19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC: Difference between revisions

'''Eric:''' Hello. This is Eric Weinstein. I'm going to be recording a short introduction to this episode because I think it's probably the most important episode of The Portal to date. That said, under normal circumstances, I probably would have either edited this heavily or not released it at all. It starts off quite slow and it gets quite awkward before finding its pace. Now what's going on is that the interview subject is none other than my brother Bret Weinstein. In Bret's case, you probably know him if you know him at all as the heroic professor who stood up against what can only be described—I swear I'm not making this up—as an Maoist insurrection at an American college in the Pacific Northwest, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College Evergreen State College]. It was a very strange situation because somehow the national media that we would normally have thought would have covered such a story—for example, the media that covered the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Straight_Hall#1969_building_takeover takeover of Straight Hall at Cornell] in the 60s—that media was almost absent completely.  At least, they were absent for a very long time before they entered late in the game. And why is that? Because the story ran counter-narrative—that is, the students at the Evergreen State College who were behaving in a racist fashion were actually students of color, and this was an exactly counter-narrative story. And Bret, who stood up to this racist insurrection, was in fact somebody with a history of standing up against racism. He had, in fact, been a student at the University of Pennsylvania, my Alma mater, an Ivy league school, and had to leave because of death threats when he stood up for women of color who were being abused for the amusement and the sexual amusement of white fraternity students. So Bret was supposed to be familiar to many of you from that, from an old national news story, and he was also the hero of a book called [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/476218.The_Tapir_s_Morning_Bath The Tapir’s Morning Bath].

I believe that a lot of us are sitting on intellectual gold. I don't think that the story that somebody’s work didn't see the light of day, or got attributed to somebody else, is as exotic as the institutions would have you believe. In fact, I think it's quite common. I think many of us find that we don't have careers inside of science because something goes wrong quite early when we're quite vulnerable. And my hope is that some of you listening, who I know are struggling as graduate students or as postdocs or as undergraduates, will listen to this and find some courage to stand up for yourself, because, quite frankly, if you choose not to do it in order to make nice with your fields, the chances are you will probably won't have a career in the long term. You might as well swing for the fences and you might as well clear your throat and tell your story as it actually happened, without fear.  

'''Bret:''' Including the pets names were also sometimes thrown in, if I recall correctly.

'''Bret:''' Well, there's a little more to it in the sense that they were entirely unprepared for a white guy willing to say, “No, I'm simply not a racist”. And it just didn't occur to them that that was going to happen. And it didn't occur to them that my own students weren't going to flee to their side at the point that they leveled their accusation, because those things would have been normal in this environment. But, in my case, I grew up in a home—there were plenty of flaws in that home, as you know—but one of the places I don't think it was flawed was that it was very clear-headed about issues of inequality, race justice. And so I, I really have the sense that these issues were really not new to me, and I had a long history at the college, lots of students of color—

'''Eric:''' I don't, you know, here's the thing. I have two documents that I've studied that have a lot of longevity to them. One begins with, “We hold these truths to be self evident” and the other one begins with “In the beginning”. And I think we've made a huge mistake taking this as an argument. It's a non-serious position held by morons and idiots, or people who've been indoctrinated and infected with an idea that there's something left-wing about being a racist. I'm not interested in it, and I also think that it's really important to stop giving these people their due. Like, it's really important to exclude them from the conversation, because if you have to have a three day symposium as to whether or not racism can be redefined in a way that makes it impossible for certain people to be racist but impossible for other people not to be racist, there's just no point. It's just needs to be thrown in the garbage because it just, it's a suicide idea that wastes everyone's time and plunges the world into stupidity, madness and hatred.

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'''Eric:''' This is a miss-telling. This is not even honest.  

'''Bret:''' Well, look, first of all, Dick was very clear with me about the fact that, we're he trying to compete in the modern academy, he did not believe he would have succeeded. And he was clear about the fact that there was no good solution to the problem. So, you know. I can't say that I've ever heard that letter. I believe you have quoted parts of it to me.

'''Eric:''' All right. Bret, this is not the story of your career and your life. What happened is that you got stuck at the university of Michigan for a very long period of time, because you made people very uncomfortable. What he's saying in that letter of recommendation is that you wrote four different theses, so far as I can remember, and they were on widely different topics. Furthermore, here's an interesting one: no one that I know of, despite the amount of discussion that's been spilled in ink over Evergreen has put you together with the hero of a book called The Tapir’s Morning Bath, that appeared years earlier.  

'''Bret:''' But he was absolutely correct. There is a moth that has this beautifully long tongue. It's a Sphingid Hawkmoth one of these sort of hummingbird-esque moths, and anyway, yeah, it's one of the major predictions, demonstrations, that evolutionary theory actually can be used predict phenomena that you haven't been able to observe.

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

'''Eric:''' Yeah.