Nov. 21, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is a biologist, a former professor at Evergreen State, who is now a professor in exile. | ||
| Brett Weinstein, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me back on. | ||
| Professor in exile, my friend. | ||
| That's what it says on your Twitter bio, which means it's your most defining characteristic right now. | ||
| That has become the tenor of my life. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I went into the Rubin Report archives. | ||
| They're very much like the Jedi archives. | ||
| I went into the Rubin Report archives this morning. | ||
| You were on this show originally on May 30th, 2017. | ||
| So that's about a year and a half ago. | ||
| It was just as the evergreen brouhaha was beginning. | ||
| You still were employed at the time, which probably seems like a lifetime ago. | ||
| So I think first maybe we should just play a little catch-up from then. | ||
| Now just to be clear, you have been on the show once since then. | ||
| You were on with your brother Eric, and we did a little bit about evergreen in your life, but I thought first let's just do catch-up on what happened, where you're at, where you're going, and then we're going to do Sort of new territory and we're gonna cover a lot of biology and all that. | ||
| Great. | ||
| So May 30th of 2017 would be exactly one week into the riots. | ||
| The protest at my classroom that became relatively famous happened on May 23rd. | ||
| So one weekend I was sitting in this chair. | ||
| And that feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? | ||
| I mean, it feels like it for me, and I think less has happened to me, although it's been a pretty busy year and a half. | ||
| The transformation of my life and Heather's life in that period has been so dramatic that it's hard to even relate. | ||
| I've never had so much happen in a year. | ||
| Yeah, so okay, so for people that don't know anything about the story, and I suspect there's very few watching this at the moment, can you give me like the 90 second recap of what happened Can that be done in 90 seconds? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| It can be done with carnage. | ||
| I fear this question more than any other because there's so much detail in the story, it can't be covered properly. | ||
| Give a Cliff Notes version that basically is an explainer. | ||
| The equity and inclusion movement got started on my campus, as it is on virtually every campus. | ||
| The new president of Evergreen threw fuel on the fire. | ||
| He used the division over that issue to accomplish things he could not have accomplished otherwise. | ||
| I tried to block his moves to dismantle the excellent part of Evergreen's teaching model, which Heather and I were using to full effect. | ||
| And I became effectively enemy number one of this equity and inclusion movement. | ||
| They arranged a protest at my classroom, very dramatic, 50 students showed up demanding my resignation, not a single one of them was a student I had ever encountered. | ||
| But in any case, they made a terrible error. | ||
| They filmed their confrontation with me. | ||
| They uploaded it, I now know, to Facebook. | ||
| Somebody else in the public picked those videos up and broadcast them and the world watched me try to reason with them and That set things in motion where Evergreen started using me as an excuse for its problems. | ||
| It blamed me for what happened there, for the drop-off in enrollment, for all sorts of things. | ||
| And I started engaging with the public about what was taking place at Evergreen, about issues of freedom of expression, free inquiry on college campuses, and increasingly evolutionary biology, which, you know, People did not initially really understand that that was the focus that I had, not freedom of speech issues. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Now, increasingly, that's what people want to talk to me about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Although we're going to get to plenty of that, because I know that's what your real focus and passion is. | ||
| And it's sort of funny that now you've been thrust into this. | ||
| But in effect, you were protesting putting racist policies on campus. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yes, and this is one of the, I think, hardest lessons for people to learn. | ||
| Good people get the idea that you can spot the right side by certain heuristics. | ||
| And, you know, there's been a historical fact of oppressed people tending to be People of color, etc., and so people have gotten lazy about recognizing who's in the right, if you follow a principle to its logical conclusions. | ||
| In other words, if you're against segregation, for example, as I am, then when the segregationists are telling white people to leave campus, or asking them to leave campus, then you are committed to standing against segregation. | ||
| And when you do stand against segregation, the world goes crazy because people who are being lazy about recognizing which side is defending the principle that they subscribe to, Okay, so you then show up in this studio a week after this whole thing goes down. | ||
| It was your first public interview about any of this. | ||
| What did you think at the time was going to happen by talking about this publicly? | ||
| Or what was your hope, at least, by talking about this publicly? | ||
| You know, initially my hope was to expose the foolishness at Evergreen and save the college from its own worst instincts because Your audience may not care terribly deeply about this, but for a small number of people, for 4,000 students at a time, Evergreen was actually a wonderful experiment in which it was possible for people who hadn't had tremendous educational advantages before they got to college to have an experience that couldn't be reproduced anywhere else. | ||
| Evergreen's model was so unique that if you ended up in the right classrooms with professors who really cared, It was like no other place. | ||
| And you were given incredible freedom as a professor to do what you wanted with these kids, right? | ||
| I believe that the position that Heather and I had was the freest academic position In the country and maybe on earth. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, really more freedom than a tenured professor at Harvard has. | ||
| And that was, let's be honest, it was both a blessing and a curse. | ||
| If you decided to use that freedom for good, if you decided to figure out how to innovate structures that didn't exist anywhere else, you could do it and nobody could tell you not to. | ||
| On the other hand, if you decided to, you know, take the rest of your career off and, you know, teach with one hand while you You know, dealt with your hobbies, you could also get away with murder, and so that happened as well. | ||
| And, you know, there was a tension. | ||
| Every good professor at Evergreen grumbles about the fact that there are a large number of people who are holding positions there that they don't really value. | ||
| And, you know, the phrase that we typically used in private on the faculty was that Evergreen paid in freedom, which meant that it didn't pay well, it wasn't a good paying job, but The ability to have a blank canvas and decide how you were, you know, what you wanted to teach and in what way and to innovate new mechanisms and take students off campus for a week or two or ten, that freedom was a very valuable commodity that Evergreen undervalued the whole time. | ||
| It should have leveled with people that it was hiring and it should have said, look, this job is not going to make you wealthy, but it can make you very happy if you have the temperament that really wants to figure out what's possible. | ||
| So as this was unfolding and now you went public and you also did Rogan and you were on Tucker Carlson where you said I'm deeply progressive because suddenly you were sort of getting crap from you know your side so to speak and you were getting embraced by perhaps a different side and I do want to get a little more into that now because it shows what a sort of crazy realignment politically we've had these days. | ||
| Were you shocked how deep it went? | ||
| So you went public, you were giving the facts, you were exposing sort of the corruption and how it went all the way up to the administration and all that. | ||
| I think from that first interview we did, I think you thought that there would be a course correction in here, or at least there was a chance for a course correction. | ||
| And at least the way I read the last year, at no point was there even a slowdown or any reflection from the administration and the rest of it. | ||
| They just went in on this. | ||
| I am completely shocked by the fact that the world's recognition of just how off things were at Evergreen did not force an acknowledgment that something was wrong. | ||
| So I would not have been surprised if Evergreen had backed off cynically, if they had privately | ||
| said actually we were on the right track, we were misportrayed, but we nonetheless have | ||
| to acknowledge what the world is saying to us. | ||
| The fact that that did not happen at all still shocks me, and I can't explain it. | ||
| Because you have a president who is widely understood to be, is there a polite word for | ||
| bonkers? | ||
| uh... that that he's back Bonkers is good. | ||
| It's one of my favorite words. | ||
| I like bananas too, but bonkers. | ||
| You know, wackadoodle something. | ||
| But in any case, we have a president who was, I mean, look, he's the mad king, right? | ||
| He's the mad king and you've got a whole bunch of people standing around Accepting his authority when in fact he's an outsider his understanding of the college Or his plans for the college are completely inconsistent with the values that the college was founded on yeah And were they really accepting his authority actually because there are moments in in the chaos of this that these videos are posted where he can't even leave to go to the bathroom and it's like he was also a hostage in this in his own maybe his own | ||
| like perverted dream or something, you know what I mean? | ||
| He was both puppet and puppeteer. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| And so the thing is, yes, he is held hostage in those things, | ||
| but I believe he's a willing hostage in the sense that he's trying to accomplish something. | ||
| And, you know, look, it tells the whole tale. | ||
