Bret Weinstein clashes with Evergreen State College’s equity policies after opposing a "Day of Absence" reversal, sparking protests and accusations—including being labeled alt-right despite his alignment with Bernie Sanders. He critiques the Strategic Equity Plan’s racial hiring quotas and absurd protest demands, like segregated seating and policing hand gestures, while questioning how manipulated terms like "racist" stifle debate. The episode ties this to broader systemic failures, like climate inaction post-Trump’s Paris Agreement exit, where Weinstein argues revolutionary tech—like blockchain—could unite humanity against existential threats if deployed correctly. Rogan and Weinstein ultimately agree that universities are corrupted by ideological echo chambers, urging reform or alternatives to preserve truth-seeking amid growing institutional irrationality. [Automatically generated summary]
So the core of it surrounds a tradition that we have at Evergreen called Day of Absence.
And this tradition stretches back long before I was ever at the college.
I've been there 15 years.
This tradition stretches back into, I think, the early 70s.
And it's built around a play written by Douglas Turner Ward, a black playwright.
And the play portrays events in a fictional town where the black population decides not to show up one day in order to emphasize their roles in the town that the white population is unaware of.
And as you would imagine, all hell breaks loose.
So anyway, it's an excellent play and some early faculty at our college decided that we should have a day that mirrored this event and that originally black faculty and students and then later people of color would leave campus for a day to emphasize the role that they play in our community and then they would later the tradition was amended and had a day of presence added to it where people would come back to campus.
And this has been going on, as I said, since the 70s and the whole time I've been there.
And then this year, it was announced by the organizing committee that the situation would be reversed.
And they asked white student staff and faculty not to come to campus.
And that did not at all sit well with me.
As I said in my letter to the person who had announced this, Rashida, who I should say is staff, and she has ended up at the center of this controversy, I think, wrongly, just because my letter and response is addressed to her, and then it was made public by our school paper, so her name has been dragged front and center.
But in any case, my letter, I said that there was all the difference in the world between a population deciding to absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their role and a population deciding to absent another population from a shared space, which I find unacceptable as a person, as somebody devoted to...
The gains of the civil rights movement.
I should also probably say as a Jew, when people start telling me where I can and cannot be, it rings alarm bells.
So that's the gist of the story.
And the letter caused quite a stir amongst student staff and faculty who responded, many of them quite angrily.
Privately, of course, people were much more divided on the matter, and there were plenty of people who agreed with my letter.
But publicly speaking, there was condemnation of the letter.
But the event itself, day of absence, was mostly uneventful.
I did go to campus, as I said I would in my letter.
And I actually...
It's neither here nor there.
It was accidental.
But while I was on campus, I ran into a student that I know very well.
Actually, a student that my wife and I were abroad in Ecuador with last year.
We were teaching abroad, and we had 30 students with us.
And so one of the students who had traveled with us to Ecuador happened to be on campus, too.
So, I ran into this student that I know well and care about quite a bit, and we had a very nice conversation, mostly not about Day of Absence.
As a matter of fact, I can't even remember if we did talk about Day of Absence.
There was something poignant to me about the fact that while I was being condemned for refusing to accept this new formulation, that I was able to meet with a student who is important to me and neither of our racial backgrounds is important.
Fund is primary in our relationship.
We know each other as people and that's really how I would like to see all of us interacting on campus.
We all have our backgrounds, they matter to us, but it cannot become the primary interface between us.
Let me stop you here and let me try to understand what the reaction was because you Rightly said that you think there's a huge problem with asking people to not show up simply based on their color of their skin exactly and What was the argument against that?
Like, when you said that, and I read your letter, and your letter didn't sound racist at all.
It sounded very well thought out.
It made a very good point.
But the response, the inflammatory response to your letter was so disturbing and shocking.
Was there anyone who had reasonable debate with you about this?
Was there anyone who said, well, we should take into consideration why they're asking us to do this, we should sit down with them, we should talk through this?
Was there anything reasonable or was it just dig your heels in the sand?
And then let the insults and the white privilege and all these accusations fly.
Well, like I said, there's a huge difference that you can't see unless you're at the center of one of these things between the public discussion and the private discussion.
Privately, I had very interesting discussions with many people that was not absent.
But if you were to look in on the discussion at the public level, it looked as if there was consensus united against me.
Now, when you say public and private, are the same people making contradictory statements in public that are commiserating with you in private, or is it just different people?
That actually is the thing I find most surprising, is that sometimes people will privately say one thing to you and then publicly do another.
Mostly it's different people.
And I should say the people who have talked to me privately and expressed concerns are actually quite a diverse group.
So it's not as if white folks are disturbed by this and people of color are united.
It's not at all like that.
Part of the hidden story here is that in order to advance certain policy proposals, it has to appear that the community is united behind them and that anybody who stands against them is standing against them for illegitimate reasons.
So that means that the number of people who are willing to express any sort of nuance about what's taking place has to be small, and they have to be dismissible.
So what they did is they called me a racist, which is ironic, because I'm an anti-racist.
I've gone out of my way to, first of all, study the question of why racism occurs, and I've I believe been pretty courageous in fighting against it where I've run into it.
So to challenge me with that particular epithet was a mistake on their part.
It was a strategic mistake.
And I kept trying to tell them while this was still internally being discussed in the college, I kept trying to tell them that they should really check the concept that I'm a racist.
They should ask.
Because if they did, they would discover that they were actually way off the mark, and then they would have an interesting puzzle on their hands.
Then they would have to explain to themselves why they had found themselves hurling this most poisonous term at somebody who not only isn't a racist, but is pretty nearly the opposite.
Yes, but this also actually points to something pretty important, and for anybody who travels this ground themselves, they're going to discover this, that many of the terms that are being used have been redefined, but they haven't been fully redefined.
So one of the things that I've seen in several places is that a term like racist has been redefined so that the bar for being a racist is so low that you couldn't possibly help but trip over it.
But then once you've tripped over it and you have accepted that you are a racist, then the stigma goes back to the original definition.
So it is the dodging and weaving between the two definitions that actually does the heavy lifting.
It is surprising, but it kind of makes sense because you get into these groups of people, they have this confirmation bias, they lump up together, and they all reinforce their ideas in this echo chamber.
And they all do it inside the colleges.
And then when it gets out to the rest of the world, as we're seeing with your case at Evergreen, the rest of the world is like, what is going on over here?
Like, what is happening in school?
And people who are sending their children off to school are very concerned with the indoctrination of these ideas and adopting these very rigid mindsets that the rest of the world just simply could pick apart pretty quickly.
Inside of Evergreen, actually, we are descending further into madness.
The faculty are blaming the fact that the campus had to be suddenly closed due to a threat from the outside yesterday on me for having talked about this in the outside world, specifically for...
And I must say, one thing that we haven't even talked about where I got thrust into the spotlight here, which your listeners are going to have to know in order to understand why I'm even sitting here...
But the intensity and the out-of-touch nature of the discussion inside the college simply reinforces the impression that something is desperately off, that what we really have is a filter bubble that is so...
So strong that even when the world sends very clear evidence that you've missed something somewhere and it's time to rethink what you've been doing, they're not waking up.
And I love this college.
This college, maybe we'll get to talk about it, but...
The structuring of this college is so unusual and what one can do as a professor at Evergreen, if you're really dedicated to teaching, it is the place to be because you have unparalleled pedagogical freedom, more freedom than you'd have as a tenured professor at Harvard.
And you also have room to teach individually to students because our students take one program at a time.
They're full-time in one program, and the professors teach one program at a time full-time, and they can go on for a full year.
So imagine you've got 25 students, and you have them for a year full-time.
You really know every student in your class individually, not just by name, but you know how they think, you know their backgrounds, you know their blind spots.
And that allows for a kind of teaching that can't be done anywhere else.
So I am quite distressed at the fact that Evergreen is now endangered by what's going on.
And I really would like to see it wake up and rescue itself because it is worth rescuing.
And kids are yelling things at him like, what the fuck are you gonna do?
And he just has to take it.
It's so strange.
It's such a bizarro world to view it from the outside.
And to view these preposterous allegations that these kids are throwing at him of being racist and everyone's being racist and no one's doing anything to protect them and everyone's acting like they're in danger and their ideas are in danger and their minds are in danger.
Well, we should talk about whether microaggression is even a good category.
