Like, I understand that a Bugatti is pretty noisy, and it guzzles gas. But, it does go rather fast if you know how to drive it. And you're telling me that I have to drive it in a school zone for 25 mph, and that it has to be under a certain decibel level, and that it can't guzzle gas that because it's too expensive and bad for the environment. Screw you. I want those learning disabled kids racing around the track at 300 mph. And now you try to catch them. This is a This is an epidemic mischaracterization of a giant portion of the population from whom you will get vaccines and new industries. These are the people who will write your scripts that you'll you'll be riveted must-see TV from the future. And right now what you're telling them is that they're a bunch of morons. So, yeah, there's a little bit of righteous indignation. No, man. I love it. I think that um I mean, it's interesting. So, not having lived through that, not having had that as my challenge, is something that I will say that I've just never really thought a lot about the way that people learn differently. But, you hear stories like you making it all the way to Harvard, getting a degree in mathematics, um and yet also being learning disabled. You hear people talk about how Einstein, when he was young, people supposedly told him that he wasn't that bright. And you know, you you hear enough stories like that, and you start to think, "Okay, maybe there are some people that are just so far outside of the box." Um your Bugatti analogy, I think, is is really spot-on. It's uh yeah. Well, the great thing about it is that all those learning-disabled kids really appreciate their their straight-A friends. Cuz they you know, you guys helped us out of our jams. You let us crib notes. Uh you very often got us through school. I don't look at me. I was a kid cheating. Like like a fiend. All right. But, what I'm trying to get at is I don't see the learning-disabled students wanting to extinguish neurotypicals. I see the neurotypicals scr- neurotypicals freaked out of their minds that the kid who they think should be, you know, in the dummy pile might have some super talents. And if you think about a lot of the energy in Silicon Valley, a friend of mine uh said something which I thought was very wise. And she said, "If only we could harness the energy of the billionaires who aren't still trying to prove to their middle school cafeteria table that they belong with the cool kids." This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life gets tough, finding someone who can truly listen can feel impossible. Friends are busy, family doesn't always get it, and some things are just too personal for work. This isolation isn't just uncomfortable, it's dangerous. Bottling up your thoughts and emotions can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression. 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