| Once you say, what we are doing is about equity, there is a whole swath of people that cannot figure out how they would object, no matter what it is that you say next, no matter what your plan is. | ||
| If you've said that it is for the purpose of racial equity, then a whole section of the population will just fall in lockstep. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What is that psychologically, do you think? | ||
| Because I think we're seeing this everywhere now. | ||
| This is not just something that's happening at universities anymore. | ||
| This is happening all over society. | ||
| I wish I could say that it is an error in cognition, that people are seeing it incorrectly. | ||
| What I know for sure now, as well as anybody on earth, is that the part of people's minds that drives them in the direction of silence, of self-editing, of all of these things is actually accurately perceiving a threat that it cannot manage. | ||
| Now, I'm not looking for sympathy. | ||
| I do not have my job anymore, and I miss it. | ||
| It was a great job. | ||
| However, I've landed on my feet. | ||
| I wouldn't trade my position for any other. | ||
| I like where I am. | ||
| First of all, there's not an infinite number of those positions in the world. | ||
| So most people who are looking at some sort of an equity and inclusion juggernaut, who are thinking, should I stand up, actually have to ask themselves, what happens if I do? | ||
| Do I have an economic plan B for my family? | ||
| Anybody who doesn't have an economic plan B for their family, and I have to say, As much as I would like Evergreen to be a place in which all the faculty had enough skills that they could go do something else if they have to, they don't, right? | ||
| They can't easily move to another college because the way they teach at Evergreen doesn't create a CV that will get you hired elsewhere easily. | ||
| And so I think lots of people are looking ahead and saying, if I stand up and I say the right thing now, What will become of me? | ||
| And the problem, the place where I, you know, I have sympathy for anybody who sees that and says, look, I don't have a plan B, I don't know what to do. | ||
| Where I lose sympathy with them is when they then, having made that calculation, rationalize what they are saying and they join, not reluctantly, but they become enthusiastic allies of this movement in order to uh... basically they sell the rest of us out right and in a weird way they almost have to do that psychologically to live with themselves right i mean otherwise you realize that | ||
| I mean, then you are a sellout. | ||
| It's harsh, but it's true. | ||
| The reason I'm so fascinated with this is because, as you know, I've been on tour with Peterson for the last couple months, and I think this is the number one question that we get asked. | ||
| People want to speak up, and they are afraid of losing their jobs. | ||
| And I think that's why your story resonated with so many people, because people were looking at you and going, well, it's pretty freaking obvious this guy's not a racist, he's not a hater, he's a self-identified lefty and a progressive and all of these things, and somehow he stood up to the monster. | ||
| And I think the fact that you're still here, and you're not employed at the moment, and I do want to discuss that a little bit too, but the fact that you're still here, you're alive, you're still willing to talk about these things, I think that's the type of courage that people are looking for at the moment. | ||
| Well, you know, I do. | ||
| So I have to say it for... | ||
| I don't know, a year now, I have had these interactions. | ||
| You know, a couple times a day, somebody will come up to me on the street, and unless I'm in Olympia, it's always nice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People say that to me. | ||
| Even sans beard, they're still coming up to you? | ||
| Actually, that has reduced it. | ||
| I think they're not quite sure either, is that who I think it is, or is that Eric? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You go buzz cut, and then you're Scott Free, man. | ||
| Oh man, I'd be, yeah. | ||
| I could go on the lam, they'd never find me. | ||
| But the thing is, it raises questions. | ||
| The stuff that people say to me about what they see on the outside, I get to compare that to what the experience was on the inside. | ||
| So I've done a lot of thinking about what it is. | ||
| Is there some reason that I stood up when others didn't? | ||
| And I think it comes down to something simple, which I'll just put it out there. | ||
| I think people are rationalizing their acceptance of this nonsense movement in order to sleep. | ||
| And for some reason, that particular switch works the opposite way for me. | ||
| If I heard myself rationalizing that, I would not be able to sleep. | ||
| So, in order to sleep, I had to stand up. | ||
| And, you know, I'm lucky. | ||
| I have Really good friends. | ||
| I have a wonderful brother who was friends with you and that put us in contact. | ||
| I have something else to talk about. | ||
| Evolutionary biology is fascinating to people. | ||
| They don't know how to think about it and they're, just as my students were, they're very interested to hear what I have to say on the subject. | ||
| So that means Somehow, even though I couldn't see it exactly on May 23rd of 2017, there was a path forward for me which, you know, it could come crashing down tomorrow. | ||
| But so far, it looks good and I regret nothing. | ||
| Is there an evolutionary explanation to that type of person that either can sleep or cannot sleep? | ||
| Because, you know, people come up to all of us all the time now and they say, I wish I could speak up. | ||
| I don't want to lose my job. | ||
| My wife's pissed at me. | ||
| I mean, all of these things. | ||
| And they're literally, sometimes I'm talking to people one-on-one and they're whispering. | ||
| I mean, this, this, this, This layer of fear is seriously real and it is sitting on top of people. | ||
| So is there an evolutionary explanation why at the moment it seems that a very small amount of people are doing it? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And for me, just quickly, I would just say for me it's like, I don't know if it's about sleeping, I just feel like I'm doing what's right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's actually not more, you know, it's not more confusing or needs more of an explanation than that. | ||
| That's just what I'm doing. | ||
| Yeah, there are two things to say on this front. | ||
| One, so I know we're going to talk more about evolutionary theory later on, but There is a way in which evolutionary theory stalled 30 years ago. | ||
| And I don't believe that the explanation that you're looking for is on the table in the way that, you know, any evolutionist that you ask would say, oh yeah, the explanation is over here. | ||
| But I do believe we can see what it is. | ||
| There are a lot of adaptations that do not map well onto the individual. | ||
| If you look at the individual and you say, well, why would the person behave this way? | ||
| It seems paradoxical. | ||
| Sometimes, if you look at something larger than the individual, and it's not the group, this is the thing, we've been caught in this argument about group selection since the 60s, and, or actually even earlier, but that's where it began to come to a head. | ||
| If you look at the lineage, that is to say, a population of people who are related, talking about ancestral populations, There are many characteristics that have value for the lineage moving forward that are hard to understand from the point of view of the individual. | ||
| Many of the things that we have a really hard time explaining, including things like homosexuality and religion, Many of these things are adaptations that exist at that slightly higher level. | ||
| And so what I would say is an individual who can't sleep if they're not doing the right thing or if they hear themselves rationalizing, that individual is not well suited to certain jobs. | ||
| But they're very well suited to other jobs. | ||
| And the idea that a population has an emergent nature and that, you know, a division of labor between, you know, I'm not telling you that not rationalizing is the way we should all be. | ||
| It may well be that we need certain people who are very good at carefully rationalizing certain things in order to get jobs done. | ||
| I mean, I would imagine if you are in the military, if you are in a position of command in the military, that there are certain things that you have to rationalize in order to win the war. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying I don't like war. | ||
| I'm not saying that You know, every war should be one, you know, you shouldn't enter into a war that isn't justified. | ||
| But once you've entered into it, the goal is justified, maybe you have to rationalize certain things. | ||
| You know, you move troops over here in order to protect something over there. | ||
| Well, what are you doing to these people? | ||
| You may be sending them to their deaths. | ||
| So, you know, even talking about it makes me uncomfortable because it's not something I would be good at. | ||
| The point is, when you look at the population, and the fact is the populations that we have alive on earth today are all winners, right? | ||
| These are the winners. | ||
| Irrespective of how you got here, irrespective of how oppressed your population looks in relation to others, somehow you made it to the present. | ||
| You're a winner. | ||
| Those winning populations had Many characteristics within them, and they knew how to call upon these people and, you know, sideline those people and then switch it up at the point you arrive somewhere else where different skills are necessary. | ||
| So, in essence, yeah, I think there's a very simple evolutionary explanation and some of us have certain skills, other people have other skills, and the real trick is can you figure out the switching mechanism that decides what to call on at what moment. | ||
| That seems to be the key part of this, right? | ||
| I mean, that's it. | ||
| It's like, some people are going to do it, some people know they should do it and won't do it, some people probably shouldn't do it and do do it, and everything in between. | ||
| Well, you know, you probably have this experience too, but when people come up to me and they talk to me, there's a couple different styles of conversation that unfold. | ||
| There's lots of people who want to apologize for what happened to me, which I always find odd. | ||