But let's just say the protesters had enough control over him that he gestured, they didn't like it, they told him not to, and he capitulated, which he's been doing the entire time.
So I would say there's a huge amount of what's going on at Evergreen that is what I would call a show of force.
He didn't need to take the job at Evergreen, which he took two years ago.
I think he is afraid that this is going to be the capstone of his career, a scandal in which he has allowed the campus to get out of control, which he did.
When George came to the college, he studied us, which I can't hold him responsible for that.
That was a good move.
If he was well-intentioned, he would have done that.
But he studied us very carefully.
He had a friend interview hundreds of us to figure out what was going on at the college.
But then he set in motion policy proposals and committees that were empowered in a way that was completely at odds with the way the school has run traditionally.
How so?
So among the many unique features of Evergreen is the fact that the college is in large measure governed by the faculty and even the administration.
All of the deans are faculty members who have come from the faculty and when they're done being deans they go back to the faculty.
So the faculty has control over the college in a way that I don't think there's another college in the country that runs that way.
So what that means is that if you want to advance a policy proposal, the faculty has to agree to it.
And George wanted to do some things that the faculty would not have agreed to.
So I've told you about these full-time programs where students get this really personally tailored education and they join a community that everybody knows each other.
I mean, the most generous thing to say is that he did not understand what an important part of the evergreen model those programs are.
Whatever his reason, it was a terrible error.
And the only way to do it is to advance the idea as an equity-enhancing idea.
In other words, you can say that the full-time programs are anti-equity in the sense that if you are disadvantaged, you are less likely to be able to dedicate yourself full-time to a program because you may be going to school while you have a family you are less likely to be able to dedicate yourself full-time to a program because And so, you know, no doubt there's some truth to that.
But it doesn't, you know, how many colleges in the country do we have that do four-credit programs?
We don't need another.
We have one college in the country that does full-time programs.
And even if it is inconvenient for many people for reasons that are beyond their control, the real question is can we get enough people for whom that's exactly the right model through the door?
And, you know, it's also the college is very inconvenient for people who live in Colorado by virtue of the fact that it's hundreds of miles away.
So anyway, so if you wanted to advance that proposal, it had to be dressed up as equity enhancing.
And once it was equity enhancing, it became very hard to challenge it because, of course, if you did challenge it, then you were anti-equity.
The president empowered, he chose people to be on what's called the Equity Council.
The council has changed its name several times, so I'm not even sure what the current name is.
I think it's the Equity and Inclusion Council.
But in any case, he chose this council.
The council is...
If you count the two deans that are on it, it's only a third faculty member, so it's mostly students, staff, and less than half faculty.
And he empowered them to propose modifications to the college that would be equity-enhancing.
And the thing that they advanced, the Strategic Equity Plan, is extremely densely written, so it's hard to read, and most of the people on our campus have not read it.
Most of the people in the faculty have not read it.
In fact, when it was released, it was pretty clear that most of the people on the Equity Council hadn't read it because it was so full of errors, spelling errors and other things that would have been caught if people had gone through it.
But in any case, my wife, who also teaches at Evergreen, and I and several others did read it carefully and were very alarmed at what was in it.
So there were features of the document that would, for example, completely reorient our hiring.
So our hiring process, I would be up to see it revised and made better too, because I don't think we do it very well.
I think it's one of the things we were weak about.
But anyway, the proposal that they advanced was that, for example, every single hire would have to be justified on the basis that it was equity-enhancing, meaning racially equity-enhancing.
Not just a policy of hiring all kinds of people and not being racially discriminatory, but being discriminatory in looking for certain people, people of certain colors.
I mean, as I said, the document is so densely written that it's hard to know.
It really is set up, I think, to be dismissed so that it can be instituted and then we can find out what it really means.
But think about the model that I described about how we teach at Evergreen.
That is not a model that anybody trains to teach in.
And the people who do it well are very unusual.
So we're not looking for the same professors that would be best at Berkeley, for example.
We're looking for unusual people who will take...
Full-time programs and total pedagogical autonomy, meaning we actually literally are free to teach anything we want in any way we want.
So that freedom is a marvelous thing if you have a particular appetite for figuring out how teaching should be done that it's never been done anywhere else before and you're willing to try it out and learn from the experience and advance that way.
So we're looking for very unusual people who find that an appealing Challenge rather than somebody who wants to get a textbook and deliver the regular stuff.
If we're now going to prioritize race over everything else in our hiring, then finding those needles in a haystack who are actually well built to deal with that much pedagogical freedom and that much contact with the students is going to be that much harder because sometimes the right person for the job just simply isn't going to be dark skinned or who knows.
Well, I'd like to put a placeholder on Asian man because during day of absence, There was actually a, I guess you would call it a seminar held on how Asians might just be part of the problem here.
Well, I think the translation is that because Asians are a population, I don't know, that is succeeding in a particular way, at least from the perception of those who are deciding what these seminars look like, that they actually, I don't know, have special obligations in this.
And I might say everything I've just said about Asians...
It could be repeated for women, especially white women, who are playing a special role in this equity battle on our campus, too.
So the idea, I think, I mean, I have my own hypothesis about this and that's really all it is, but it does fit everything I've seen so far, is that there are entities within the, you know, 10 years ago, the phrase women and minorities was a very common phrase.
And what it meant was people who had faced historical oppression.
In the current context, that's too many people.
In order to utilize these structures to feed a certain set of populations, you can't very well have all women included.
And so what's happened is people who are perceived as, yes, having been historically disadvantaged in some way, but also at the moment being successful in some sense, are being shoved out of the coalition.
And then if they feel a loss, a sense of loss in having been shoved out, the mechanism to get back in is to take on the role of what is ironically called allyship in this case, which is not allyship at all.
It's an abuse of the concept of allyship.
Allyship is really a symmetrical concept and this is subordination.
Is subordination, we hear that a lot with the male feminist community.
The male feminists are supposed to be allies to women, and I even read a paper that was, or an article rather, that was telling white people, if you truly want to be allies, you should not take high-paying jobs, and you should only leave them to minorities.
And in fact, this is the thing that is most troubling to me about my personal situation is that if they really wanted, you know, mind you, we're going to have to fill in what they means, but if this coalition really wanted an ally for a quest for real equity, I would be an ally.
If they don't want real equity, what they want is a special advantage given to people of color, a special advantage given to people that were historically oppressed?
Again, I've got to be really careful because, you know, I've seen the video only once, and I'm trying to remember if the people who are doing the asking are even on the screen.
So I don't want to project something that I don't know for sure.
But it was definitely the protesters, which were protesting on...
Some of them were white protesting on behalf of people of color, and some of them, many of them, were people of color...
But even there, we're in trouble with the complexity because the people of color coalition that is protesting is not synonymous with people of color at Evergreen.
There are many people of color at Evergreen who are either just simply bewildered by what's going on or very troubled by it.
Because you can imagine, I mean, just put yourself in the shoes of a person of color who came to Evergreen to get a really interesting education and didn't want to tell the president how to move his hands.
Well, there's also the problem, the very real problem with the mob mentality.
And it is a common thing with human beings when they get together in large groups and people start chanting and screaming and they feel very justified and they always want to escalate.
It's very weird.
It's a strange reaction that human beings have in large groups acting together, where they just want to ramp things up.
They want to take it to the next level.
They want to shut this motherfucker down.
It's a weird thing that people do, but I was watching it in your videos, where people were saying, you should resign.
Like, you need to resign.
Like, you need to resign.
Like, wow, you need to apologize to that woman for communicating with her the way you did.
They want to take that professor, that guy who's been allowed to be the one who's talking and distributing all the information, and they want to shut you down.
Is that almost nobody seems to know what to do about bullies, especially when they're armed with a super weapon like the accusation that you're a racist.
Nobody understands that capitulating to bullies may solve your problem in the moment, but it makes the problem vastly worse over time.
And so anyway, all I've done is apply that piece of knowledge that when a bully challenges you, not capitulating is just a prerequisite to getting anywhere.
Ideally, you want the bully to pay enough of a price that they don't continue what they're doing.
Well, ideally, you would like to have a rational conversation with these people and get them to see your perspective, and they should be able to consider it and say, okay, he's not racist.
Well, yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that we're asking people who didn't have a say in what color they were born to step away from something.
Well, I mean, A, you have to get used to the fact that you don't get there all at once.
