Read the full transcript of Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” interviews Eric Weinstein about the potential rise of Generation X in leadership roles, analyzing Trump’s tactics. Premiered Mar 8, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
The Gen X Moment
DAVE RUBIN: All right. The return of the Eric Weinstein. There’s many different ways I could go here, Eric.
We’ve been doing this for, as I said, on stage last night, about a decade, which is completely insane. We’ve been having these conversations. Yes.
To our credit, it’s not for us to pat ourselves on the back, but we’ve been directionally right about a lot of this stuff. I want to mention a couple of things that we’ve been talking about, which is something that you brought up in the panel that we did last night or yesterday afternoon, which was this Gen X concept, because it’s something that I’ve mentioned on the show for quite some time that we desperately needed to shift.
Most people understand the shift away from the boomers that, okay, you guys had a great run. You’re running it probably a little longer than you should, but then everyone got focused on the millennials or the zoomers, and they skipped the people who are basically upper thirties into mid fifties, let’s say that’s our crew who are in the prime of their lives, physically, mentally, probably have a little money, have garnered a little success that remember the world pre-internet.
It seems like right now, largely through Elon, we’re getting our moment here. Do you think we’re going to take it and do something good with it? If you agree with the premise?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, it’s an interesting question. So let me just say something. I got one.
We can lose as many audience members as possible. Okay. We have four groups of people generationally speaking that are arguably not reality based at a generational level, the silence, the boomers, the millennials and Gen Z. For whatever reason, some grew up too much with the screens, some got a chance to milk the system and basically broke things for their own benefit.
And so we are the odd ones out. Everybody’s dependent upon us for some degree of reality, which is why so many of the talking heads of the podcast circuit are Gen X, but everyone’s a little scared to see them in power. And so partially what you’re seeing is this kind of righteous indignation of a highly capable reality based people at a generational level.
And the thing that we don’t have is we don’t have a history of being able to do much. And even Elon is really using much younger people to actually carry this out. He’s not surrounding himself with Gen X. DOGE is a bunch of 20 somethings. Exactly. So I’m not positive whether we’re going to have our moment.
I can make a decent argument that our moment never comes. For example, no one born in the 1930s will ever be president of the United States, for whatever reason, that’s a decade which just not a single person ever got to the oval. So I don’t know.
Trump as a Gen X President?
DAVE RUBIN: So, although you don’t know, I suspect you think it would be good for a series of reasons, right? Like that we did grow up pre-internet, some of what I just laid out there, just literally in terms of the age, the wherewithal of a certain set of people to go ahead and do so.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So I can make the argument that Donald Trump went from being one of these three presidents to come born during the summer, the three summer months of 1946, along with W and Bill Clinton, right at the beginning of the baby boom, and he came back as Gen X. That’s interesting. You can make that argument that more or less, once you get completely screwed over by your society, you start to resonate with us.
DAVE RUBIN: That’s interesting. So in some sense we have our Gen X president, it’s bizarre, but this is, and maybe that’s also because he just loomed so large for us in the eighties. His name was on every building. He was on all the TV shows and everything else.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So he was part of that seeming extractive class. That’s the way we saw it. And, you know, he was a builder, but on the other hand, you could say that he was a very glib salesman and was selling things that weren’t entirely what they claim to be.
I think that what happens is that when they shoot at you and that they don’t give you your due or they take every opportunity to drill holes in your boat, you start to resonate with Gen X.
Team Politics and Independence
DAVE RUBIN: I know you’re not a team guy. You don’t like the team nature. I would love to be a team guy. You would like to be a team guy. So I’m sure many people watching this are probably going, why is it that Eric doesn’t seem like he’s on team Trump at this point?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It’s not a question of whether I’m on team Trump or not. I mean, the first thing is that I just sat through a bunch of years of being asked to kiss the woke ring and to bend the knee to the woke and all this kind of nonsense, and I don’t like bending knees and I don’t like kissing rings.
DAVE RUBIN: All right. So I think everyone gets that part. Now give me the other part.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t want to bend a knee and I don’t want to kiss a ring. I want to come and bring the full force of what I know how to do, what’s singular about me, the history that I know about how these things got screwed up. I’ve been fighting this war at some level since the late 80s.
DAVE RUBIN: So it’s like 35 years. So short of getting a laminated card with the big T on it in gold, in essence, the idea set that you’re talking about and the world that you’re trying to create…
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah.
DAVE RUBIN: Would you say that broadly fits within the Trump?
Yes, except without, look, I don’t like cruelty. I’m not trying to pin you here, brother. I’m just curious personally. And I know a lot of people ask me. But I’m very free about this.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I want to help my country and I don’t want to bend the knee and I don’t want to kiss a ring. I want Americans to walk erect and I don’t want cults of personality. I don’t want to genuflect every time Elon’s name gets mentioned, nor do I want to be asked, are you on the Trump train? Yes or no? Because quite honestly, I was on this train a long time before Trump ever boarded.
