Bret Weinstein on the Dangers of #ShutdownSTEM | Joe Rogan

But what we are now doing, and the thing that troubles me most about this movement, is that if you listen to it closely, and I have listened to it very closely, it is explicitly about disassembling the very things that make the West marvelous. It is anti-science. It does not want policy based on science. In fact, it wants... How so? And you saw last week, presumably, that it got Nature, the journal Nature, Science Magazine, Caltech, it got all of these just absolutely top level scientific institutions to broadcast the hashtag shut down stem. What? Oh yeah. No, I'm not aware of this at all. Oh, well, and this is another thing. We're losing our minds because to me, the idea that you would be unaware of this is hard to imagine because it was so... There's just too much going on. It was so thoroughly all over my feed though, but I'm discovering this. There's stuff absent from my feed too that I should know about, and I'm finding the same thing. Well, here's the thing. I don't read my feed. Well, you don't read your Twitter feed, but you're plugged into enough people. You have enough conversations in this room. Things have to be almost nuclear before I'm paying attention to them these days. Just for my own personal sanity, I've stepped away from almost all social media other than posting. If I can say something perfectly weird, I don't really aspire to great wealth. I never have, but there is part of me that wants to be wealthy enough that I can afford to ignore my feeds, right? I can't now. I have to be plugged in. But anyway, the thing that's really concerning here, and I don't want this podcast to be all about concern. There's lots of... Here it is. Thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism in STEM. More than 5,000 scientists in two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the data to address racial inequalities in science. The strike follows two weeks of demonstrations spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer. People on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag, shut down academia, shut down STEM, and strike for black lives. Shut down academia is terrifying. Shut down STEM is equally terrifying. But I mean, what takes its place? What do you expect? Well... If you shut down academia, what are they saying when they say systemic racism in STEM? What does it mean? It's representation in terms of the... What are they saying? So this is so sad because truly, if you really wanted to raise black people out of the quag mire, the economic quag mire, they find themselves in. If you wanted to do it en masse, you would arm them with the most powerful tools. The most powerful tool and the tool that is best positioned to address biases, especially subtle biases, is science. That's what the scientific method does. It's one reason for existing, is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is wrong. It takes your biases and forces you to see what's wrong with them. That's what science is for. Now the reason that this movement is attacking STEM has to do with the connection of this movement to critical theory. And critical theory didn't come from the sciences. The word theory is basically pilfered. It's being used in a most ironic fashion. Critical theory is a narrative that's now becoming a religious movement, and it is anti-STEM on the basis that it claims that STEM itself, science itself, is anti-STEM. It is racist, inherently. What do they mean when they're saying critical theory? What does that encompass? Well, my understanding is that critical theory was born as an honorable investigation of biases that exist inside of our court system, racial biases, and that it has now morphed into something that its originators don't recognize and don't respect. That it has become basically ... I mean, you've had Jordan Peterson on your podcast many times once with me. What he talks about with respect to these are cultural Marxists, and they are wielding this postmodern doctrine. What he's talking about is critical theory. Critical theory is basically a Trojan horse that exists in academic departments that are dedicated to its study. What it does is it uninvents progress in other fields. It's a very uninteresting process when it's hiding away in some corner of your university where you don't have to listen to it. What has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public, and the nonsense that you hear about shutting down academia, shutting down STEM, abolishing the police, all of this is standard fare in those phony departments. When you say uninvents progress, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean that we have a system, and I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody, but we have a system that accomplishes a great deal. This style of thought, all of these departments that end in theory that don't actually function by normal rules of logic or the scientific process, these things are an attack. They're like an autoimmune disease of the academic culture. By and large, the scientific part of the academy keeps its head down, and it stays away from people who believe in this stuff, and it tries to do its work. What has happened is that the dynamics, the demographics have changed such that these departments, which weren't taken seriously by the sciences, are now dictating terms to the sciences, which couldn't possibly be more dangerous, because to the extent that the argument more or less is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of those who are currently successful, and that that bias is actually preventing people who are not succeeding under current conditions from getting there, and