| Unless they were there in the room. | ||
| Right, unless it was them. | ||
| But I'm guessing those people have never contacted you. | ||
| They never contact me. | ||
| But, you know, some people want to apologize. | ||
| Some people, you know, want to thank me. | ||
| And some people, there's this one thread, which is, I'm facing something like this too. | ||
| Can you give me some advice? | ||
| And, you know, I always say the same sort of thing to them, and it throws them. | ||
| You know, I always say, look, It's not safe. | ||
| You have to think very carefully about what you're doing and don't kid yourself about what you're signing up for. | ||
| And, you know, you just watch in their eyes as they grapple with the fact that they didn't get what they wanted from you, what they wanted to be told. | ||
| They wanted somebody to egg them on and say, do it. | ||
| It's the right thing. | ||
| It'll work out. | ||
| And you tell them, oh, it may not work out. | ||
| And, you know, there's a moment of heartbreak. | ||
| But my hope is that The people who should do it have to go through that little heartbreak in order to get to the other side. | ||
| And so among my various jobs at the moment is To show people the abyss and just say, look, is this the abyss you want to jump? | ||
| If it is, nobody can tell you that but you. | ||
| I certainly can't. | ||
| It would be irresponsible of me to tell people to do something like what I did because you could get maimed. | ||
| Yeah, and in a way, it's sort of the shows that I'm most proud of here are the ones where I was able to facilitate a little bit of that. | ||
| So it's sitting down with you, it's sitting down with Lindsey Shepard, who went through something very similar, it's sitting down with James Damore, these people who did not ask to be heroes, who even if I say the word hero, I can see you're uncomfortable, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, the people that didn't want this, but Somehow it got thrust upon them, and then they got there, and then hopefully I was able to amplify that a little bit, which then spreads that out to all sorts of other people, which is pretty cool. | ||
| I don't want to do this for, obviously, the entire interview, so let's just catch up on a couple things. | ||
| Well, if I can just say one other thing. | ||
| Yeah, we'll do a bit more. | ||
| There's one thing that is, and I believe there's a little caveat to it, If you do it, and you do it for the right reasons, in other words, you could do it cynically. | ||
| You could stand up against one of these things in order to see if you couldn't get famous or something. | ||
| People will see through that, right? | ||
| Especially the people who've gone ahead down this road because they know something about it. | ||
| But if you do it for the right reasons, if you're really trying to advance the ball, to challenge a bad narrative, The people who have gone through this recognize it, and it won't feed you, but it is very reassuring to discover other people who see the corrupt narrative, who understand what happens when you challenge it. | ||
| So anyway, if you're hungry to meet other people like that, standing up You gotta figure out what you're gonna do to feed yourself, but it does put you in contact with lots of people who are very worthwhile. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting because, again, after being with Peterson, it's like people say to him, you know, I wanna get a new job. | ||
| Should I just quit my job tomorrow? | ||
| And it's like, you have to seriously think about what your options are. | ||
| You may hate your job, but it doesn't mean you can leave tomorrow. | ||
| You gotta think about all of this seriously, and I think that that is the key here. | ||
| So I'm curious, how much of this has shifted what you think politically because you do talk about politics now and I know when I had you in there for the first time I think I said to you we'll revisit this question because I thought here's a guy that's that I come from a very similar political place as him as a progressive and all of these things and now I see you know as you | ||
| No, I consider myself a classical liberal, and I love libertarian ideas, obviously. | ||
| We just did stand up together last night in Brea, California. | ||
| You and your brother joined me on stage for the second half, and it was mostly a conservative crowd. | ||
| There were some Trump people, there were some lefties and some liberals, but mostly conservatives. | ||
| And they love you guys, and yet you both still identify as lefties, and the whole thing. | ||
| And I wonder now, a year and a half later, Are you shocked at that, that you are now really liked by people that perhaps you thought were your ideological opponents and now you're sort of on the outs with the people that you used to be allies with? | ||
| Okay, that's a good question. | ||
| I get one every episode. | ||
| I am heartened and flabbergasted by what I encounter on the center right. | ||
| You know, this is not the Republican Party that I remember from my youth. | ||
| This is a very different entity and I think it has a lot of refugees who've been driven out of other places and they've grouped there because I don't know, because something over there is making sense to them. | ||
| Well, as you said to me the first time we met, Dave, you have PTSD from the progressives. | ||
| And I must say, we should return to this, but I was very heartened to hear you bring that up during your episode with Ben Shapiro and Eric and Jordan. | ||
| You went through a cool exercise, which I think deserves a place with steel manning. | ||
| And your exercise, I think, was something like, where is some place that you suspect your own thinking might be incorrect? | ||
| And you brought up political PTSD as a place to pay attention to. | ||
| But let's just say I am I'm shocked that the center-right seems to be, you know, it has protective custody of liberty and free speech and science of all things. | ||
| I mean, how the heck did the center-right end up having custody of these things, which are traditionally things that the right is uneasy about and the left has defended. | ||
| But nonetheless, the people who value them are where they are. | ||
| I think they do have something wrong. | ||
| Your initial question was, has this changed my political view? | ||
| And I think everybody said it would. | ||
| And I believe I'm being honest with myself when I say it really hasn't changed my view of what is true politically much, if at all. | ||
| I think because what I believe is true isn't predicated on anything social, right? | ||
| In other words, these are conclusions that I reached through game theory and evolutionary thinking and observation of the political landscape. | ||
| They're not things, you know, it wasn't that I went to a dinner party and had a good time and fell in with their political ideology. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not, you know, the fact that I am not welcomed in certain quadrants of the left doesn't change anything | ||
| about what's true at all. | ||
| Right. - It can't. | ||
| So I understand that, but at the same time, I mean, you can go, I've done public events with you | ||
| that are usually, were usually invited by libertarian organizations. | ||
| We've done some Ayn Rand things together and a couple other things. | ||
| And I think everything that we've done publicly, and when you've joined me for stand-up, the crowds all basically seem to be on the right. | ||
| As you're saying, this sort of new, this new center-right that maybe needs a better phrase than that, because center-right sort of, it needs something sexier than that per se. | ||
| But, I mean, have you been invited anywhere by progressives to tell your story, or to get some camaraderie, or empathy, or sympathy, or kudos, or anything other than guff? | ||
| Very occasionally, and only slightly. | ||
| I mean, the asymmetry is amazing. | ||
| And I must say, one of the most interesting things to me about the early phase of this public part of my life is that initially there was just this overwhelming message that came back at me. | ||
| You are a conservative, or welcome to conservatism, or something like that. | ||
| Welcome to the dark side, I think is what they usually say. | ||
| They do say that. | ||
| And then, at the point that the phrase IDW showed up on the landscape, then there was this point about, oh, the IDW is a right-wing movement, or something like that. | ||
| And so, there's a trajectory There's something... we track immediate effects pretty well as people. | ||
| We can observe them and detect them. | ||
| There's often a slower pattern that is harder for us to see, and so just by analogy, I find this is true with healing, you know, just physical healing. | ||
| If you do damage to your knee, for example, there's a one-month healing trajectory, but there's also a one-year and a five-year trajectory, and they're much harder to spot. | ||
| So anyway, the interesting thing is The challenge of, you're on the right, or now surely you will be moving to the right, you know, that was just an overwhelming message that came back. | ||
| But the ability to talk back to that message and say, actually no, still on the left, actually part of the left you don't even remember exists. | ||
| One of my fears is that all of the stuff that the left was correct about is not getting properly credited now. | ||
| So, to the extent, I don't know if people have seen this Hidden Tribes report that came out maybe a month ago now. | ||
| that says that there's this vast, exhaustive 80% in the middle who do agree on the desirability of a fair society that doesn't burden one population in order to enrich another and that we basically share. | ||
| That basically it's only 8% actually that buy into this hyper-political correctness and the rest of it. | ||
| Right, it's a tiny fringe on the authoritarian left and it's a tiny fringe on the White nationalist right and the rest of us in the middle. | ||
| No, we're not in perfect agreement We don't agree on the order of the priorities, but we do agree basically on what a good society would function like and That a lot of the gains I mean, you know, I The ability to be gay and out and function in society without that being a tremendous obstacle, that's something that the left deserves credit for. | ||
| Racial equality, equity is a different beast by virtue of the new, I hesitate to even call it a definition because it's not a definition of the standard. | ||
