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[ly] 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].

'''Eric:''' Okay. This is so uncomfortable, but it is also the real substance of our relationship. I always resented the fact that you really excelled at, and enjoyed, teaching as much as you did, and you saw this in terms of a place to play with ideas, to teach students to have a pleasant and enjoyable life, healthy as it was in the great outdoors, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. And I still see these characteristics in you, and it drives me nuts because you're your own worst enemy in some ways, to me. What you really are, to me, is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, and beneath this kind of very nice, friendly pedagogue is a thinker that the world doesn't know. And I watched recently your interactions with Richard Dawkins, and it was absolutely infuriating. I mean, you know, he's very clear. It's like well, Bret is a real hero, so far as free speech and standing up for free inquiry goes; but he's very confused. Well, no, I don't think that that's right. I think that you guys had a really substantive interaction about biology, which I wish he would spend more time on because he's phenomenal at it when he's focused on it, and you're phenomenal. And that was supposed to be a really different conversation. But because we got to know you the wrong way, in my opinion, you're always the guy who was strong enough to stand up to students at an obscure place, and this completely masks who you've always been, and you're not willing to take up the yoke, which is the more important role for you.

'''Bret:''' Well, I don't know that I'm not willing. I think you and I have a different approach to this and it may be, you know, birth order stuff or whatever, but, you know, and I also, I have the benefit of you in the world, doing what you do, which, I do wonder sometimes what would've happened to me at Evergreen had I only had my own tools at my disposal. It is quite possible I would have been effectively snuffed out in private and I don't know what I would be doing at the moment. As it happens, the Evergreen story turned into rocket fuel that propelled me into a strata where there's lots of interesting things to do, that may not be exactly what you're talking about, but they make sense.

'''Eric:''' Yeah, it's frustrating. I'm trying—I don't think you understand what it is that I'm trying to do here. I believe that you're miscategorized, and you're really not grasping that this is my opportunity—

'''Bret:''' No, I am. I am grasping it. What I think distinguishes us is that we have very different styles with respect to approaching things. I, for example, take a certain perverse pleasure in watching Dawkins slowly move in my direction, which I believe is happening.

 

Now. I would like him to move faster. He's not a young man and I think it's actually quite important that he recognize where the errors in his own thinking are. And to be honest, I believe I know where at least several major ones live, and I know what he would see if he could be brought to understand the nature of those errors and to confront the, frankly, the portal that opens if you walk through a slightly different door than he's been walking through. But you know, it didn't work in one evening—I always wondered if it would, but there is still the possibility that he will have the epiphany that I hope he will have.

'''Bret:''' Okay.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. You're not getting it. You were found at Evergreen State College. That is a communication to the world that you weren't very good.  

'''Bret:''' That would feel bad to most people, because they would feel like, “What am I doing wrong? Why does nobody else understand this point?” To you and me, that feels good. It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it, gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. The question is what to do with those things, and there, I think the question is if I went through something with-I said something intemperate to the New Atheists, and suddenly Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and Neil Shubin came at me all at once, not on the topic that I had caused offense–on a totally different topic. They had picked something off my YouTube channel. Jerry Coyne had claimed to have debunked it. He was wrong, but nonetheless it provided fodder for them to attack. Their point was that I didn't understand natural selection and that, to the extent I might believe I knew something that other people didn't know, the right thing to do was to submit it to a journal and go through peer review. I pointed out to them that peer review was not Richard Dawkins style, and that he in fact advanced the ball for the field, substantially, but has barely published a paper. That backed them off that course, and their tune changed to, “Well, how about a book then? That's what Dawkins did.” And to me that's a win. The idea— I'm not against peer review. I want peers to review my work, but I don't want it snuffed out in private. And so, to the extent that that little battle was the result of them underestimating me and not knowing that something was going to come back that was cogent and responsive to the world as it actually is, and having them back off their position and say, “Yes, actually a book would be a fine thing.” That was positive movement from my perspective. They underestimated me, and they had to back down. So I can't regret that too much. To me, on a different timescale, I believe I'm making progress toward a goal that you and I agree is the right one, but I'm not sure that coming at it, guns blazing is the way to go.

'''Bret:''' Okay. Floor is yours.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. I want to talk about something I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, and it has nothing to do with Richard Dawkins and peer review and Jerry Coyne and a bunch of other things that almost nobody cares about. It has to do with about a 50 year period in which great ideas got buried no matter where they occurred. Because great ideas were very likely to be highly disruptive to an institutional order. And between you and your wife, and me and my wife, three of our four theses ran into incredible problems, because they were trying to break really new ground. And the amount of delay that you suffered, I mean you're now 50 years old.  This is a very late start in a career. You're coming from a very inauspicious place. You've been fitted with a story, which is “He's a sweet guy who stood up to a mob and that's his claim to fame” and you're not really understanding that you're not being taken fully seriously as a biologist. In part what Jerry Coyne is saying to you is, “Hey, you're really unknown to us. I'm at Chicago. Richard Dawkins was at Oxford.” You know, he was the Simoni professor for the—