You plant a seed that's enough to cause them to know something about what we're saying couldn't possibly be right or we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing.
The problem here is that the mob that we're talking about is so large that even, you know, in the couple cases on last Tuesday, not this last Tuesday, I guess it was two Tuesdays ago now, You know,
somewhere below 100. I actually do think I made some progress, but I thought it was not durable at all, because as soon as the event was over, whatever progress was made got overwritten by whatever discussion happened next.
So it is possible to have these discussions, but there's something about the momentum that is in play here that makes it impossible to make any durable progress.
allow people to wear ridiculous Halloween costumes because that's part of like the fun of Halloween yes people are acting like you were saying that we should be lynching people well so first of all he did reach out to me and his point was what you are going through is eerily reminiscent He's watched the videos and he was just pointing out how shocking it was.
I mean, even to the point of my wife having been dragged in here oddly in this discussion where she wrote an email internal to our distribution list Asking the college why they were not protecting me and my students who were being actively stalked on our campus, harassed, doxxed.
And I should say, just in terms of putting the context here, as the college was pretending that nothing serious was going on, the police called me up on the Wednesday just after the Tuesday on which...
I had been challenged in my class and asked me, are you on campus?
And I didn't have class.
I said, no, I'm not on campus.
They said, don't come to campus.
I said, why?
And they said, because the protesters are searching car to car for what they describe as an individual, and we think it's you.
The college told the police to stand down, which means the police were literally barricaded in the police station.
Despite their sense that they very much needed to be actively protecting people outside of the police station, the police were left with no choice but to barricade themselves in the police station because they answered to the college administration, which told them not to act, I think because it wished to prevent a news story.
But this meant people engaged in these protests were roving freely about the campus, looking for people, following them.
Let's say that it was me that they were looking for, which would make sense.
I would imagine that they would have had the idea of, I don't know, taking me somewhere and getting me to acknowledge something that they think I should acknowledge.
I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge whatever it is that they wanted me to acknowledge, just as I didn't want to resign when they said I should resign.
I don't know if they had a backup plan, and it worries me that one of the things that unfolded on the campus was that people who had a very clear idea of how things should go were...
they were literally...
I mean, they were barricaded in the president's office with the president and a bunch of faculty members and staff.
And the story is that the president wanted to go to the bathroom and he was not even allowed to go privately to the bathroom.
I mean, and could have been worse had you not been contacted by the police, had you been in one of those cars, had you been pulled out, had you been pulled into some sort of a hostage situation where they were trying to tell you, you can't go to the bathroom without us, like they did to the fucking president, and he agreed to it.
Well, I believe it is a militant belief structure and I do think, based on what we've seen on our campus, it is emanating from a subset of the black population.
Okay, so I'm not saying that this is black people doing this, but I'm saying that the people who are at the forefront of it happen to be in that part of the coalition of people of color.
And that they are advancing a set of assumptions and beliefs that they seem to imagine describe some future world that they would like to reach.
So I would imagine that your listeners, having heard me just say what I said, have to be wondering a little bit about me and where my sympathies really lie.
but what I've seen and if your listeners go looking at the videos that came out of Evergreen over the last 10 days posted by the protesters I should point out videos that they thought made them look good they will find many instances in which the official order of things says well let's say there's a 4 o'clock meeting on the Tuesday in which I was challenged in the morning 4 o'clock meeting that became very dangerous and
And the meeting began with an announcement that the chairs and the food were for people of color and that white people shouldn't use them.
This idea, I mean, imagine if there was a college in North America that suggested that white people only should eat and white people only should be able to take the seats.
Is that what's going to happen 300 years?
So what if black people are pressed for the next 300, then white people come back and say, hey, we're going to have to turn this around again.
I mean, isn't the idea that 100 years from now, white people are going to be a minority in America?
Because the rates of birth with Latinos and black folks, there won't be this minority group anymore, that they will be, in fact, a majority.
So how do people react when someone says, a person of color needs a power adapter?
Can a white person go fetch it?
Are there these white, air quote, allies that are running, these beta males, just running to go grab a white power adapter and give it to this person of color?
Well, and that's the thing that, well, this is a whole other side of the puzzle.
What this is really about, and not just at Evergreen, but this movement which has taken over so many campuses and shut down so many people who spoke with positions that were not somehow sanctioned, is really a battle.
Between two incompatible worldviews within the academy.
So on the one hand, you have the sciences and all of the things that function on the same assumptions that the sciences do about how you figure out what's true.
And then you have these postmodern disciplines, which basically argue that the tools that the sciences claim are about figuring out what's true are actually tools of oppression themselves.
And so, you know, another video...
Right, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's this video in the middle of the Tuesday, the first Tuesday of these protests, where the president barricaded with these protesters, is talking to them.
And the protesters actually flat out say, in referring to my email, that I mentioned the word phenotype.
And that that inherently tells you that I must be a racist to even be thinking about a scientific term in the context of this.
Which I find horrifying because these very students stand to gain a tremendous amount.
They will be most powerful in the world.
In pursuing equity, among other things, they will be most powerful in the world if they are...
Armed with a scientific toolkit, with an analytical toolkit that allows them to be forceful rather than to be preposterous.
Oh, I said that I would like us, in my challenge to the new day of absence formulation, I said I would like us to put phenotype aside, right?
I put phenotype aside, meaning that I did not want us discussing equity as teams, as different teams broken up by skin color.
And so the very fact that I said phenotype and that I suggested that I would be willing to give a lecture to anybody who wanted to come...
About what I understand to be the evolutionary context of racism.
And they did not want the lecture.
They assumed that if I said evolution and racism that I was going to give a eugenics lecture or something like that.
And so it's preposterous.
The way this works is they shut down the conversation before you can have it so that they don't actually know what you're going to say and therefore don't need to address it.
Well, it's bizarre because it's primarily occurring in universities.
It's not happening really in high schools very much.
It sort of bubbles up in high schools, it appears, by people that I've talked to that have been in high school and gone into universities that you see echoes of it.
You see the beginnings.
And then when it gets to college, you're away from your parents, you're in some new place, everyone gathers in groups, they dig their heels in the sand, and they go fucking crazy.
Well, I mean, there is something about college, and we all did some dumb stuff in college.
But I also think there's a hidden reason for it being colleges, which is that there is real inequity in civilization that needs to be dealt with.
I would say the thing that I find most troubling is the skew in policing and in the courts that results in disproportionate fractions of some populations being incarcerated, which has terrifically destabilizing impact on those communities.
So I think that that is a very real harm that would be hard to overstate and that absolutely has to be addressed just to even make any claim on being a fair society.
That said, it is very hard to attack the private prison complex, for example, right?
It's a difficult challenge.
On the other hand, the universities are a soft target.
They can't defend themselves and they already have sympathies in the direction of, you know, a view of a radically different enhanced world.
So, in effect, I think we're being challenged on the basis that the inequities on our campuses are completely intolerable, and that that is largely a fiction.
And that what really is happening is that this is displaced anger over a system that is fair, that's been pointed at something that can't defend itself.
So this is a reaction to the actual real inequities of the outside world, the systemic racism in places like Baltimore and what we're finding out about places where they literally would not sell homes to black people, communities that have just had generation after generation of impoverished people that are fighting off crime-ridden neighborhoods.
And so this is occurring in universities all over the country and at a rate that's, according to people that I know that teach, pretty unprecedented that this wasn't the case 20 years ago, that you would have dissent, you would have debate, you'd have discussion, but you wouldn't have these full-blown ideological mobs.
So originally, the idea that certain That based on their history, certain people who had been, for example, largely shut out of the sciences were entitled to think without having to deal with the structures that had been built around, let's say, men and mostly white men over the course of Western scientific history.
So the idea that women maybe needed a place to discuss what was true that was not structured by men...
I get that.
And in fact, there's a very good example in my own field where the difference between the way men and women, I don't mean every man and every woman, but the difference on average, I think played a decisive and very positive role when Lewis Leakey empowered three women to go study the three great apes in order to figure out what was going on with them.
And so Jane Goodall And so it is a case where something about the way men look at the world had prevented people like George Schaller, who had made his mark studying lions.
He didn't do so well with gorillas.
So anyway, Jane Goodall's female approach worked, and it is largely the reason that we understand chimps today.