therefore, we need to hobble these disciplines to level the playing field. Imagine that America surrendered its advantage in the sciences in order to, even if you could level the playing field inside of the US by doing that, which you can't, but even if you could, this would so hobble us in the world that it would be an insane policy to pursue. Is there any debate going on about this? Clearly, what they're saying is, if you're looking at the vast majority of the scientists, they represent, what is it? European Jews are a lot of them. There's a lot of various people of European ancestry, Asian folks, less African Americans, less Africans. So they're saying that because of this, this is clear evidence of racism. Yeah, which is total nonsense. What is it evidence of? Well, it's evidence of a number of things, and I find myself in two places on a lot of these arguments. On the one hand, somehow, I'm sitting here on your podcast defending academia, when on any normal day, I would be telling you, academia was so incredibly broken, and science has been so incredibly corrupted by its contact with the market that we have to fix these things because that is, in and of itself, a threat to the West. Here I find myself saying, wait a second, these people are actually telling you what they think. They think science is the enemy, and instead of democratizing the tools of science and giving them to the people who need them most, they want to end science. So the problems are several. Unfortunately, they're not tremendously interesting. They're sort of dry inside baseball stuff. But I think we have to cover them, though, just to sort of take the legs out from under this racism argument when it comes to representation. Sure. First of all, let me just say, academia is tremendously liberal, and that ... I mean that in both senses. Let's take the honorable part of it, right? Inside of a university, there is every desire to bring people who do not look like the old white guys that have done so much of the past work in science. There is a desire to broaden. It is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them, and then behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color. It's not like that. There is a desire to have those people show up and get the job, because for one thing, it takes the pressure off to the extent that departments don't look like the demographics of the country in which these departments are housed. That raises questions, and so there's a desire to bring in anybody who makes it clear that that's not going on. However, let's say that you were black, and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you, and you made it. Let's say that you had people who said wise things to you, and they got you to focus on the right stuff, and you managed to dodge the stuff that captures so many, and you made it, right? Let's say you got into Harvard, you got a really good quality degree in a proper science, well, what are you going to do with it? You're going to go into academia? That would be insane, because I don't know what the numbers are. I don't know what fraction of people who get PhDs actually get the job that they've trained for, but it's tiny. Is it really? I'll be like one in 20. Really? Yeah. Because there's only so many positions, and every year, you're graduating hundreds and hundreds of people with those degrees. Well, but there's also a very good reason for this. I mean, it's a terrible reason, but there's a very easily comprehended reason. So universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grants. So if you get a million dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory, that is to say, proper scientific theoreticians like me. And it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments, because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university, and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of the university. And the way you do that is you bring them on as graduate students, and you pay them an appalling wage. You claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students. And they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university for incredibly low amounts of money. They live under poor conditions, and increasingly they have to come from abroad, where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university in order that the people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job, and it's a racket. So in that- I wasn't aware of that at all. I didn't know how it works. Yeah, it's a racket. And the person you should talk to, the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running. And effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market to drive the wages down. But all of these things mean that if you are coming from circumstances that have been challenging, and you make it, you don't want to go to graduate school in the sciences because it's a dumb move. You're going to take, having gotten your head above water, and then you're going to voluntarily drown. And it doesn't make any sense. You're much better off, even as bad as being a doctor has become. It used to be a great job. Now it's kind of a sucky job, but you're better off doing that because at least it's a job you'll pay off your loans, you know, you'll make it. And so basically what we see is that there are lots of reasons that a rational person from certain demographics is less likely to go into the sciences. That's not racism in the sciences. It's again one of these echoes of a past racism or a past indifference that is having huge impact on the present. Okay. So these people that want to, that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it, what do they