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 had to leave because of death threats when he stood up for women of color who were being abused for the amusement-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.

I think in this episode we're going to do something interesting. I see Bret in two separate ways: On the one hand, I view him as a very heroic figure and he's an absolutely brilliant person. It's been a pleasure sparring with him throughout my life. However, I'm also his older brother and you're going to hear me at sort of my overbearing best, brow beating him a bit. Now the point isn't to push him down, but quite the contrary. I'm rather competitive as Bret's older brother and I don't want to compete with the weakest version of Bret, the professor and exile. Instead, I want him seated again inside of the institution where he always belonged. And in order to do that, I want him to tell the tale, not with embellishment, but as it actually happened, because I think it's one of the most fascinating episodes in modern biology that I've ever heard.  

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 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.  

'''Eric:''' Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm joined today by none other than my own brother, Dr. Bret Weinstein. Bret, welcome.  

'''Bret:''' Wow. Well, I dunno. I would imagine a certain fraction of your audience is going through the usual sort of a—  

'''Eric:''' That's true. Okay. So if you don't mind, I was trying to think about the fact that we have an opportunity to do something that might be slightly different because you and I share a lot, and what I thought is that we should begin to really focus on areas of your expertise with respect to biology rather than the way in which many people have come to know you. So can I ask you to just quickly dispense with, in 30 seconds, how the world has come to recognize you if they recognize you at all?

'''Eric:''' All right. So you were a biologist teaching at a relatively obscure college that had previously been known for social activism. And I didn't love your introduction, because when you say, “Well, the students accused me of racism” that leaves sort of a weird question. Like, “Why was he accused of racism?” Let me solve the puzzle just immediately-maybe you can't do this-because that was the closest we'd seen to a Maoist takeover inside of the United States of America, ever. Like, it was a case of mass insanity, and the videos showed it to be mass insanity, and unless you had been indoctrinated to believe that Maoism of some form, Maoist re-education, was normal, the rest of the world said, “OMG, what the heck is going on at this completely insane—”. It wasn't just like one of these college craziness pieces. This is really an episode of broad institutional madness that was localized there. And I want to take it to be self-evident because it is self-evident. The video exists. And if you took the people who were trying to pretend that you were a racist in their own terms, that was sufficient to—it was like the unreliable narrator. They were debunking themselves in the eyes of everyone who hadn't come under the spell of this particular kind of madness.