On the other hand, Jane Goodall took the scientific toolkit and threw out the rules that had been biased, rather than rejecting the scientific toolkit, which is what the postmoderns are doing, which I think is just tragic.
What we should be doing is arming everybody who goes to college, and frankly, we should be arming everybody who Can't go to college with a scientific toolkit that lets them figure out what's true, especially now, because science is the ultimate bullshit detector.
And, you know, this era is, you know, hopefully this is peak bullshit, but they need the ultimate bullshit detector.
And it seems like that's one of the reasons why it's so important for you to stand your ground, is that you are, you're being very clear about In what you perceive the situation to be.
And you're doing it in a very logical and a very rational, well thought out and clearly structured way.
You're showing everyone what's wrong with this.
It is a scientific approach.
You're literally using the very tools that you're trying to empower these young children.
But you're literally using, you're dealing with a dilemma, and you're using the very tools that you would like them to learn from this university and take forth into the world.
I mean, it is a very scientific approach.
You're saying, like, well, no, this is not, that's not racism, and this is racism, and what you're doing here is actually racism.
And in fact, you know, the irony is, so my students, and really my students, many of them are both my students and my wife's students.
We both teach evolutionary biology, and students bounce back and forth between our programs.
So, you know, we have people in our community who are empowered by having an understanding of how things function evolutionarily that gives them a window into all sorts of things, including...
You know, human social dynamics and other things that affect us all the time.
So anyway, yes, there is a way of thinking about virtually any of the issues that most people care about using scientific rationality, which does not mean that you put aside your humanity, but it means that you give your humanity a tool to understand what is going on before you figure out how you feel about it and whether something ought to be done.
How do these students come out of this with a new understanding of what went wrong and in some way that allows them to save face and still be a viable part of the community?
So he's got to step down because, A, when something has gone as crazy as we've seen things go on Evergreen's campus, there is an expectation that somebody will take responsibility.
So he has to step down to signal to the world that somebody's taking responsibility.
But in this case, He also absolutely must step down because this is his responsibility.
He set this in motion and he made this happen.
And so it is not an injustice at all that he should have to step down.
And I frankly am flabbergasted that it hasn't happened yet.
I do not understand how the Board of Trustees could allow him to maintain that position as long as he has.
But first thing is he has to step down.
At the point he steps down, that's going to flip a switch.
Suddenly the question is, okay, what now?
The next thing that would have to happen is the faculty of my college would have to evidence that they actually got something out of this rather than feeling that they had been wrongly portrayed in the media or something like that.
If the faculty, and there are many good faculty who do understand what's going on, so They have been quiet because, frankly, they're afraid of what happens to them if they're not.
But George has to step down or be fired, and the faculty have to rally and evidence that they learned something.
And then the third thing, and in some ways this is the one that is, I think, the toughest.
They came after me.
They came after two other people.
The chief of police of our police force, Stacey Brown, who they have been attempting...
She is a utterly professional, extremely good police officer who is also an Evergreen graduate and interested in cleaning up policing.
Right, which is why they were stood down, because they are part of the administration, has control over them.
But the police was demonized, and I mean, in the most disgusting way, it's posters of her wearing a KKK outfit in some sort of, I don't know, sexed-up garb was distributed.
There was in the middle of this protest, there was a something like a police community review board.
I'm not sure exactly what it's called, but there was some sort of a gathering where suggestions about better policing were advanced.
And the protesters actually advanced not only the idea that the police be moved off campus, that they'd be disarmed, but that in fact that campus policing be turned over to what they call community policing.
So at the very same moment that you have protesters as judge, jury, and executioners searching cars for people, stalking them, they're telling us that actually they want official control over the policing of the campus.
Funny you mention sexual assault, because the third witch, in addition to me and the chief of police, is our grievance officer.
Our grievance officer, Andy Siebert, is also an excellent human being who is very dedicated to her job and very dedicated to Evergreen and has been there for a very long time and And one of the things that she's been accused of is not being sensitive to allegations of sexual assault.
Now, what she has not said in her own defense, she is so interested in protecting the college from its own worst instincts, that what she has not said in her own defense is that she runs a summer camp for girls who have been sexually assaulted.
And I think she funds it out of her own pocket.
So in all three cases, in my case, I'm accused of being a racist.
In Stacey Brown, the police chief's case, she's accused of being a brutal, biased cop.
And in Andy Siebert's case, she's accused of being insensitive to people who have been assaulted.
In all three cases, not only are these things wrong, they are the opposite of right.
And so I was just going to say the third thing that I wanted to say was George has to step down, the faculty has to wake up, and then everybody needs to take a look at the fact that three for three they've gone after people in classic witch-hunting style and the person in question was the exact opposite of what they were saying.
At the point you discover that you've been hunting witches and then it turns out the people in question are innocent, you have to step back and ask yourself how you got there.
How did that happen to you that you ended up hunting innocent people?
That should be a wake-up call for everybody involved.
Well, the ramping up of things is what terrifies me.
I've just seen it too many times where people get together in large groups of people and things escalate and no one knows why.
And then all of a sudden it's chaos and there's a literal feeling in the air that violence can erupt.
And I don't know if there's...
Maybe you would be able to tell me.
Is there some...
Evolutionary echo of that from back in the day when we would get invaded by large groups of people and we had to switch over immediately to some sort of a warlike mindset.
I don't know what it is, but there's something really bizarre that happens to people in large groups.
And if you've ever been in a concert where a riot breaks out or a stampede where things go crazy, it's scary.
Well, you're absolutely right about the evolutionary roots, that these are programs that exist in us for circumstances.
And one of the things, you know, if I had been able to give the lecture that I proposed in the letter that got me in so much trouble with people, one of the things that I would say is that the most dangerous thing is that we have these latent programs that are waiting for evidence that it is the moment to do X, Y, or Z. And because we haven't been in those circumstances until the moment those programs are triggered, we're not even aware that human beings are capable of some of the things they're capable of.
So we have to guard against these things at all costs.
If we really, you know, never again is a very important concept.
And if never again is to mean anything, we have to understand why it happens in the first place so that we can repair the world so it becomes impossible.
In fact, maybe the thing that would be worth remembering is what happens to a drowning person.
When a person drowns, they're very dangerous, right?
Because their body switches on a drowning program that basically looks for anything that can be pushed down so you can get up to where the air is.
Which means that somebody can drown their closest kin by accident because a drowning program that they've never seen active until the first time they face drowning is suddenly online.
And so that's a simple one.
But there are other ones too.
There are ones for And I believe things like genocide, where populations that have successfully eliminated other populations have done well.
And so knowing that human beings are actually wired for genocide under some circumstances is...
Well, it's a sobering responsibility, but it's also hopeful to me, because if you know that it's there, you can figure out what triggers it, and I think we can rule it out by raising people in an environment where awareness of that program allows us to teach them in such a way that that program is deactivated.
You must be aware of the fact that there is a potential to disassociate and decide that this group of people is the other, and that they are not you, and you could do horrific things to them.
And that this is literally a part of how human beings evolved to 2017, how we got through all the horrific things that have taken place in the past.
The religious innovations that have occurred in the history of most of the populations on Earth today, they involve a recognition at some point where the definition of self gets broadened to a larger group.
So if you think about, for example, the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule has progenitors in the Hillel tradition.
But it is basically somebody saying that some large entity needs to be treated as some extension of self.
And really, this may sound funny to people, but if we are to survive the next century as a species, it's going to have to be through the recognition that actually all human beings are trapped on one tiny little planet and And we're in severe jeopardy.
And really, we have to start treating each other, not as other, because we will be fighting each other as the whole experiment goes to hell.
We have to recognize that we actually face a common enemy, which is the unintended consequences of the system we've built.
I never like to bring up Ronald Reagan as the voice of reason, but he had a fantastic quote way back in the day, one of his speeches during the Cold War, where he was talking about how we would bond together if we were approached by some alien life form from another planet that threatened us.
How we would all realize that we are all in this together.
And here's the even better part, I think, which is, yeah, if there was an alien race that came to invade the Earth, we'd rally.
If there was an asteroid that we had enough time to know that it was coming and that we would have to rally together to do something about it, we'd do something about it.
And so it is perfectly possible for the mechanisms that evolution built into us to fight each other, that caused us to cooperate to fight other groups, to be retargeted at things that aren't other groups, that are problems.
And so what frustrates me more than I think anything else is...