And this idea that a bunch of, in particular, like the tech right, they just jumped on this thing four seconds ago. And now they’re acting like they’ve been here the whole time. It’s just incredibly disrespectful.
Way too much emphasis is being placed on the market. There’s even free market economists who know that there’s certain things that the market can’t do, like public goods or principal agent problems. So there’s this sort of simplicity and this bravado and triumphalism that I find repellent.
But when it comes to the reforms, do I want these people to succeed? Oh my God, you have no idea. Do I want to help? You have no idea. The problem is, is that I don’t want to do it in terms of these cults of personality. I don’t want to do it in an ugly way. I don’t want to be triumphalist. I don’t want to just stick it to people. And there’s way too much of that energy.
Concerns About Extremism
And I’m also going to just be very honest. We have a situation in which antisemitism and other forms of bigotry are tolerated by both the left and the right to get votes. And if either of these groups would just kick out bigots, like the grippers or the pro-Hamas left, they could have at the middle. And it’s completely alienating that these two sides won’t call out their problems.
DAVE RUBIN: I see, I don’t see the symmetry on that. To me, the left has been largely in the Democrat party, largely has been overtaken by let’s say the Hamas thing. On the right, I don’t see Trump really placating those people.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So the question of placating is a question of you actually have to call this stuff out. What I see is dual signaling. I see huge signaling, “Hey, we’re with Israel or with the Jews. We’re on the side of good against evil.” And I see this idea of, “We’re also going to signal to the people who harbor very bad suspicions, particularly the griper movement, don’t worry. We’re going to signal to you too.”
And they’re going to kind of speak out of both sides of their mouth, playing this cryptic game. And I wish that they would just be very, very clear. Because think about it, you have this opportunity to go after the middle, like reasonable people. Get rid of your extremes. What you really want is to elicit the people who would like to be part of it.
DAVE RUBIN: It’s interesting. I’m just not that concerned about that. And it seems to me that Trump has grabbed those people in the middle as illustrated by say, Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi and Rogan and me, et cetera.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So we may just… but you know, you moved the embassy. Look, I don’t want this to become exclusively Jewish, but I am getting so much abuse out there from people on the right and nobody on the right stands up. And it’s like, wow, you guys are a bunch of cowards. You can’t even stand up for your friends who you fought shoulder to shoulder with.
And in particular, I’ll be entirely honest, one of the most off-putting things I ever heard in my life is that when you look at people who’ve been fighting the war longer than you are, and then you say, well, you know, you didn’t endorse. Did you ever call? Did anyone ever call? Never, not a single phone call.
Universities and Reform
DAVE RUBIN: Nobody cared about my endorsement. Eric, I have to tell you, you don’t get any apologies or someone coming around and saying, oh, I should have done this.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But I’m saying that you have an opportunity. If my endorsement mattered, like when they called Bobby, Bobby said, I have things that I want. I had things that I wanted to know. What are you going to do about universities? What are you going to do about science?
To hear Chris Rufo go off about “we’re going to stick it to the Ivies.” I’m like, well, I understand getting rid of the woke. I understand getting rid of the DEI, understanding all these things. You’re going to destroy the crown jewels of American science. Who are you exactly?
DAVE RUBIN: My claim is, do you think there’s much left there at the universities, at the Ivies?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Go to a seminar. I go in economics, I go in mathematics, I go in physics and I go in biology. Yes. There’s so much great stuff happening in universities. I’m a huge critic of American universities, but the current group of people doesn’t know anything about what they’re destroying.
The USAID stuff. Well, that’s a laundry list of weapons. We’re trying to destabilize regimes. And now you can see that we were trying to destabilize our own people, right? You have to ask, can I at least get a hearing with like, what are these things?
If you just go line items, as I said, you wouldn’t want to do it after October 7th, if you were auditing Israel, say, why are we providing pagers, walkie talkies and tech support to Hezbollah? Because that’s part of like the secret statecraft that we were up to. And the fact that it’s cancerous, the fact that it’s wasteful, the fact that it’s immoral and illegal and all these sorts of things, those are very important facts, but you do have to realize that you can’t just keep saying sunlight is the best disinfectant and Vox Populi Vox Dei.
The Need for Careful Reform
DAVE RUBIN: Does this just get us back to something that we talked about probably eight years ago when I said, well, you got it already.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, no. You said you can’t have a Panther in the China shop that selectively knocks over the China. And you and I have been sort of, it was just like one of the most insightful things. We don’t have to agree on it, but my claim is it’s very dangerous to do what we’re doing right now. And if we were doing it with more care, I’m directionally very much in favor of it.
