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

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].

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, browbeating 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-in-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.  

So I hope that you like it. We're going to put it in front of you as an experiment, and we're going to test to see whether or not I'm correct that The Portal can be used to augment the usual channels.  

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.