Right now, we do face a common enemy, and that common enemy is, you know, let's say climate change would be one facet of it, but it's the system that set climate change in motion, which has also given us nuclear reactors that are unstable and difficult to control.
It's given us economic policies that are going to cause us to destabilize as a result of the concentration of well-being and power in a small number of hands.
Those are common enemies.
And if we allowed the circuitry that is in us to be triggered that allows us to fight a common enemy, actually we would be quite united at the moment and for a good cause.
Which is one of the more disturbing things about Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, is that what it says is that we're not in this together.
I mean, even more so than it says that these guys are...
I mean, he has...
Advisors and this EPA guy is a very dangerous character that's a climate change denier, and there's so much anti-science going on in this administration, you wouldn't even know where to begin, right?
But one of the real problems is that we're moving away from this group of people that's trying to figure out what to do about emissions.
What do we do about all this garbage?
What do we do about all this waste?
It's not even necessarily just about climate change.
It's about sustainability.
It's about what are we doing with the byproduct of civilization.
And if it's one thing that should disturb us about capitalism, the number one thing is putting profit ahead of the environment that we literally need to sustain life.
And, you know, and ironic too, because, I mean, we're now behind the eight ball because we've put this off for so long.
We should have started doing this 25 or 30 years ago.
But even now, it is actually not as hard as people think to figure out how the world might function that didn't create this jeopardy as a matter of byproducts of everyday activity.
It's actually not that difficult.
But the system is built to frustrate it.
So, you know, in the same sense, if you step back from the last presidential election and you think about how is it that we ended up with two such lousy candidates for this position with such power, something in the system has to be off that we don't end up with any viable candidates for that office.
And it's the same problem.
We are caught in loops that prevent proper solution-making.
It's not that solution-making isn't possible.
It's that solution-making is not someplace we can go from here because of mundane reasons in our system that are ultimately going to kill us if we're not careful.
Well, it's also such a complicated structure that outside of completely radical change, like restructuring everything from the bottom up, like tearing it down literally to the foundation and rebuilding it.
How else are you going to fix this thing with lobbyists and special interest groups and congressmen and representative government?
It's like there's so many different areas that allow for the possibility of corruption and influence and just Cronyism.
It's such a dark and twisted corridor that you enter into if you consider any kind of reform.
And I must say it's something that a number of friends of mine and I have been working on for some time.
There are answers which...
Five, seven years ago, I wouldn't have thought possible that I now believe actually are possible.
And so what we're really talking about, we can't have revolution, we can't afford it, nor will it work.
The power arrayed against revolution is so immense that it's inconceivable that it could function.
We also can't afford a disruption massive enough to cause the system to restructure on its own, if for no other reason than the fact that we've got more than 400 nuclear reactors on Earth today that require constant inputs of power or they melt down and spill not only the contents of the reactors but the contents of the spent fuel pools where we've stored decades worth of spent material.
So basically we have to restructure the system without letting it collapse and without confronting it in the traditional way.
So we need effectively revolutionary change without revolution.
However, notice that your life today doesn't look all that much like your life 30 years ago from the point of view of how you go about things, how you navigate around the world.
Things sweep across civilization in a market system based on utility.
And that model can also be used to replace the system that we have currently.
So in essence, if you think forward, what is the world going to look like 20 years from now?
It's very hard to know because you know how much change has come in the last 20 years.
So there will be revolutionary change.
At the moment, it will be dictated by a market and it will basically give us more of what we think we want rather than what we actually need.
However, the same mechanism that causes technologies to sweep across civilization can be utilized to have meaningful change in the way we interrelate with each other and the way we govern ourselves sweep across civilization.
So that's the project that we've been working on behind the scenes.
Well, it involves different people with different expertise and there are those who are expert in the technological aspects.
In other words, identifying those technologies that actually stand a good chance of replacing the dangerous stuff that runs civilization now.
There are those of us who are involved in the game theoretic aspects of what it is that keeps the current system Stabilized as it is and what would have to change in order to replace it.
So anyway, it's a complicated effort, but it is not.
I'm hopeful in a way that I wasn't back during Occupy, let's say, because I no longer think that the only route forward is one of the traditional modes that we've seen.
So do you think it's going to be a slow integration of technology into people's lives to the point where it's going to affect the system itself, to the point where the current system, the way it works, just won't operate the way it does?
Shut out of the gains of civilization, and they have been fed a small portion of the phony growth that our system generates to placate them.
They've also been threatened with austerity, which is largely a false threat.
In other words, they've been told, yes, we could do something different, but you're going to have to give up most of the things that you So how about it?
And in fact, the world could be a very exciting place to transform.
If we were to recognize the real landscape that we face rather than the story that has been portrayed that has told us that we really don't have any good options, it seems that there is still time, though frankly the clock is ticking.
Well, the question is, do I want to say that out loud here, where the entities that want to oppose it know exactly what it is before it comes?
I don't know how smart that is.
What I will say is that there are a good number of us working on the puzzle, we're serious about it, and we are The things that would typically be used to dismiss us ought not be.
We're not looking to be the head of some system that enriches us.
We're looking to make the planet function in a way that serves everyone.
So do you think there's some sort of conspiracy to stop this?
Like if you actually bring it up, you think that there would actually be people that would make or take active measures in order to hold it off at the pass?
I think there is a structure that has emerged that exists.
Administrations come and go, but there's a structure that doesn't.
And it seems to have a central principle behind it, which is it doesn't like change that it can't control.
Change is one thing, change happens, but it's not interested in change that could happen.
So anyway, the reason that we end up with a battle between a non-viable Republican and a non-viable Democrat is that they have passed a test in which they do not threaten the fundamental structures underneath.
In fact, Trump may actually be a violation of that.
He may actually threaten those structures and they may be trying to figure out what to do about them.
But in general, what we have is a system that filters on the way towards the levers of power such that anybody who gets there wouldn't use them in a destabilizing fashion.
We saw them conspire in the most direct terms, and then we've seen them in court defend it by saying they had every right to do it rather than denying it.
So anyway, I'm not, you know, it's too easy to say conspiracy and it is too, it's too simplistic because it implies that people got together in a room and said things out loud.
And that does happen sometimes, but it also happens through another mechanism, a mechanism of what scientifically we would call emergence, where those structures that frustrate change outcompete structures that allow change.
So it may be that what we have are forces that resist change reflexively without knowing what they're doing, the same way, you know, a tree grows toward the light without knowing what it's doing.
I mean, in fact, we've we held a what was called an unconference in Palo Alto several months ago.
So it's not that we don't talk about them out loud.
What I'm concerned about is that, A, I'm only one of the people involved, and so I have my area of expertise in this group, but there are many other areas of expertise that I can't speak to as directly.
So anyway, I'm concerned about unearthing the thing in a place where it will be a cartoon version of something that's actually more sophisticated than that.
Well, the first step would probably involve a blockchain currency that had strengths connected to it that made it competitively superior to something like the dollar.
In other words, the dollar is a flawed entity in multiple regards.
But the dollar depends on our valuing it.
And the thing about blockchain currencies is that blockchain currencies can be exchanged between entities that have an agreement about...
So, for example, a group of people could decide to pay each other in blockchain currency of some kind based on ideals that are not the same ones on which our nation, for example, is founded.
So, you could agree to a higher set of standards for something and agree to prefer each other in the context of business, so you would do business with those who had also agreed to the same higher set of principles, and that currency could therefore displace something like the dollar.
I mean, I know that Bitcoin and blockchain and a lot of these different cryptocurrencies are gaining momentum.
And in fact, Bitcoin, weren't we just talking about this, is higher now than it has been, like, literally in years.
Ever?
Ever.
So, there's some momentum in that regard.
It'd be nice to see them used side by side, you know, to see if it could be possible that it could gain more momentum to get to the point where it's...
I mean, right now you bring up, I'm going to buy something with Bitcoin.
And it's high on my list of, let's say, fears is that those nuclear reactors are so dangerous by virtue of what it is that keeps them stable day in and day out that really, if people understood the danger they face based on those reactors and the spent fuel that they have, people would be alarmed.
I mean, just look at what's happening and know how many of those there are.
And here's the other issue.
You know, I've talked to people before, and there's this...
I mean, it's really funny how when you subscribe to a certain ideology, whether it's a liberal ideology or whether it's a conservative ideology, you immediately adopt a series of beliefs that go along with that.