| Sense but equality these are traditional left values, and we were right about mm-hmm And so the fact that these things are now no longer Controversial that belongs in the discussion to the left has been right about some stuff It's also been wrong about some stuff And the right has been right about some stuff, and it's been wrong about some stuff, and it is time for that conversation Absolutely. | ||
| And that's why I don't denigrate what it was. | ||
| I am upset with what it is. | ||
| And perhaps guys like you and your brother and Sam, some people that still identify as lefties, will be able to do a reclamation project that I just don't see anymore. | ||
| I see sort of more That this thing needs to burn so out of the ashes a phoenix can rise. | ||
| That's just maybe a little bit of a tactical thing, but let's just jump back to an evolutionary explanation for some of this. | ||
| So I asked you about why some people can do this from an evolutionary perspective, why some people are able to step up and some people aren't. | ||
| What's the evolutionary explanation for why this, let's say, 8% very loud but small group of people feel the need to purge everyone? | ||
| Is there an evolutionary... because that seems it would be almost counter to evolution. | ||
| You'd want to have more commonalities with people and bring in a big tent, but what I see them consistently doing is just getting rid of everybody who dare, you know, talk back to the God. | ||
| Well, you know, I wish I had known this was going to come up because I would have looked it up, but there was a... Put me on the spot! | ||
|
unidentified
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Go! | |
| There was a report that emerged maybe it was six or eight months ago, that I don't, you | ||
| know, I haven't looked into it and it's not my area of specialty, but | ||
| it sounded right to me. And what it said was that there is a particular, | ||
| there's a particular personality trait, authoritarianism, that isn't ideological. | ||
| It doesn't really care whether it's, you know, defending fascism or communism. | ||
| What it wants to do is boss people around, and that essentially what's confusing to people Is that at the moment, these dyed-in-the-wool authoritarians are concentrated over on the left, and they're saying stuff that sounds nominally like leftist stuff, but that, you know, were the winds to shift, and the authoritarians of the moment to be over on the right, they'd be there. | ||
| And so, that makes sense to me. | ||
| And what I would like people, yourself included, to consider is that there is almost no point in engaging those people, right? | ||
| This question of the importance of liberty is settled, right? | ||
| The 80% of us in the middle all get it. | ||
| The fringe on the far left and the far right are, I don't want to say, safe to ignore because they can always rise up and become important as the one on the left is doing. | ||
| However, That's not where the game is. | ||
| The game is all of the people who can't figure out how to escape from the stigma and all that is driving civilization. | ||
| So all of the people who are falling in line with what's going on on the authoritarian left, those are the people to reach. | ||
| And what you raise about, you know, let's say the audience last night at the comedy club, and you know, this is reliable, this was the second one I did with you, it was exactly the same the first time, The thing that is so heartening is, you know, I can come into a room, and you're right, that room last night must have been 95% right of center. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And first thing you tell them is, here's a progressive. | ||
| I tell them I'm a radical, right? | ||
| It doesn't dampen their enthusiasm one bit. | ||
| In fact, they're thrilled to discover that things are not so bleak and that there is somebody on the other side of this thing who's still talking reasonably and can hear them and can see them and doesn't think that they're racist and out of control. | ||
| And so anyway, You know, I know I take a lot of flack for, you know, interacting with the right, and I'm not listening to that flack. | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| Because it is the best thing we can do is to engage and, you know, when you spot the humanity of the people on the other side, then to the extent that we differ over something, we can talk about it. | ||
| All right, well, we could keep going down this Pandora's box of lunacy related to everything that you've been through, but let's just catch it up to where we are now and we can start looking at the future a little bit. | ||
| So you and your wife, Heather, who you referenced, Heather Hying, who's been on the show, who's a brilliant professor as well and has that brave evolutionary tick that you have too. | ||
| How'd you end up marrying a woman that was going to have the same evolutionary tick as you? | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Uh, you really want to know the answer? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Um, Heather and I, we were not going out, but we were friends in high school. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know that others will understand the... | ||
| The phrase, but the one that runs in my head is, somebody goes to high school with the girl you should marry, and it might be you, right? | ||
| So, anyway, in my case, you know, I don't know how because, you know, I was a confused kid like every other kid that age. | ||
| There was something about her that seemed so very right, and I have to say, I was right about that. | ||
| Best decision I ever made. | ||
| Was she ever pissed at you during this? | ||
| Because you sort of thrust her in the spotlight too. | ||
| And the fact is, both of you left your jobs. | ||
| You got a $500,000 settlement for two tenured positions, which to some people, $500,000, it sounds like a lot of money. | ||
| But this is your life's work, you and your wife. | ||
| You've since relocated your family and your two kids. | ||
| So this is massive. | ||
| 500 grand in the scheme of that is not a lot. | ||
| But was she ever bothered or hesitant by what you were doing | ||
| 'cause she didn't go public about this until a bit after. | ||
| She was never pissed, not for a minute. | ||
| She and I were in complete agreement. | ||
| We saw the same thing unfold at Evergreen. | ||
| The nature of our teaching at Evergreen was kind of interesting in the sense that | ||
| we had like a little undeclared graduate program in evolutionary biology where we couldn't award you | ||
| a master's degree, but if you were interested in evolutionary biology, and many people | ||
| didn't know they were, but they would take my program and then I would sort of nudge them over | ||
| So we had students bouncing back and forth and we had a community of people that were in our circle. | ||
| The basic point is that creates an opportunity for every night at dinner, Heather and I would compare notes, what we were seeing at the college and all these things, talk about students, what the student's blind spot is, what they do particularly well. | ||
| And as this unfolded, Heather and I saw the identical picture, or maybe the way to say it is the picture of what was happening emerged between us as we discussed it. | ||
| And she was, let's put it this way, what put me in the bullseye was the emails that I wrote and the things I said in faculty meetings. | ||
| I never wrote an email that Heather didn't look at first and tell me It's ready. | ||
| And frankly, there were a lot of emails that I didn't send, and if I made one error, I believe I should have sent every one of them. | ||
| Because what they do is they leave a historical record of what is taking place. | ||
| So the dissent was In retrospect, very clear, as you went back through the emails. | ||
| But anyway, yeah, Heather was in complete agreement the whole time, and I think the confrontation was less in keeping with her personality traits than mine, but in terms of her commitment and her belief in what we were doing, it was a team effort. | ||
| There's a lesson in marriage right there. | ||
| There's probably many lessons in marriage right there. | ||
| So many. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so let's just get to where you are now. | ||
| You guys have left Washington. | ||
| Neither one of you are teaching at the moment. | ||
| You're trying to figure out what your future is, I assume the same with Heather. | ||
| What is that like, number one? | ||
| And number two, I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that schools have not thrown offers at you. | ||
| I mean, you have a seriously great public profile now. | ||
| You are respected by so many people. | ||
| You have fans, not just students now. | ||
| You have former students, but you have fans. | ||
| That would love to sign up for courses that you would be teaching and all sorts of things. | ||
| Where I think most people would look at this on their face and think, wow, what an asset this guy would be, not only intellectually, but PR-wise and all that. | ||
| That's not where we're at. | ||
| It's absolutely not. | ||
| And it does say something. | ||
| I'm an outsider to whatever discussions it is that result in nothing of that sort coming our way. | ||
| But it is conspicuous. | ||
| So, you asked what it's like. | ||
| I'm having a... | ||
| a very unusual experience in life. | ||
| My life was great before any of this happened. | ||
| It's great now. | ||
| The lack of security is frightening when I stare at it. | ||
| Heather and I have two kids and if we didn't we would be in a different position. | ||
| We could take risks and we could afford to go through years of austerity, | ||
| but as it is, we have responsibilities and our kids didn't sign up for this. | ||
| So, I mean, they would've, but-- | ||
| Are you saying they didn't get that gene? | ||
| What are you telling me? | ||
| Oh, no, they're on board, but they're kids. | ||
| It's our responsibility to protect them. | ||
| And so, the whole thing has been frightening from the point of view of what it means for the future, | ||
| because literally, I don't know. | ||
| It seems like things are headed along a path in which, you know, the settlement that you mentioned is a tiny fraction of what we would have earned over the rest of our careers at Evergreen. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| A huge amount of it was burned up paying lawyers and taxes, you know, you get all that money in one chunk. | ||
