#1919 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Was there a time in the beginning when you did, where you were like, okay, here we go?

Bret Weinstein (0:22)

Yeah, I suppose at the beginning, it was nerve-racking, 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.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

Did this come after Evergreen or before?

Bret Weinstein (0:49)

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.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

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?

Bret Weinstein (1:30)

Yeah, that's true.

That'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 impaneled 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 really, it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the college.

Joe Rogan (2:54)

What were the other policies that he was trying to implement?

Bret Weinstein (2:56)

Well, let's take, for example, the one that Heather and I were most troubled by was a proposal that every faculty hire 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.

Joe Rogan (3:57)

Equally capable by what metric?

Bret Weinstein (4:00)

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.

Joe Rogan (4:37)

But what about people of color that are truly exceptional geniuses, like outliers? Like, what do they do to the other people that don't meet up to those expectations?

Bret Weinstein (4:47)

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, it's considered counterproductive or race trading, really.