And one of them on the right is that nuclear power is clean energy.
And my argument to that has always been, we've only had it for 60 years, and look how many places you can't even go anymore.
I mean, every now and then we, you know, they're digging in Mexico City and they find some ancient Aztec ruins and they have to stop construction because they didn't know it was there.
What the fuck happens if a hundred years from now they dig into the Nevada desert and just tap right into a chamber of spent fuel rods and kill everybody?
Yeah, and there have been some solutions that someone...
There was a really young kid, I believe, that came out with some radical proposal for taking the nuclear waste and converting it into energy that could power cities for thousands of years.
whether or not it's viable.
I mean, it's totally possible.
I mean, look, if someone can come up with nuclear energy in the first place, the ability to split an atom and power a city, maybe it is possible that someone can figure out what to do with that waste.
Some new sort of radical approach to looking at it.
There is one thing we can do with it that's better that we already have the technology to do, and there's no excuse for not doing it, which is that all of the stuff that's sitting in pools that has to be actively cooled, after something like five years it can be put in dry cask storage, which ain't perfect, but at least it doesn't require some system to actively keep it from boiling.
We could just require it, and we should, because it's vastly safer.
We could also, potentially, there are ways to take the spent fuel and to burn it down that does involve other kinds of reactors.
But ultimately, ultimately, I can't understand why we have not made an immense investment in fusion production.
Were we to discover the ability to make viable fusion power, which I believe we know is possible, we not only would be able to power civilization without warming the climate, but we would also be able to pull carbon out of the atmosphere if it turns out that we need to do that.
If you have effectively an unlimited source of power, you can take carbon out of the atmosphere and you could turn it into Building materials that were stable for thousands of years.
And the tiny amount that we spend on fusion research is inexplicable to me.
I didn't start out studying people, but the longer I proceed in evolutionary biology, the more interested I am in people.
Let's put it this way.
Sometimes something is surprising, but in general, if you have the right tools to understand people at an evolutionary level, things make a certain amount of sense.
I have something I say to students frequently, which is if a situation is confusing with people, very often it makes more sense if you turn the sound all the way down so you can't hear what they're actually saying.
Because very often what's being enacted between people isn't really about the content of what they're saying.
It's about something else.
And so let's take, for example, My first project, when I was an undergraduate, I was studying with a very famous evolutionary biologist named Bob Trivers.
And I wrote a paper for his class, and it was about the Holocaust.
It was about the, really, I was testing the question.
At the time, it was relatively commonplace to hear that Hitler was insane.
And something about that didn't And I wanted to know, evolutionarily speaking, was he insane?
And in studying that question, it became very clear that insane was the wrong description, that he was a monster, but he was a rational monster from the point of view of advancing, um, German genes.
And that was a very troubling discovery to me, that in effect, what he was doing was, I mean, it's the worst thing imaginable.
But from the point of view of genes that are attempting to spread across the globe and exclude alternative genes from access to resources, it was perfectly reasonable.
Not only what he did to Jews and homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, but the military plan, the future of Germany lies in Russia.
The idea was that this was actually a sophisticated plan that would have advanced the cause of spreading German genes spectacularly, had frankly so many million Russians not been ready to give their lives to turn the German war machine around.
So what I'm saying, this has to be dealt with carefully because people hear you say that and they think that you're justifying it.
But, you know, I'm of course a Jew, you know, whose ancestors were from Europe.
There's no part of me that is in any way okay with what happened.
Quite the opposite.
But understanding that even though the Darwinism that Hitler was deploying was deformed and not accurate and defensible in a logical sense...
The plan he was advancing was German genes attempting to take over a larger fraction of the resources that planet Earth has to offer than they had available to them at that point in the 30s.
So anyway, what I'm trying to say is that There's something that we often teach students first when we get to them, which is called the naturalistic fallacy.
It means that just because something is true doesn't mean it's good, that it ought to be true.
And so discovering the nature of something like the Holocaust is very important in the sense that it allows you to grapple with it logically.
But as you're grappling with it logically, people want to imagine that you're saying it was okay, and that's the opposite.
There are many things that are true for evolutionary reasons that are completely unacceptable, and understanding what those things are gives you a pretty good shot at preventing them from unfolding.
It also really is a problem when something becomes taboo to even consider or to look at.
You can't look at the idea that he wasn't insane and that he was in fact rational in rationalizing his horrific acts.
That there was some sort of a plan to it all and you would say that even by enacting that plan You'd be insane in terms of how you think of the world and I think of the world like if we found out that Jamie over here was thinking about starting a master race and killing everybody off We would go Jamie's gone insane.
I mean that's like the and to say no, he's not insane.
He has a rational plan Yeah, like immediately people would want to justify Any horrific thing they could say about you.
But having taboo subjects, or having things you cannot consider, even if you're clearly not a racist person, even if you're clearly not a person who advocates genocide, the idea that intellectual discussions cannot be pursued about specific topics...
Well, the first thing, if you're going to go into evolutionary biology, especially if you're going to get anywhere near human beings, you have to really put aside the idea of taboo in intellectual space.
You have to be able to consider everything because so much of the story is, you know, it goes from bizarre to horrifying, you know.
And there's also great beauty.
I mean, one of the important...
Things to remember is that the evolutionary, the adaptive process, the adaptive evolutionary process gave us not only our worst characteristics, our tendency to war and to genocide and to oppression, but it gave us our best characteristics to our capacity to love, to empathize, to be compassionate, to sacrifice for others.
So all of those things are The message I try to convey to people when I talk about this is that we have to pick and choose which of the evolutionary products we want to honor and preserve and which of them we wish to bar from the landscape.
And this is really what civilization is about.
Civilization is about taking the whole spectrum of things that we're capable of and providing a landscape for the ones that are honorable and good and making the ones that aren't honorable and good so expensive that nobody would consider engaging in them.
Now, when you're in the middle of this crazy scenario that you find yourself in, And you know what you know about evolutionary biology and about the mechanisms behind human behavior.
So what that means, from my perspective, is that I'm able to take the stuff I'm intellectually interested in And I'm able to make it my teaching life as well.
And that has worked beautifully.
I've really had a great time bringing students in on what I think is the cutting edge of evolutionary theory.
And many of them have rallied.
You know, it's a lot like having graduate students who are deeply interested in the same material and are able to play ball because, you know, they take on the toolkit, they learn to use it.
And so anyway, my intellectual life is quite rich and it involves undergraduate students, which is a pretty unusual thing, but it does work pretty well.
I unfortunately have a conference that I have to...
I mean, it's not unfortunate that I have it, but I have a conference that unfortunately interfaces with the end of the quarter such that I had to wrap my program up early, and I met with my program for the last time.
Yesterday, after the campus had closed, we met in the park again.
Well, what can be done or what should be done about some of the, I don't want to use the term crazy, but some of the more rambunctious students that are a part of this?
I mean, it doesn't seem like they're going to just change their behavior and go back to just being a normal, inquisitive, young person trying to figure out the world.
It's like they're so embroiled in this ideology, it seems And they've given them so much ground.
It's like, how do you stop this?
And when you've held the fucking president hostage and told him he can't go to the bathroom without representatives of your militant group watching him pee, where does it go from there?
A, they think they know enough about the way things work to describe a good state for things to reach, and they tend to focus on one thing that they want to make better and ignore all of the harms that will come if they engage in it.
So, anyway, I'm not a utopian, and what I'm about to say about what could happen at Evergreen is not utopian in nature.
But I do think Evergreen...
As you described earlier, is really the tip of something.
What happened at Evergreen is so extreme and the way it looks to the world is so preposterous that I do think, I do hope that the Academy is hitting bottom.
That in seeing this little preview of where these things go, if they are allowed to evolve their own accord, that people will wake up and they will realize, actually, as hard as it is to challenge this stuff, we have to do it, because if we don't, this is what happens.
Now, that said, on our campus, if we get rid of a few bad actors, starting with the president, and...
We recognize that we have ended up in some new landscape where up is down.
It is also possible that we could find a new kind of common ground.
Do you think you could find a new common ground with these students that are screaming in the streets, hey, hey, ho, ho, these racist teachers have got to go?
I know this is going to sound crazy, and some people are not going to understand why, when my family and students have been threatened, I would even talk like this.
And to be honest, I understand why they would say that.