| So we got about two years of Buffer money from that, but it wasn't like we got bought out. | ||
| We could have, in a state that had punitive damages, we likely could have won something much more like 4 million bucks for the amount of income that we would have earned over the rest of our careers. | ||
| And why did you guys not go that route? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people, when they saw the number, I remember when I saw the number, I think I just saw an article or something, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why so low? | ||
| Because Washington is one of 11 states without punitive damages. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| Oh, I thought you said that Washington did have punitive damages. | ||
| Oh, I just misheard you, okay. | ||
| So that caused us to effectively cut our losses and decide that There was nothing to be done. | ||
| We did the best we could with Evergreen and cutting our ties with them at the point that they made it clear. | ||
| I mean, they behaved atrociously in negotiations. | ||
| For one thing, they dragged their heels. | ||
| They wouldn't sit down with us until we were already back on contract for the next year, fully assuming that we would be going back into a classroom. | ||
| But what would it be like to walk onto a campus that is, you know, paying a PR firm to demonize you, right? | ||
| What would that be like? | ||
| And we would have done it, but they insulted us in negotiations. | ||
| They offered us panic buttons, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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As if... Oh, panic buttons in the room, literally? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, as if the problem was that we were panicking people, right? | ||
| You know, rather than that they had, you know... They could have at least offered you a counter baseball bat, right? | ||
| Wouldn't that have been nice? | ||
| Right, something. | ||
| But they didn't, and you know, hobbling the police. | ||
| The whole thing was a fiasco. | ||
| So we cut our losses. | ||
| We've moved. | ||
| We moved to Portland, which is wonderful. | ||
| I know that's in some ways not its reputation, but it is a marvelous place. | ||
| You went to the only more progressive place. | ||
|
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It does seem that we have gone to the belly of the beast. | |
| But, you know, the beauty of Portland, you know, there's a beauty and there's a tragedy. | ||
| There is this equity and inclusion thing and it seems to go up to the mayor's office who happens to also frighteningly, in a parallel to Evergreen, be the police commissioner so he can stand down the police and has done so in some circumstances. | ||
| Well that video from a couple weeks ago with Antifa, basically running traffic in the middle of Portland, I mean it's unfathomable that that's happening in the streets of a United States city. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is, they are flirting with the same, I mean it is the same story as Evergreen except this is a major American city. | ||
| You know, to have a college Play games with literal anarchy is dangerous enough. | ||
| To have a city doing it, I shudder to think. | ||
| You didn't want to think about Texas? | ||
| I really, on this tour, I gotta tell you, San Antonio, I think you'd have a field day over there. | ||
| Well, but here's the thing. | ||
| The other part of liberalism is also true in Portland. | ||
| So, I never encounter the Antifa madness and the mayor and his confusion You know, it's like the mayor of your town. | ||
| You never run into it. | ||
| What I do run into is a clean, functional city. | ||
| People, as far as I can tell, are very decent to each other. | ||
| They make provisions for cyclists to commute around the place. | ||
| I think in some sense Portland is, it shows exactly the conflict between the left's better instincts and its worst instincts and I hope that it will come around to the kind of enlightened progressivism that used to exist rather than the naive progressivism that seems to have taken over. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's shift all together. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's do it. | |
| Let's talk about the stuff you really know. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Biology. | ||
| Evolutionary biology. | ||
| I thought this would be an interesting place to start. | ||
| You just recently did a talk with Richard Dawkins, just in the last couple weeks. | ||
| As I understand, the video of it should be up online somewhat soon. | ||
| I am told it will be up within a couple of weeks. | ||
| Okay, so hopefully people will be able to actually watch this conversation. | ||
| Very quickly, this event was put together by Pangburn Philosophy. | ||
| There's been a little tumult around that, and I know you just wanted to quickly address what's going on there. | ||
| Yeah, so Pangburn Philosophy has obviously imploded, and that has left people speculating about what happened and why some of us, like myself, continue to participate. | ||
| Just very quickly for people that have no idea they were putting together a lot of the public events that included well the one that you moderated with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris in Vancouver also the one that Douglas Murray moderated which I think was that in the UK or was that Australia? | ||
| One in Dublin and one in London Yeah, and then a series of other events like the one that you did with Dawkins and this day of reflection that was supposed to happen on November 17th that we all pulled out of, which now I think you can take it from there. | ||
| Sure, so let me just say that I know that there's a lot of speculation about what took place, why people pulled out of the New York event, why some of us, like myself, stayed in, and I was in at the point that it was cancelled a couple days ago. | ||
| And I do hope people will recognize that there was a predicament for those of us, like myself and like Eric, who were looking at the Pangburn situation and trying to figure out what to do. | ||
| Which was, at the point that Pangburn cancelled the Auckland event, something new emerged. | ||
| So other events had been cancelled, but there had always been refunds for people who had bought tickets. | ||
| At the point he cancelled the Auckland event, there was a lack of refund money, which called our attention to the fact that something was off. | ||
| Money that should have been kept. | ||
| Separately for that event, so that if it was cancelled it could have all been refunded. | ||
| Somehow wasn't, which we didn't know. | ||
| And to be clear, you guys, and I think not just you guys, hadn't been paid for some previous things too. | ||
| So it wasn't just about the people that were buying the tickets. | ||
| Just putting it all out there. | ||
| It wasn't Auckland, it was Sydney. | ||
| Sydney is where speakers, as far as I know, that's where speakers didn't get paid for the first time. | ||
| And I'm certainly one of the people who didn't get paid and still haven't been. | ||
| Yeah, and also as a sidebar, so that is why I pulled out of the Day of Reflection thing in New York. | ||
| I was supposed to host the whole day, but then when I realized that people hadn't been paid for previous things, and I had heard through the grapevine that there was some shady stuff going on, I just said, you know what, let me just not get involved in this mess. | ||
| Right, which makes perfect sense. | ||
| So I think what I did also makes perfect sense, which is I looked at the situation and I said, Well, you've got people who haven't been refunded their money for Auckland. | ||
| You've got speakers from Sydney who haven't been paid. | ||
| And if the New York event comes apart, then it's going to compound that. | ||
| It's going to create new ticket holders who haven't been paid. | ||
| And so my thought was, Let's have an event that gives people what they paid for so that we don't make the damage worse. | ||
| And I certainly didn't sign up for anything new after the Auckland event was cancelled and there was a failure to repay patrons, but my thought was, from the point of view of protecting the fanbase from whatever was going on, Behind the scenes at Pangburn, the better part of Valor was to make the event happen and be successful rather than create another Auckland situation. | ||
| So, in any case, that, you know, and I should also point out that up until, so Pangburn gave us a little bit of warning Just a couple days before he cancelled it, he said he was about to cancel it, and Eric and I tried to save it. | ||
| In fact, Eric, who had pulled out of the event quietly so as not to cripple it, He and I got on the phone with Travis and we tried to get Travis to agree to hold the event and to let us rescue it. | ||
| We offered to work for free and we would have liked to have held the event so that it wouldn't cause further harm to people. | ||
| And I don't know why Travis refused, but he did. | ||
| So anyway, it got cancelled and I do want people to understand that it was not that anybody was unaware that something was going on. | ||
| The question was, what's best for the fanbase, the movement, to the extent that there is a movement, is it better to have another event cancelled than have More harm? | ||
| I didn't think so. | ||
| Yeah, and I know this is all a little insider baseball for people, so I know you just wanted to get that out, so I'm glad that it is. | ||
| A few of us also, we had discussed possibly doing a free thing, and who knows, maybe there will be something in the future if people end up getting stiffed on ticket prices, because obviously we want people to get something, and if we can all figure it out, we will. | ||
| Okay, so that being said, you did do an event with Richard Dawkins, as we said, the video should be up soon enough. | ||
| From Chicago. | ||
| Should we expect from this? | ||
| And I think on its face, I think a lot of people would say, wait a minute, well, we've got Weinstein and Dawkins. | ||
| These guys should agree on everything, shouldn't they? | ||
| Well, this goes back to the question of what happened to evolutionary biology 30 years ago. | ||
| And Dawkins and I do agree on a tremendous amount, but the place at which we start disagreeing, I think, is the branching point where you have the way evolutionary theory went thirty years ago and the way it should have gone. | ||
| And, you know, that's not and that's an indictment in and of itself. | ||
