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 a 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 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].

But somehow, the news media, who chose not to report on the Evergreen story, was not very interested, either, in figuring out who Bret was, because the stories showed that there was a contradictory problem with the main narrative. In some sense, that's going to be recapitulated in this episode. There is an official narrative about what happened in the scientific episode, and there is a narrative which I think is much closer to the truth, which I happened to be one of a very small number of witnesses to-to this alternate story. Now the key question is whether to tell the story or not, and you're going to see that both of us have a certain amount of trepidation and energy around the question of whether or not to break a longstanding public silence. When Bret found himself as professor-in-exile along with his wife, [http://heatherheying.com/ Heather Heying], I had thought that the American biology establishment would realize that one of their own had been thrown overboard as jetsam, and that he would have been invited to many universities to give seminars in biology.  

It took awhile for me to understand that, because he was found at Evergreen State College, the people who taught at highly ranked research universities thought that Bret was something more like a teacher rather than a researcher. In fact, he had been the top student of one of the most important evolutionary theorists in the United States, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Alexander Richard Alexander] at the University of Michigan, as well as a student of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers Bob Trivers], formerly of Harvard, arguably one of the greatest living evolutionary theorists-I think presently at Rutgers. Bret was somebody who had actually done really interesting work in his thesis, and for some reason the system found it very disturbing to consider the full implications of his work.