But the difference is, can you talk to them in a small group of people where they could be reached, because indeed many of them are reachable, or do you have to talk to the entire mob?
Isn't it also a problem in that when people dig their heels into the sand and they decide that this is how things are, and then even when confronted with the possibility they may have been incorrect or wrong or acted irrationally, it's very difficult for people to admit that and reconcile and step back and maybe just self-assess.
And, I mean this is why I said, recognizing that you have been involved in a witch hunt, that's the moment at which, you know, you either level up or you don't.
When you realize you've been engaged in a witch hunt, that's the moment at which you can discover there's something fundamental that's wrong in my program somewhere that allowed that to happen.
I mean, in fact, it's not exactly that, and it was planned long before this protest erupted, but I'm scheduled next spring to teach with another professor a program on essentially the evolutionary origins of human violence.
So when when you think about everything coming, do you have like a vision in your mind about how everything would sort of the dust will settle and this president hopefully will either resign or be forced out?
And then what do you do with these students that you looked at and they were screaming at you, calling you a racist, telling you to resign?
Like, how do you deal with that when you go back to school?
The thing that is, I think, hard to appreciate from the outside a little bit is that because I know that there's nothing to the accusation and because so many students know that there's nothing to the accusation, it doesn't hurt in the same way that it would if I had serious doubts about myself in this regard.
So if they were to come around You know, we could make it happen.
That said, that's not the direction things are going.
As of this morning, the internal list of the faculty and staff was headed in exactly the wrong direction.
Well, they imagine that this entire catastrophe, including the closing of the campus yesterday and today, is the result of the, I think it was six minutes I spent on Tucker Carlson.
Like how in Yale, the students that stared down the professor and physically threatened him, they were actually given awards.
Wasn't one of them given some sort of an acknowledgement of being a leader?
We'll find that.
Jamie will find that.
We acknowledge we have a great deal of work to do in order to honor and live up to the demands made by the student leaders during last week's protests.
We acknowledge that students of color and others who are underrepresented and underserved Have been voicing their demands to us for some time through the students of color focus groups of 2014, through their participation in anchoring the strategic equity plan for November in Cooper Point Journal, blah blah blah, and we have not yet truly listened and acted.
We acknowledge a student's right to protest and affirm President Bridges' recent decision not to use the misguided language of the current student conduct code to punish the protesters.
What is the language of the current student conduct code?
A, hell if I know, but B, I believe what they're talking about is the president said that students would not be held accountable for disrupting my class.
And then I believe he agreed to their demand for student authority over any changes to the conduct code.
So these students who are engaged in this, I hope this is right.
I don't want to say something that's untrue, but my understanding was that he agreed to that demand.
We vehemently reject the claim that students have been violent simply because they have been loud and emphatic.
There is a difference between exercising the right to freely voice an opinion and inciting violence.
And that difference has nothing to do with the volume or forcefulness.
That's not true.
Because they were upset that he was moving his hands.
They were calling that aggression.
And now they're saying that, on the other hand, children can scream.
I'm calling them children from now on.
We support the demands made by students and honor the positive institutional change they have already achieved through their protests.
That's hilarious.
Our most urgent demands below center on the safety of those individuals who are currently most at risk.
I mean, like, the professor?
At the same time, we acknowledge that in weeks and months to come, our attention will need to turn to the larger structural issues students have identified.
In solidarity with students, we commit ourselves to participating actively and self-critically in the annual mandatory trainings specified in the Memorandum of Understanding recently signed by the UF... What does UFE stand for?
Right, but what's going to happen here is this is going to be intolerable re-education by people who, frankly, it pains me to say it, but they're the most racist people on the campus.
I mean, that's what this is.
This is racism.
It just happens to be in an unfamiliar direction, but it's racism.
And they also are going to be in charge of sensitivity training here, which, to me, is the height of insanity.
According to guidelines in the social contract and faculty handbook, Weinstein has endangered faculty, staffs, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.
What I have done is I have pointed to videos that the protesters themselves put up that I've been fighting this for a year, trying to point out to my colleagues that they were making terrible errors.
This is all the result of reforms put in motion by President Bridges.
So they are now blaming me.
And I should say, I do think there is jeopardy on the campus.
We had a threat yesterday from somebody.
I have no idea how serious it was.
But I do believe that there's jeopardy to people on our campus.
I think the jeopardy to people on campus is real, and I live right adjacent to campus, and I must tell you, I brought my family with me because I don't feel that they are safe there at the moment.
The question is, how is it that we have reached the point of deciding that this jeopardy is from me?
When they accuse you of misinformation, they should be very specific.
If they're going so far as to say that you are, somehow or another, summoning the alt-right and making misinformation public on mass media, what is that misinformation?
So their claim is that white people were not asked to leave campus, that there were only 200 spaces in the venue off campus, and therefore this was just supposed to be for a small subset of people, which is nonsense.
There were only 200 spaces if you wanted to go to the particular seminars that they were holding, for example, the one about why Asians were part of the problem.
But in any case, they are conflating the 200 spaces off campus with what was actually expected of us.
And it was quite clear.
In fact, one of my staff colleagues put out an email.
Boy, time has gone into some weird thing, but I think it was last night in which he detailed the several emails that we had seen in which the school did ask white people to leave for that day.
So, they are promoting falsehoods themselves designed to obscure what's going on, I think, because they finally understood that the world doesn't get what they were doing.
Well, do they not understand that this is a trail that's going to be released?
Like, that this is actual data, and that this data, when they accuse you of misinformation, and then you have all this data, and then you can just, like, release it to everybody.
Several people, in fact many people, have now started to refer to what's going on in the staff-faculty zone here as a cult.
And I think, you know, on the one hand, that could be tongue-in-cheek.
On the other hand, the mechanisms at work that have people doubling down on absurdities rather than trying to get on the right side of history as quickly as possible, it is very cult-like.
And, again, you asked me what would have to happen for us to right the ship.
The second one is that my faculty colleagues have to wake up to the fact that their belief structure has become bizarre and unrecognizable from any normal position.
And very dangerous from the perspective of an educator.
If this is what an educated person who has gone through the entire system and now has a job in educating young people, if this is how you view the world and this is how you view facts and this is how you distort them and then disseminate them to the rest of these like-minded folks in this very bizarre echo chamber that's being rejected, like almost universally outside of the college, I mean, it's not just Fox News it's rejecting.
It's the Washington Post.
It's the New York Times.
People are freaking out about your situation and recognize very clearly and very rightly that you are absolutely not a racist.
And this is...
This is kind of a lot of what I've said to Jordan Peterson when I had him on.
They fucked with the wrong person.
Again, they fucked with the wrong person.
And this is one of the most horrific things about what I find so troubling about what I think of as...
I used to think of myself as a progressive, but what I have a problem with all of this is that the left is attacking itself now.
It's like there's no one who's progressive enough.
No one.
Like every single thing you do is a microaggression.
Every single thing you do is based on white privilege and therefore you're racist.
And unless you somehow or another give up all your money and give up all your jobs, and there are people who are asking to do that, too, by the way.
There's people asking people to give their money and put them in black banks, give them to black people.
In some ways, is this a problem with influence and charisma and people's ability to sort of change the way others view the world with dramatic interpretations of events?
And things like emails, where this is not a one-on-one debate.
There's a real problem with blogs and emails, and I've talked about this several times, but it's worth repeating.
There's a real problem when someone writes something like that specifically about another person like you, and just writes it, but you're not there to respond.
So they can write as much stuff that's not true.
And they can put it all down, and then it's there.
And then someone has to refute it, but it's still there.
So you don't even get to refute the actual document.
You write your own, and then someone has to go and read that at a different location.
It's a real weird way to distribute information, and it's contrary to the way human beings rationally discuss and debate ideas.
So anyway, she says in a faculty meeting that this is a racist backlash.
And I said to her in front of this faculty meeting, I said, somebody might want to check on the question of whether or not I'm actually a racist, because if you do check on it, you will discover I'm not.
And if you don't, this is going to blow up on you.
And the...
Chair of the faculty told me that the faculty meeting was not the place to defend myself against accusations of racism.
Or it's creating a structure that makes it impossible to defend yourself because these accusations are so preposterous that they realize that they have to have some sort of a bizarro world structure.
They are currently running a program where she's teaching students to make documentaries, and that program, one of the students in the program filed a public records request.