| Fields take wrong turns all the time, but what should happen is you should detect | ||
| that you're on the wrong path because suddenly progress ceases, | ||
| and that didn't happen. | ||
| So what actually happened 30 years ago that got us in that place? | ||
| Well, ironically, I would argue that the last piece of progress that we all really agree, | ||
| now there's been lots of empirical work, but the last piece of theoretical progress | ||
| is Dawkins' Selfish Gene, which essentially encapsulates a synthesis | ||
| that does lots of things, including brings a proper theory | ||
| of cultural evolution online, Cultural evolution is a non-issue for almost all creatures, | ||
| but for birds and mammals It's a big deal and for human beings it is the big deal | ||
| So to the extent that we did not have a way of discussing cultural evolution prior to the selfish gene | ||
| Dawkins introduction of the concept of memes which have now been | ||
| Trivialized by you know people putting funny captions on pictures, but the concept of I think you could argue | ||
| They've become the most relevant way of communication in a bizarre way | ||
| Yes, but they become you know little tidbits become little bites and the fact is | ||
| Almost everything about human beings that is interesting and special at least touches cultural evolution, if not is entirely housed there. | ||
| So, in order to understand ourselves, we have to get this cultural evolution thing straight. | ||
| And Dawkins set us, I believe, on the right path. | ||
| Chapter 11, he introduces the word meme, he introduces the concept, he sets us in motion. | ||
| But he makes an error in that chapter. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| We all make errors. | ||
| But it hasn't been corrected in 30 years. | ||
| And so... So what is that error? | ||
| The error is in... | ||
| a misportrayal of the relationship between culture and its evolutionary units and genes and the way that they evolve. | ||
| So what Dawkins says in that chapter is that memes, the units of cultural evolution, exist in a new primeval soup. | ||
| Right? | ||
| He says this is a new kind of evolution. | ||
| It begins at the point that culture begins to happen and it is independent of the genes. | ||
| That cannot be the case. | ||
| It cannot be the case because the only reason that you are able to pick up units of cultural evolution is because you have a brain that your genes created which is hospitable to those things which means that to the extent that your culture starts wasting the time and the energy and the resources of your genes, the genes are in a perfect position to shut it down. | ||
| So my point to Dawkins on stage in Chicago was that can't be right. | ||
| And if you make an adjustment to the theory that you, Dawkins, presented in 1976, if you adjust it correctly, you discover That many things that are paradoxical about cultural evolution are no longer paradoxical and many things about human beings are suddenly tractable. | ||
| So can you give me an example of that? | ||
| I can give you the ultimate example. | ||
| I will accept that one. | ||
| So the ultimate example has to do with religion and things that function like it. | ||
| So, if you think about, you know, this is the antithesis of some little picture with a caption on it. | ||
| You imagine Catholicism, for example. | ||
| Catholicism is a set of beliefs that has profound implications on the way that believers deploy their efforts, their resources, the things that they elevate, the things that they eschew, all of that. | ||
| So the question is why, right? | ||
| So Dawkins and I would agree there is no supernatural explanation necessary to interpret what is taking place on Earth or anywhere else in the universe. | ||
| You don't need a supernatural explanation if you are trying to explain phenomena. | ||
| So why is it that people who hold a belief that supernatural forces are at the heart of human affairs, why are those people so successful historically? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| And Dawkins and I disagree with it. | ||
| I disagree over it. | ||
| Because A, he has this view of what cultural evolution is, that it's independent of genes. | ||
| I say it is actually much more flexible than genes, but it is subordinate to the will of the genes. | ||
| And he also does not subscribe, actually he came around a bit on this on stage I thought, but he also does not subscribe to a lineage level interpretation of selection. | ||
| He is a traditional kin selectionist who believes effectively that the individual, that the gene in the individual are the places that we must interpret evolution and if you do that then lots of things are paradoxical, hard to explain, maybe intractable. | ||
| If you accept that lineages evolve, that adaptation can apply to the lineage, then you can begin to understand phenomena like religious traditions as adaptive properties of a population and There's tremendous progress to be made. | ||
| So what happened on stage with Dawkins was at dinner prior to the event we more or less agreed that I would lead the discussion because I had a sense of where we disagreed and he would react to it. | ||
| I put together a list of Points on which I was certain that we agreed, points on which I was pretty sure we disagreed, and points on which I wasn't sure which way to call it, which we didn't get to. | ||
| But anyway, I started out by pointing out the vast agreement between the two of us, and asked him about each one, and more or less I had been right about where we agreed, and then I started to go through the list of places that we disagreed, and I thought it was a fascinating conversation. | ||
| It was definitely closer to the conversation I hoped we would have than the one I feared we might have. | ||
| There was a lot of progress. | ||
| Could you sense which way, not that this matters in the grand scheme of things, but at some level it does, which way the audience was going? | ||
| Not that it is about who gets more cheers or anything, but what I do find fascinating about these things, and although I didn't attend any of the live events with Sam and Jordan, you know, I've watched some of them, and just sort of noting A little bit of crowd applause and jeers and pauses and things I think gives you some extra taste that maybe for you guys on stage you can't quite quantify. | ||
| Well, I mean, first of all, I'm a believer in that, and it was one of the most important tools that I used to use in the classroom. | ||
| You know, figuring out what people heard, how it landed, what they don't yet have. | ||
| So anyway, I'm very cognizant of what people are hearing, and I was listening carefully to the audience. | ||
| And, you know, the thing was set in motion You know, as another New Atheist event. | ||
| And so in some sense I was battling uphill because my basic point was New Atheism is a cul-de-sac. | ||
| It's a problem in and of itself. | ||
| It's a problem because at the end of it, there isn't enough. | ||
| Is that the most simplistic way that I could present it? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Let me just put it in stark terms. | ||
| Atheism is defensible, but New Atheism is wrong. | ||
| And New Atheism is wrong because it portrays religious belief as a defect of mind rather than an adaptation, a non-literal adaptation. | ||
| In a room full of people who, you know, Dawkinses. | ||
| a very famous person. | ||
| Most people presumably showed up to hear Dawkins. | ||
| Almost all of those people have at least deep sympathies with the ideas of New Atheism and so somebody setting out to say actually New Atheism is an incorrect instantiation of atheism because it is effectively ideological and it accuses people who have religious faith of being mentally defective and in fact Dawkins and I tangled over this. | ||
| I said, look, you've called religion a mind virus. | ||
| That's an incorrect interpretation. | ||
| And at first he said, well, I don't really mean anything deep by virus. | ||
| He said, you could argue that every gene in the genome is like a virus. | ||
| And I said, well, but what people hear when you say that is that they're mentally ill for believing this. | ||
| And he said, well, they are mentally ill, right? | ||
| And so, you know, you could see the division in his own thinking. | ||
| Right, because at that point he's then saying both things at the same time. | ||
| He is saying both things. | ||
| And I, you know, I understand his position about you could interpret each gene as independent. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, I could defend that position, too. | ||
| In order for there to be an honorable atheism, we have to own up to what all that religious belief was about. | ||
| And then, and this is the place that I get into an easier pickle, but a pickle with Peterson as well, is the question of, if we acknowledge that religious belief is adaptive Then all of the things that are true of adaptive phenomena kick in. | ||
| And the most important one is that adaptive phenomena are not timeless. | ||
| They are adaptive relative to a historical time and place. | ||
| And it may be a very long-standing time and place, but the point is there is nothing, it is purely magical thinking, to imagine that religious traditions that are thousands of years old are the core of the toolkit for moving forward. | ||
| Our existence in 2018 is so novel that if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that our adaptive nature is a poor match for it. | ||
| So then can anything be truly timeless? | ||
| Is that the right question? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, yeah, but the way you do it is this. | |
| The longer standing some truth of some kind is, the closer it gets to being timeless. | ||
| In other words, if we look at things that are very evolutionarily long-standing. | ||
| Well, those things have persisted through environments that were very different from each other. | ||
| So what that means is that thread still functions irrespective, to an extent, of the context. | ||
| The longer it lasts, the more likely it is to speak to truths that continue to be relevant. | ||
| But, the bitter pill for Modern people, with respect to understanding the degree to which evolution is the key to seeing ourselves properly, is that we live in circumstances that are more novel than almost any creature has ever faced. | ||
| Now, you know, a creature can You know, fish can flop into a boat and it's suddenly in novel circumstances and it's dead within minutes. | ||