When I was asked by Konstantin Kisin, what is Trump going to do? I said, he’s going to renegotiate the world. This is the third founding of the Republic. We had Washington, we had Lincoln, and we have this.
DAVE RUBIN: And you’re pleased about that. It’s just, you just want, so that’s the interesting thing. I sense you’re pleased about directionally every which way it’s going. You’d like some sort of more of a barrier or something.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Can we do this like adults? Do we have to signal to all our allies? You’ll have no idea where we’re going to be. We need to do a lot more assurance, explain to people why things are going on. I have no idea from outside, whether this is as crazy as it looks, whether there’s method to the madness. I understand some of it.
The Potential Rise of Generation X in Leadership
DAVE RUBIN: I don’t understand other. And you know, the thing that I keep getting from so many people who do have connections, like, you know, I haven’t been to Mar-a-Lago, you’ve been to Mar-a-Lago. I don’t know what’s going on inside of this thing.
So everybody who’s outside of this, it’s very golden. It’s very, it’s not that either. The issue is what’s the plan.
If you can’t pick up the phone to call your own friends who fought the same war with you and say, look, I need you to keep quiet about this. We need your help on that. What are you concerned about? There just isn’t any of that.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So are you more, does it make you more concerned or, or more, are your feelings moderated by the fact that so many tech bros are now involved in this?
DAVE RUBIN: They’re not tech bros. They were my friends.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So, but that’s what I mean. So, you know, a lot of these, yeah, but they just changed. Like it was crazy how many of them have just changed.
Two years ago, they were like pro science or, you know, maybe this idea that Fauci represents science and therefore science doesn’t exist. And therefore universities don’t exist. I didn’t know how shallow this was.
Very strange to find out from Vivek Ramaswamy that we need to worry about India and China and mathematics. When, you know, as I, my point is, is you need to worry about the French, the French are the world champions of mathematics, these people don’t know things and they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t ask.
DAVE RUBIN: So if you were, if you got a call and they said, Hey, how can I help? How, well, if they got a call and they said, what can you do to help?
Economic Policy and Technical Expertise
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Let’s reverse that. I have the paper that tried to figure out how we get American business, the best and the brightest without hurting American capital, how it gets the best and brightest without hurting labor. I have the history of what H1B came from and the conspiracy between the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences.
They don’t know that they’ve got a huge problem that the CPI was directly broken by the Boston commission. And it uses a modified less bears index called a Lowe’s index. And it’s supposed to be using a seasonal, path dependent index because an error in the CPI affects all tax brackets and entitlements.
So the error in the CPI was supposed to be the fourth largest program after like defense, Medicare, and social security, the error in the CPI, you know?
So it’s like, do you guys know how this thing works or runs? Do you care? Do you just want to move fast and break? You tell me if you want to move fast and break things and you want a map of where things are, I don’t need to be, I don’t need a job. I don’t need to be in the administration or anything. I’m just like, do you want to win?
Do you want to be strong or do you want to, is everything a loyalty test?
DAVE RUBIN: So all of that being said, do you feel hopeful about the direction things to be going? I mean, it seems to me, everyone here is at least from an American perspective, very hopeful you’ve brought up some directional things that you’re worried about, you know, in mathematics.
Statistical Analysis of the Current Situation
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And that is my language. There are four moments to a distribution mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis, and what I said, this is positive mean, like, you know, on average, it should work. It’s very high variance.
These guys are swinging like crazy and they’re going to do all sorts of weird stuff and some of it’s going to work and some of it’s going to be a disaster. It’s negatively skewed, which means if it goes wrong, it’s a thermonuclear planet that’s very fragile and it’s got high kurtosis, which means that it’s not a normal distribution. The extremes are more likely than usual.
Put that in a sentence.
It’s probably going to be a really beautiful spring day with a low probability of accuracy of the forecast and a very higher than normal, but still low chance of an apocalypse.
And it’s very hard to say that to people.
DAVE RUBIN: I can work with that.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I can work with that. They’re super, what they’re doing is super dangerous. They don’t appear to be aware of the danger.
And you know, it’ll probably work out. I wouldn’t bet against them. It’s not a morality play.
The whole point is to save the country, the world, and have a glorious future. And the obsession with like, will you dance the YMCA? No, I’m not going to dance the YMCA.
I’m here to solve the CPI problem. Come on. What? Come on. Why come on?
DAVE RUBIN: No, no. Now, now it’s just this. You don’t even have to do that. I just, I don’t want to do that because it’s two hand job. That makes you nervous. You didn’t say that Peter.
We will continue this over dinner. My turn. Dude.
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