Since we are a public college, you can request the emails of faculty and staff to If you want them and so she had a student file a public records request for my email to make a documentary in her program.
So you've got one faculty member searching another faculty member's email through a student looking for evidence of I don't know what, but...
You just gotta leave alone when someone levels an accusation.
This is the current progressive mindset.
The current, like, PC gone awry mindset.
It's fucking crazy.
We're all even.
We're all human.
That's it.
I don't give a shit where you're from.
I don't care if you're from...
Your ancestors are from one part of the planet or right next door.
It does not matter.
It's who you are.
And as soon as you try to gain some sort of a leverage position because of the fact that you think that you have suffered more oppression in your Families, ancestral history, we're way off track.
We're way off track.
The track should be equality today.
We're all on this.
And as soon as someone says, you're a racist, but you can't defend yourself, well, then we don't have equality anymore, man.
You're trying to have anti-equality in order to bring equality to people that have been treated unethically?
It's structural inequity, which is the irony of the whole thing, is that people who were wrapped in the flag of equity I challenged them because I believe in actual equity and I was accused of being a racist for doing it.
It's like the actual structure of the thoughts that they're presenting are so poorly worded and so it's so poorly thought out and you're not allowed to defend against it.
Well, that's what I was saying about the difference in assumptions and beliefs between the postmodern disciplines and, dare I say, the actual disciplines.
In the postmodern disciplines, the illogic of those arguments doesn't matter because logic isn't a thing.
Well, not only that, the real problem with any of this really crazy shit is that it gives fuel to actual racists.
And that it makes actual racists think that these people that are involved in these protests, as misguided as they are, it makes them think that, see, look, we told you that these people are bad.
See, look, we told you that there's a reason why they're inferior.
And it just, as soon as you...
As soon as you open the door to that, you have real problems.
But I will say there's a positive outgrowth of this, I think.
Which is, if I look in my various inboxes at the stuff that's coming in from people that I've never heard of before...
This wake-up call is uniting people across every known fault line.
So I'm getting letters from religious people, from very conservative people, from very progressive people.
Every known fault line is cut by this, and people...
They are galvanized by seeing something that doesn't fit any narrative they've seen before.
That is to say, staring down an accusation like this is not common.
Watching it stared down and the world not fall apart is encouraging.
And then, you know, you mentioned it yourself, to have the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on the same page about this, that's pretty interesting.
So I do hope that what emerges from this is that all of the coalitions that exist will look at themselves and will recognize that they have, you know, maybe not every coalition has a noble part, but all of the ones that have a noble part will understand that it's paired with something that isn't noble.
And I'm hoping that people who find themselves ill-served by the narrative will join together and that basically a coalition of the reasonable might emerge.
I mean, I really hope that what's happening is that in these insulated environments of these universities and colleges where things just get crazy, that when word leaks out that they get crazy, it's very much like cults.
When you hear about Jonestown, you're like, hey, man, don't drink the fucking Kool-Aid.
Something's going on down there.
But these...
Group mindsets that people fall into, you know, oftentimes when you're in the hive and you're in the middle of it, it can all be very, very confusing.
My hope is that as more people find out about the preposterous behavior that's going on in these universities and colleges and how people are I mean, these are young people that don't have a fully formed frontal cortex and are about to enter into the world, and they're doing this with this ridiculous momentum of these silly ideas.
And there's people that want to enforce that more and more, and that these people, some of them, are actually professors at the very college where this is going on.
I mean, that, to me, is...
One of the weirder aspects of it and one of the things that scares people a lot is the idea that these people are going to live in these insulated environments and then they're going to go and get their graduate degree and then they're going to start teaching and they're going to go right back with these same ideas in this insulated environment and never really go out into the world Where the marketplace of ideas has roundly rejected a lot of these notions that they're trying to pass off through logic and debate and actual discourse,
not through shutting people down because of the color of their skin or lack of or, you know, excess amount of melanin.
I mean, that's not how human beings should be behaving in 2017. It's just not.
So when you see it so evident and so prominent and so commonplace in universities and colleges, There's so many people on the outside looking back, looking in at this rather, are baffled and for the first time enraged.
Or A. Yeah, they come to maturity inside a field where these things sound reasonable, and then they go on to teach them to students.
And so, you know, the intensity and absurdity grows with each of those generations.
And I think...
And had they been exposed to the real world in the context of having to make sense in order to make a living, which, you know, I'm not a big fan of capitalism, but nonetheless, just even having to interface with the world and make enough sense to get by would enforce a kind of mental discipline that is not evident here.
It's not even, I mean, I'm sure there's some bias in who writes and who doesn't, but I would actually imagine there'd be some pressure if you were really angry with me out in the world to write to me.
And, I don't know, I must have...
A thousand highly supportive emails, all kinds of emails from amazing, interesting people all over the world now, and a few angry emails, and I think...
I don't know if it's three or four angry emails and two of them come from inside the college.
The intensity of this, the national nature of it is all completely unprecedented, and it's pushing both me and my wife to our absolute limit of what we can do, just even fielding all of the stuff that is coming across our desks and all.
That said, there is a precedent when I was a freshman in college, and I've had battles inside of my field.
And so what I would say is that when...
When one has deep principles and one acts based on those principles irrespective of the, I guess, what would be called optics, you find yourself the one against the many repeatedly, just by virtue of the way the world works.
This is without precedent in terms of the magnitude of it, but it's not the first time that I've found that just simply proceeding from principles that I'm pretty sure are right based on careful work has resulted in something boiling over in some amazing fashion.
Have you explored the possibility of teaching outside of a university or college structure?
Have you explored the possibility of using new media, whether it's online video, audio, text, in terms of publishing things and maybe having a Patreon page or something along those lines?
Well, I would love to do it, actually, because at the moment, you know, the college has been a great place to do this because of the unusual teaching model.
But it's becoming less fun.
I mean, even if I wasn't at the center of this firestorm, the rules that are being instituted and the, you know, diversity sensitivity training that's coming and all of those things.
I really hope you do, because I think you have some really interesting ideas, and you're a very smart guy, and obviously your heart and your mind is in the right place, and it seems like before all this boiled over with this new president, Things were going the way you would enjoy them going.
This individualized attention, the freedom to teach anything you want.
I mean, it sounds wonderful in the hands of the right person, and you seem to be the right person.
I just feel like the whole idea of going to a place and learning, I mean, it sounded like a great idea back when that was how it had to be done, but it doesn't take into account the wonderful internet that we all have.
I mean...
The ability that you have now with this platform, with the amount of attention that's on you right now to launch something, is really, you're never going to have anything like this ever again in your life.
Maybe a lot of this can be overcome if we don't have these groups of people that live in these echo chambers and constantly circulate in these same groups that reinforce these opinions and experience all this confirmation bias that makes them believe that this is all correct and the rest of the world is just misinformed and don't understand.
But clearly by that email, a big problem is the staff itself.
Because I think if someone like you who has this unprecedented...
Platform where you you have been launched into the public eye because so many people are outraged about this I know you were on my friend Dave Rubin show and And you know I'm sure there's gonna be a thousand other requests after people hear this as well People people don't want this to be the case anymore and they want to do whatever they can to stop that and they also Want to support people that are brilliant people like yourself that have wonderful ideas that we would like our kids to learn if they do go to college somewhere and We'd like people to be educated in these unique facets of the world
and have a platform where you could teach evolutionary biology unhindered and unshackled by this fucking nonsense that you're dealing with.
And I've talked to quite a few other professors who think that as well.
Gad Saad, he believes it as well.
He believes like there's just a certain amount of time left in this system where it's just so caked up that maybe the only way to deal with it is to abandon it.
And then there'll be a whole group of people just talking about what a piece of shit you are that's locked in some classroom somewhere demonstrating all the different terrible things that you've done to bring horrible things upon the college.
It's just...
Boy, it's such a strange world you're in right now.
I mean, partly it's just the number of hours trying to field everything means I go to bed late and then, you know, by the time the sun comes up, the question is how much more stuff is accumulated.
So less than I might.
I don't...
I guess the thing is, I'm worried about what's going on.
I'm worried about the danger to my family.
That gets in the road of sleep.
I know that what I'm doing makes sense, even if my colleagues don't understand that.
So, I'm not getting enough sleep, that's for sure, but I'm also not ripped apart by doubt.