| Right, don't tell that to the dinosaurs when the meteor was coming. | ||
| Right, well there you go. | ||
| That was so novel that, you know, dinosaurs did survive that. | ||
| But one group, the birds. | ||
| They're still with us and they're doing great. | ||
| We are creatures living in circumstances that are not only novel at an unprecedented level, but are changing so rapidly that even to the extent that we can figure out what to do, the world changes out from under us. | ||
| We have to stop that, right? | ||
| That is going to kill us. | ||
| If you want to know what The greatest existential threat to humanity is, it is the rate of change that we have set in motion, which makes it impossible for us to adapt fast enough to it. | ||
| It has to be slowed down to a point that we can catch up. | ||
| Is that impossible though? | ||
| Because we already have that power? | ||
| Because I'm with you on this, just from my limited knowledge of this, just from what I do. | ||
| You know, from doing these shows and that people can watch more, you know, the amount of information that you can intake on a given day, the amount of things that you can share. | ||
| You can speed things up and listen to them two times as fast. | ||
| You can clip everything and that we can take all this information. | ||
| Things can be live streamed, like all of this. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| It's happening faster. | ||
| We're learning more. | ||
| We know there's a great thirst for this. | ||
| But can it be slowed down? | ||
| I mean, what force could slow down progress, really? | ||
| Wisdom. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| Good one, Weinstein. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We are children in this landscape, and children grow up, right? | ||
| I mean, the key to raising children properly is to back off the things that protect them enough that they actually Get burned without being burned so severely that they're crippled. | ||
| In other words, you have to experience the places that your notions are naive in order to become less naive. | ||
| We are now in a situation in which we are behaving in a childlike fashion in You know, in a very, in a foundry or something like that, right? | ||
| We're like children running around in a foundry. | ||
| There's molten metal that we need to, you know, figure out how to recognize it, how not to touch it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, and we're just pressing every button going... Yeah, we're just like, hey, pushing buttons are cool, there's power. | |
| Yeah, we gotta stop doing that. | ||
| I don't think, you know, if I'm to be candid about it, I don't I think we are in an unrecoverable situation. | ||
| I can see the path forward and it's all still plausible as far as I know. | ||
| But I'm worried that we won't get there. | ||
| And the reason we won't get there is that there are lots of things that have been true that just aren't true anymore. | ||
| In other words, the people who are in love with, you know, a limitless market in which you can do anything that you can manage and it's all cool and then at the point we find out That it isn't cool, we might have to take some action, but in the meantime, you know, you're free to explore. | ||
| I'm very sympathetic to this view, as you know. | ||
| Well, I would be sympathetic to this view if I didn't recognize that there was a problem in which, well for example, if you look at the way our economic system is hooked up to our political system. | ||
| There's a problem where any time you set a new force in motion in the market, if that force pays at a high rate in the short term, but it costs at a high rate in the long term, by the time you get around to discovering the cost in the long term, it has found its way into the political system so that it cannot be reversed. | ||
| You can't have a system in which you can't reverse things. | ||
| So the simplest way to frame this would be some sort of crony capitalism kind of thing, right? | ||
| Well, you know, we're not truly free market because we've politicized competition, basically. | ||
| Well, you know, I try to look at everything through an evolutionary lens, and to me, politics and economics are just one more landscape. | ||
| And they're interesting because it's humans, and humans are especially capable in this regard. | ||
| But the natural tendency for a creature that has found its way into a niche is to protect its access to that niche. | ||
| And the way creatures do that is they freeze other creatures out. | ||
| So there is this natural pattern. | ||
| I mean, I can't not see it now that I've understood that it exists. | ||
| There's this natural pattern where the upstarts who succeed, the stories that we know, we don't know about the upstarts that failed mostly, but the upstarts that succeed end up tremendously powerful. | ||
| And then they go through this process in which they become hostile to upstartness. | ||
| And they become hostile to upstartness for the most natural of reasons, which is that their well-being depends on shutting down the process through which they became successful. | ||
| So this could be like Facebook buying all their competitors and things of that nature? | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| There are obvious versions, and then there are innumerable versions that are cryptic. | ||
| And we are never going to understand the whole landscape of ways in which those who have reached this level of power that you and I will only dream about, that they will then shut down the access to others. | ||
| It's like there's a I don't even want to call it a conspiracy because it doesn't have to have any consciousness to it at all, but there is a tendency for those who have succeeded to shut down the mechanisms through which they succeed. | ||
| I mean, you can see this with people frequently remarking on the fact that immigrants are often not that wildly enthusiastic about further immigration. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| For obvious reasons. | ||
| You know, you're talking about, do people who've just entered at the bottom of the economic ladder want more competition? | ||
| Well, there's a tension between what people should want, but you shouldn't imagine that there's some immigrant-ness that necessarily has you favorable to anybody else who has that label. | ||
| Does this also sort of explain a little bit of what's happening in the tech world right now in terms of it seems that these companies, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, are potentially at least using algorithms against their own audience, shadow banning people. | ||
| I mean that they're basically now turning against their own people because of whatever they perceive to be their own protection or long-term health, even though I would probably argue in most cases that's not really what's gonna happen. | ||
| Oh, I mean, without question this is what's going on. | ||
| And let's put it this way. | ||
| If you're at the top, if you're in that strata, you have a lot to lose through anything you can't predict. | ||
| And so there is a way in which we expect The upstart who got there through some sort of radical transformation to be favorable to radical transformation. | ||
| But the way we should understand it is that once you've gotten there, radical transformation becomes threatening and you start... it's a conservatizing evolutionary force. | ||
| And, you know, we can look at what Twitter is playing with these days with potentially eliminating likes and follower counts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they're doing it for us! | ||
| of paternalism at best. | ||
| And they're doing it for us. | ||
| For us, right, because we shouldn't be so concerned about who's paying attention. | ||
| But really, the truth is, as much as we all recognize that there's a problem with tweeting to get trivial likes, | ||
| on the other hand, understanding what your audience hears, what they find favorable, what doesn't ring true to them, | ||
| is the way you learn. | ||
| It's the way you steer. | ||
| And so effectively, Twitter is playing with blinding us so that, yeah, we can say whatever we want into the void, but we have no idea how it lands. | ||
| There's no ping back to you, basically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't need to tell you, you're a comic. | ||
| You stand in front of the room and you get a lot of feedback. | ||
| It's better when they laugh. | ||
| It's better when they laugh, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What should we be thinking? | ||
| Oh, you know what, before I get to that, so as you know, I was just in Europe and I did a bunch of the Scandinavian and Nordic countries and Sweden was a particularly interesting case because I know that our fifth most viewed country for this show is Sweden, which is sort of fascinating considering how tiny Sweden is. | ||
| So I had sort of circled that. | ||
| We did two shows in Sweden. | ||
| I had kind of circled them on the calendar because I was like, something's going on in Sweden. | ||
| I want to figure out what it is. | ||
| Now I thought, if you would have asked me before I did the show that first night, I thought it was going to have a lot to do with immigration. | ||
| What I realized, although there were a lot of questions about immigration at the end, it had much more to do with gender. | ||
| And what is happening to their highly egalitarian society that have done most of the things related to gender and true equality correctly for many, many years. | ||
| And all of our friends on the left always point to Sweden and Norway and Finland, these countries that I was just at, as the examples of their perfect societies. | ||
| And they're really struggling with certain things that you know that the government's forcing them to have genderless kindergartens and that the emasculation of men and the removal of the father and that they have supposedly Europe's first feminist government and all of these things. | ||
| So I thought as long as I have you here and since gender seems to be such an endlessly Provocative and also misunderstood topic. | ||
| What should we do on gender right now? | ||
| Yeah, well. | ||
| Beyond you going to Sweden and figuring out what's going on there. | ||
| Well, what it struck me as is that they've done everything right, in effect, in terms of egalitarianism. | ||
| And they've done it for decades now, they've done it right. | ||