propose? Like what do they propose in replacement of STEM and academia? So what they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it. I will answer your question, but I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous. Okay. The only reason that I'm so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly and I watch this happen at Evergreen. You've talked to them directly so you know this is actually what they want. Well, I can't say they because undoubtedly there's variations. But I can say that to the extent that I've actually had these conversations with people, I was left completely shocked by, you know, there was an example at Evergreen where we were in a faculty meeting and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the enlightenment, but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything. What did they mean by enlightenment as a problem? Well, so here's what I say to people who asked me about this, students in particular. The enlightenment was a European project, right? It definitely had a light skin tone, right? It was European men. It was not a Jewish project, but I am not embarrassed about taking the tools of the enlightenment and wielding. They don't belong to Europe. Right. They're human. They're human tools. They were a discovery in Europe and arguably the discovery in Europe happened because of unfair exclusion of other people. But at some level, who the fuck cares? These are the most powerful tools ever. And you can't un-invent them. The thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible. But if you're in critical theory, first of all, if you end up in critical theory, any one of these fields, women's studies, queer studies, whatever it is, you have already forgone this option. You don't end up in critical theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect, you have people who don't stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider because they wouldn't go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors. So let's take a side step here. Critical theory. When you're talking about gender studies or queer studies, why do you think those are not valid avenues for people to pursue? Well, because the method is non-existent. If you were to do these things properly, you would study them with the tools of STEM. Right? But we know that's not what goes on inside of these departments. And we also know that the product doesn't add up from the point of view of science. You can't take the claim, for example, that if a man decides that he is a woman, then he is a woman. It's not a valid claim. It just doesn't stand up. And you can't claim that sex is a spectrum either. That claim doesn't stand up. These are empty. We could have a discussion about what we are to do in light of the part of gender that is flexible, but we're not having that conversation because we've got an ultimatum on the table. Either you agree sex is a spectrum or you're the enemy. So all I would say is just empirically this is what happens. Now I will also say one of the most telling incidents that happened during the Evergreen riots is now finally it's been covered by PBS. I've talked about it on my podcast. A student of Heather and mine, an excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, is a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black. Her mom is Afro-Caribbean. She was known to be my student and Heather's student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened. And what I'm telling you is- What did they say when they say you're a race traitor for studying science? What specific discipline? Well, she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me. And they said you were a race traitor for studying evolutionary biology because- Because science is racist. Yo. It's nonsense. And I hear you're trying to parse it as if it makes sense. And I think the point is- I just don't understand as a person who spent three years barely paying attention in college, I don't know how it got to that. I don't know how that becomes an actual course. I don't know how that gets funded. I don't know how that you can get a degree from that. Well, so what I've heard of late, and it may be James Lindsay who is the originator of this phraseology, but there's a term racism of the gaps. And racism of the gaps is a reference to the God of the gaps hypothesis. Anything we can't explain in science is explained by God, which is obviously nonsense. But racism of the gaps says any place where that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism. So if we see an absence of black people in math, obviously the answer is racism. Do they apply that in areas where black people excel? No, because this is a self-serving modality. Like hip hop. Right. And so let's go back to Odette for a second. Trying to parse what they're saying as if it has content, logical content, is a mistake. Trying to parse it as a tactical move makes a lot of sense. Let's imagine that Odette was not the courageous person that she is and that she had caved. Imagine you're cornered, you're alone, you've got a mob that's actually physically confronting you for studying science. If she was not a person of strong character, she might have signed up with them. If she had signed up with them, then A, now they have a potentially powerful ally, right? A black person, former student of, or at that point I guess current student of Heather and mine who would say, yes, in fact, science is racist, evolutionary biology particularly, so I was in that class, yada, yada, yada. And people are easily influenced and that being bullied by that would probably cause a lot of people to cave into that and give into that just for conformity, just so that