#1919 - Bret Weinstein
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Do you get weirded out when you do podcasts now?
No.
Was there a time in the beginning when you did? Were you like, okay, here we go.
Yeah, I suppose at the beginning it was nerve wracking, but I also think I have a really weird relationship with fear, I guess. And so I think I have reason to think that in places where I'm particularly anxious, some part of me feels it, but my conscious mind is not allowed in on it, so I can do what I have to do.
Did this come after evergreen or before?
Definitely before, although right as Evergreen erupted into the public consciousness, there's this one incident, actually, the incident that brought me to public attention, where I was standing in the hallway and I was being confronted by these 50 students who I had literally never met, and they were accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired.
We should explain to people that don't know, because we're starting off this way, the backstory of the evergreen. So it started off where there was an appreciation day for people of color where they did not have to show up for work. Right?
Yeah, that's true. It's not exactly the story, but there is this event called day of absence, which was a long standing event at the college where basically at first, black people, and then later on, more generally, people of color did not come to work, and they held discussions separately. And then in 2017, they changed this to a request that white people not come to campus. And I responded to this, and I said that was unacceptable. This was a public college. I wasn't going to be told I couldn't teach my class. And that did cause a bit of a firestorm. But that firestorm was embedded in a much longer battle that had begun to simmer when the new president of the college, George Bridges, showed up and empanelled a committee, effectively, to suggest mechanisms for restructuring the college. And the mechanisms were insane. They were a recipe for destroying the place. And it was my obligation as a faculty member to point out that it would be a terrible idea for us to adopt these policies. And so the day of absence controversy became the explanation that the public got for why things erupted when they did. But it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the college.
What were the other policies that he was trying to implement?
Well, let's take, for example, the one that Heather and I were most troubled by was a proposal that every faculty higher needed to be justified. On the basis of it in some way addressing inequity. And so you can imagine an environment where you need to hire a mathematician or a chemist, and the answer is, well, you can't really hire anybody whose background doesn't include some strong evidence of their being an activist. And so anyway, that would have been debilitating to the college. That was one thing. Another thing was the suggestion that the college would only be functional at the point that every single graduate was equally capable. And there is exactly one way to do that, which is to hobble all the people who are highly capable. So these were things that didn't make any sense.
Equally capable by what metric?
By every metric. So to the extent that there was going to be some level of skill that was going to be shown by people graduating with respect to math or whatever else, everybody needed to attain it, which, of course, even if that's plausible, if you had access to everybody from birth and you could give them a really high quality math education, by the time students come to college, many have lost the ability to do many of these things, and it will never be regained, certainly at the level of the top performing students. So the only way to get them equal at graduation would be to hobble those who were unusually capable.
But what about people of color that are truly exceptional geniuses, like outliers? What do they do to the other people that don't meet up to those expectations?
Well, that's one of the terrible things about these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, is that the right way out of the problem is to herald those people and to provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish. Instead, they get dragged into a group based on something like skin color, and their exceptional capabilities aren't allowed to shine through. It's basically considered counterproductive or race trading, really.
So the idea was that they wanted to make everyone equally capable in some way, but the only mechanism to do that would be that you had to lower the performance of the people that were at the highest levels of achievement.
Well, they never said that. As a biologist, that is me telling you that when you have a group of organisms that have different capabilities, the idea you're going to bring every individual of low capability up to the top performer, the only way to do that is to lower where the top performers are. So they never finished the sentence. They basically described a utopia in which we looked at the top performing student and then suddenly brought everybody up to their level. But that's possible.
This was like the very beginning of the public being aware of some of the madness that was going on in some universities?
Well, I think there are a number of things that are true about it. One is the protesters at Evergreen were foolish enough to film everything they did, and they uploaded it first to Facebook and then an account called not my fault, one, I believe transported it over to YouTube. And when people saw how absurd it was, it made it much harder to deny that something had gone very wrong. Now, of course, the response at that point was, well, that's evergreen. And I at this point now famously said, no, evergreen is maybe more dramatic in this way. It's earlier, but this is going to spill out into everything. It's already riddled throughout the other universities. And now that's just undeniable.
Yeah, I remember the early days when this was happening, when I would do podcasts about it. And I think this is back when I was still reading comments. And one of the comments was, why would you care about what's happening in these universities? Like, this has literally no bearing on you. And my thought was, I don't think that's true because the people from universities are eventually going to go into the workplace. And if this ideology is so radically different than anything I experienced when I was in my early 20s, there's a shift in the culture that seemed to be a groupthink shift that was forcing people to accept these crazy ideas and that this is going to have some spillover. And now we know that that's 100% true. Like, Jordan was ringing the alarm for this a long time ago, and I'm sure you're aware of what's happening to him now.
I am aware that something new is happening to him in the last couple of days, but I have not caught up to it.
I don't know if he wants me to discuss this publicly, so I'm going to hold off and wait until he does because I believe he's addressing it publicly. Has he addressed this on his. See if he went to go to his Twitter page, see if he said anything but wi fi issue at the moment. Okay. He's getting in trouble for retweeting. Some person who was critical of Justin Trudeau and whatever board of psychologists that they have in Ontario is bringing him in for disciplinary discussions. And I think they want him to be involved in some sort of a class or some sort of a thing. I should just read it. And if I don't get. I'll contact him. If I don't get his permission, I'll delete this aspect of. Here's. Here's what it. It says. The College of Psychologists of Ontario. The government mandated Professional College of Psychologists has disciplined me and is threatening my clinical psychology license for retweeting. The conservative party leader, Pierre Polevier. How do you say his name?
Not sure.
Criticizing Justin Trudeau, the chief of staff, Gerald Butts, someone named Jacinda Arden, and an Ottawa city councilor. He is required to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining. It says, to modify my objectional behavior, which I absolutely refuse to do. So they'll go to the next step, which would be an in person disciplinary hearing. Excuse me, with my license on the line, I'm going to make all this public this week. If you're
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