| And when they got to the end, which is now, when they got to the current day, they realized that despite all of this equality, men and women are still different. | ||
| That women still care more about people and men still care more about things. | ||
| So even though they've been given the exact same opportunity, Women are still becoming nurses, and men are still becoming engineers. | ||
| And it's like the social justice warriors, or whatever you wanna call that crew, they still don't like the results of true equality. | ||
| So I think that's why Sweden's in such a weird place. | ||
| The average person's like, what? | ||
| We've done it right. | ||
| We did it right. | ||
| Everyone's equal. | ||
| You can do whatever we want. | ||
| But then the result isn't being allowed to be accepted. | ||
| Does that make some sense? | ||
| Oh, it makes perfect sense. | ||
| In fact, I think the, The naive left finds the failure of its hypothesis absolutely galling. | ||
| And so they're effectively trying to erase that failure by hard-coding the solution into government. | ||
| So I think that's exactly what's happening in Sweden right now. | ||
| And it's tragic. | ||
| And with respect to sex and gender, it is so needless, right? | ||
| The fact is, the truth of sex and gender is There are parts of it we don't fully understand yet, but in general, actually we do. | ||
| We pretty much understand how we got here. | ||
| And the truth is, it is asymmetrical, it is complementary. | ||
| The truth of male and female is a complementary truth. | ||
| It may be largely irrelevant in the present. | ||
| In other words, technology has eliminated most of the basis on which the division of labor between men and women initially evolved. | ||
| So I think we have actually an opportunity here to become, to behave in an enlightened fashion that the easiest place to solve this problem is sex and gender. | ||
| What we should do is pretty clear and it is not hard to ground in evolutionary theory because unlike other places like race, for example, we do know what to think with respect to sex and gender. | ||
| And the basic outline is this. | ||
| Men and women are different for historical reasons. | ||
| The basis for that difference and the utility of that difference has largely been neutralized by the modern world. | ||
| We don't need to retain those distinctions. | ||
| But some of those distinctions are built in at a deeper level than others. | ||
| So meaning you could potentially be a stay-at-home dad and that could be perfectly fine, but that probably, for evolutionary reasons, is not going to be the thing that usually happens. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, but here would be my point. | |
| We can democratize access to almost everything. | ||
| With respect to sex and gender, there are very few places where we actually need to have some asymmetry in access. | ||
| But probably, you know, the firefighter who comes into the burning building through the roof to pull you out when you're panicking and you don't know what to do because you've never been in a fire before. | ||
| On average, that should probably be a guy. | ||
| They're just better built for it. | ||
| If there's a woman who is well enough able to do it, should you be picky about the firefighter who plucks you out of the burning building? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I personally am thrilled to see it every time it runs against the narrative that we expect. | ||
| I'm very fond of Stacey Brown, the police chief at Evergreen who was driven out along with Heather and me. | ||
| I thought it was great that she was female and that she was an excellent cop. | ||
| So I'm up for the narrative being broken by reality as often as possible, but you democratize the access, but you don't force people to do what they otherwise would. | ||
| For one thing, you wouldn't even want to force it because for every job that you would, you know, force women into at some higher rate let's say engineering jobs because it sounds like a good thing to do. | ||
| There's some awful job that men are disproportionately represented in that you would also have to force them into to be fair. | ||
| So you democratize the access You recognize that the division of labor that we have inherited is largely outdated, but you don't override people's choice. | ||
| If you democratize access to engineering perfectly, and women go into it at equal rates, great. | ||
| If they don't, that's cool too. | ||
| So in any case, it's a question of allowing liberty to decide where people go after you've done away with unnecessary barriers. | ||
| Well, it's so interesting because I think then you hit it right on the head that, well, Sweden's now politicizing it. | ||
| They're making a point of making this political because they will not accept The science of what they've done correctly. | ||
| And I think that that is what has led the sort of average person there to go, this is just not right. | ||
| So I don't know what the way out is. | ||
| And I sense that most of the people there didn't know what the way out was. | ||
| Well, I mean, the way out really is to recognize that the ire of the authoritarian left on this point is actually indicative of the whole problem. | ||
| In other words, because sex and gender is more or less clear, Desire to erase it, irrespective of the collateral damage, is an indicator of just how wrong this path is. | ||
| So, you know, I find this all the time, where people have... If you're not focused on biology, and you're focused on the world that you find, and you're galled by inequality, then you think, well, let's just solve the inequality. | ||
| We'll just hard-code the solution. | ||
| But then you hard code the solution and it says men and women are the same to the extent that there's any difference in what they choose to do. | ||
| That's the result of either cryptic barriers or internalized misogyny or whatever. | ||
| And then the problem is you're now interfering with my biology class. | ||
| You're now telling me that the received wisdom is that men and women are the same thing. | ||
| What I know damn well that can't be right. | ||
| You don't want to build a solution that forces you to confront your biologists, your physicists, your statisticians, right? | ||
| You want all of these stories, to the extent that they're true, have to reconcile. | ||
| All true stories reconcile. | ||
| To the extent that you've got a naive notion over here and you want to just write it in because it seems very important to you and you're willing to tolerate all of the cascading effects elsewhere, you don't belong in a position of power. | ||
| Unfortunately though a lot of those people are in a position of power and I think we're seeing more of them get into positions of power and I think it's also now having a counter effect in Europe which is why we're seeing the rise of more far-right parties because people are just like Screw this, this is so wrong, I'm gonna take my chances over here. | ||
| People who inherently are not, say, far right, or certainly not racist, are now playing with people that perhaps they wouldn't have played with before because they're so sick of this, and I'm worried where that leads us. | ||
| Oh, I think this is exactly, and I've heard you say this, is that you are afraid that the lunacy over on the authoritarian left is actually going to, you know, its collapse is gonna leave people who otherwise wouldn't And not because they're racist. | ||
| That's the key to this. | ||
| It's not that they'll suddenly wake up and be racist or hate women or hate gays, but it will be such a disgust of reality and a rejection of what's provable that they're gonna be like, at least there's something over here. | ||
| I mean, it's an awful bargain, but I think it is. | ||
| I just think it is. | ||
| I see this frequently, where people, because they detect that there's something wrong with communism and socialism, are often driven pretty far into the let's not regulate anything camp. | ||
| And the answer is actually we have to regulate stuff. | ||
| I don't want to see people driven, because there's something wrong over here, I don't want people to be driven into a reactionary position that is not justified. | ||
| The thing on sex and gender, though, is maybe this is the key question. | ||
| Every reasonable person who just simply Observes the world. | ||
| Knows that men and women are not the same thing. | ||
| They know that those differences have an implication for the way we view all sorts of things like mating and dating, what careers we want to have, how we view risk and all of these things for historical reasons. | ||
| All reasonable people can infer that from just their own observations of the world. | ||
| You are now confronted with people who insist that you not acknowledge what you can see. | ||
| Those people are crazy, right? | ||
| They're dangerously out of control. | ||
| They're dangerously out of control on other topics where it's harder to know what's true. | ||
| But you wouldn't want people who were so naive as to argue that men and women are effectively identical but for oppression in charge of any policy. | ||
| You don't want them in charge of economic policy, in charge of prisons, anything. | ||
| So, having seen just how far their confusion goes, can we all agree To shut them out of the discussion about how power is to be wielded, and the rest of us can have a discussion about what our values are, what we think we know, what we don't yet know, and what its implications are. | ||
| That's the place we should go. | ||
| That seems like an effective ending here, unless you want to throw in one more. | ||
| Did we not hit something that's been rattling around in your brain? | ||
| No, I covered a lot of territory here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, it's always a pleasure sitting down with you. | ||
| And you joined me last night for Stand Up in Brea, California. | ||
| This'll be up already, but you're joining me tonight in Oxnard. | ||
| I'm turning you into a stand-up comic, which is a biologist's worst nightmare, I would imagine. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's not quite the thing where the lead singer of your favorite band has laryngitis, but it's about as close as I could hope to come. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well, we're gonna do this. | ||
| We'll do, well, we did it about a year ago after the original one, but we'll do this more than once a year because you're right in the center of all the things that I think are right at the moment. |
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