people accept them. Yes, and so thank goodness that Odette is somebody who is of incredibly strong character, who really got the message of evolutionary biology very deeply and there's nothing that they could have said or threatened her with that would have caused her to make the move that they wanted her to make. But processing it tactically is important. What they're doing is tactical and what they did with shutdown STEM, tactical. They were proving their power, right? They were able to get the most important scientific institutions to broadcast a demand to shut down STEM. That's an amazing level of power. And actual scientists that are in disciplines that are legit, like evolutionary biology, who went along with them? Well, I contacted Richard Dawkins as this was happening because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested, he hadn't made a statement and I thought it would be powerful for him to do it. He was totally unaware of what's going on. So you have the most important institutions broadcasting this thing. Something about our environment is not calling it to the attention of people who might be in a position to say something. And the whole thing is it's setting us up. We're in tremendous danger. And what do you think their motivation is? Power. Power. Well, again, we have to be careful about the day. So what happens if they get through? They shut down STEM, then what do they do? Are they thinking this far ahead? They're not playing this long game. Okay. I would just, I would tell people who aren't aware of me and what I think and believe that I am very progressive. I am very interested in making a fair system. As am I. As am I. I know you are. So what I'm about to say sounds like one of those right wing crazy things. What they want, well, imagine the following. First of all, let's talk about reparations for a second. I am not a fan of the idea of reparations. I think it would be a terrible failure. It would be a disaster. But I do believe that something of very substantial magnitude is justified. I just don't think reparations is the answer. I completely agree. I think reform in terms of communities. I think spending massive amounts of money to rebuild communities and give people hope. Yes. Economic opportunities. Massive investment in communities that have been systematically frozen out. And I would put American blacks and American Indians at the top of the list because I believe they have a special claim. Native Americans are particularly distraught because they've been subjugated to this weird position when they're stuck on these reservations. So we'll come back to this in a second maybe. I think that there's something very special that happened with blacks and with Indians. It's not exactly alike, but it has to do with their different origin stories. These two populations have both suffered a parallel, I don't even know what to call it, an obstacle that makes them unlike any other Americans. So not in favor of reparations, but I would be in favor of something that did the job that reparations are imagined to do. What this movement is, is an attempt to create a slant in every single interaction that does the job of reparations. It's reparations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in every room, in every institution, in every context. Now that will be the un-invention of America. It is in some weird sense a mirror for the America that blacks and Indians have faced. They have faced an America in which everything was slanted against them. It has grown less so. But again, we have the echoes of that deeply slanted America that are broadcast into the present at a high level of intensity. That you cannot do reparations inside of every institution, every hour, every discussion. That is not a plausible plan. Even people who support the idea of monetary reparations as a solution, if they understood the dynamics of trying to infuse it into every interaction, there is no way it could possibly work. And it invalidates all of the most important principles on which America runs. So we are really talking about un-inventing America and substituting a reparations program for it, which it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard. And think for a second. If you're trying to imagine what the hell I'm talking about, imagine the courts. Now there is a problem. There's a process called jury nullification. And Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what it has to do with race as we have. Because effectively, you can instantly create a situation in which the law doesn't apply to certain folks because of the color of their skin. That would be an advantage. You could argue that it was compensatory for years of being on the other end of that deal. But it cannot be made to function. But the other thing is also possible. You can not only have the law not apply to people on the basis that they have a skin color that suggests they've had a raw deal, but you can also make the law apply to people because of their skin color. We can have show trials. I was effectively exposed to the equivalent of a show trial at Evergreen. I was convicted of racism. And it happened for various reasons. I knew damn well that the charge was completely empty based on my history as a human being. I felt I could stand up to it and withstand it. And I guess in a way I did. On the other hand, my wife and I were driven out of the college. So yes, I survived it. But I didn't survive it intact. I made it somewhere else. But that show trial mentality, it would be a perfect fit for the Maoist part of this movement's ethos. I mean, we're already seeing struggle sessions, people being forced to admit things that aren't true, right?