#1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

Joe Rogan (0:08)

Boom, and we're live, ladies and gentlemen.

Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein. I didn't screw it up this time.

Bret Weinstein (0:14)

Nope, you got it right.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Gotta get that Steenstein thing messed up with you.

Bret Weinstein (0:18)

Gotta get it right.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

I apologize. It's a bad time to get those messed up.

Heather Heying (0:21)

It is. Thanks for having us.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Thank you for being here, both of you. I'm very excited about this conversation.

Bret Weinstein (0:25)

Really excited about it, too. Little bit nervous in one way, but pretty jazzed.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Well, I think it's good to be nervous about it. You know what I mean? What we're talking about, folks, what we would like to talk about is, well, why don't you explain it?

Bret Weinstein (0:38)

Well, I think Heather and I have been on an interesting adventure. We are evolutionary biologists. We trained with some of the finest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, and we have been teaching. We taught for, Heather taught for 15 years. I taught for 14 years at Evergreen, and we spent a lot of time dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function and how we interact. And that was very enjoyable to us, and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person. And we're now watching the conversation out in civilization about sex and gender devolve into an absurdity.

And on the one hand, that's kind of frightening.

I mean, for us, it's not directly an issue. We're happily married, and so we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days.

And our kids are too young to be navigating it yet. Maybe this will all be clarified by the time they're involved in dating. But we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends, former students, who are trying to navigate this stuff and finding it difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that, frankly, there's a much better alternative. If one can stand to think in evolutionary terms, if we can really look at ourselves as we are, as we came to be through evolutionary forces, then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating a great deal. But we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

What is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now?

Heather Heying (2:39)

Well, I think we'd love to see a third way. So they're the pre-moderns, as it were, who have a very traditionalist conservative approach.

Joe Rogan (2:48)

Try to get this sucker up close to you. Sorry.

Heather Heying (2:50)

Sorry about that.

Joe Rogan (2:51)

No worries. Yeah, perfect.

Heather Heying (2:52)

The pre-moderns who have a very traditional conservative approach to gender roles. To sex, to relationship.

And there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that. And then there are the post-moderns who want to throw out everything. Want to throw out everything that evolution handed us. And in the meantime, pretend that it didn't happen. Right? Pretend that it's not even based on reality. And there's a third way. And maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre or post-modern. But there's a third way to navigate what evolution has given us.

What we can change, what we can't change. And how to actually recover some of the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance. And understand that human beings are what we are from not just a hundred years back, but a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred million years back, we've had sex.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

Since you both taught at a university level, you've been around these students and you've seen this sort of post-modernist movement gain steam.

What do you think is the cause of it? Like what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women, and that all the differences in the genders are all, it's all propaganda or cultural or...

Bret Weinstein (4:16)

So, I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause, that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught. We detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured. We can tell that there's nobody really at the helm. And you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to them is incredibly glaring, something that just absolutely needs to be solved. And so what they do is they look at that issue and they say, what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed?