Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1919 - Bret Weinstein
Uploaded: 2023-01-04T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1919 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1919 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-04. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1919 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Do you get weirdered out when you do podcasts now?
No.
Was there a time in the beginning when you did?
Were you like, okay, here we go.
Yeah, I suppose at the beginning it was nerve-wracking,
but I also think I have a really weird relationship with fear, I guess.
And so I think I have reason to think that in places where I'm particularly
anxious,
some part of me feels it, but my conscious mind is not allowed in on it,
so I can do what I have to do.
Did this come after Evergreen or before?
Definitely before, although right as Evergreen erupted into the public
consciousness,
there's this one incident, actually the incident that brought me to public
attention,
where I was standing in the hallway and I was being confronted by these 50
students
who I had literally never met, and they were accusing me of racism
and demanding that I resign or be fired.
We should explain to people that don't know, because we're starting off this
way,
the back story of the Evergreen.
So it started off where there was an appreciation day for people of color
where they did not have to show up for work, right?
Yeah, that's true.
That's not exactly the story, but there is this event called Day of Absence,
which was a longstanding event at the college where basically at first black
people
and then later on more generally people of color did not come to work
and they held discussions separately.
And then in 2017, they changed this to a request that white people not come to
campus.
And I responded to this and I said that was unacceptable.
This was a public college.
I wasn't going to be told I couldn't teach my class.
And that did cause a bit of a firestorm.
But that firestorm was embedded in a much longer battle
that had begun to simmer when the new president of the college,
George Bridges, showed up and empaneled a committee
effectively to suggest mechanisms for restructuring the college.
And the mechanisms were insane.
They were a recipe for destroying the place.
And it was my obligation as a faculty member to point out
that it would be a terrible idea for us to adopt these policies.
And so the day of absence controversy became the explanation that the public
got
for why things erupted when they did.
But it really, it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the
college.
What were the other policies that he was trying to implement?
Well, let's take, for example, the one that Heather and I were most troubled by
was a proposal that every faculty hire needed to be justified on the basis of
it
in some way addressing inequity.
And so you can imagine an environment where you need to hire a mathematician or
a chemist.
And the answer is, well, you can't really hire anybody whose background doesn't
include
some strong evidence of their being an activist.
And so anyway, that would have been debilitating to the college.
That was one thing.
Another thing was the suggestion that the college would only be functional
at the point that every single graduate was equally capable.
And there is exactly one way to do that, which is to hobble all the people who
are highly capable.
So these were things that didn't make any sense.
Equally capable by what metric?
By every metric.
So to the extent that there was going to be some level of skill that was going
to be shown
by people graduating with respect to math or whatever else, everybody needed to
attain it.
Which, of course, even if that's plausible, if you had access to everybody from
birth
and you could give them a really high quality math education, by the time
students come to college,
many have lost the ability to do many of these things.
And it will never be regained, certainly at the level of the top performing
students.
So the only way to get them equal at graduation would be to hobble those who
were unusually capable.
What about people of color that are truly exceptional geniuses, like outliers?
Like what do they do to the other people that don't meet up to those
expectations?
Well, that's one of the terrible things about these diversity, equity and
inclusion initiatives
is that the right way out of the problem is to herald those people
and to provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish.
Instead, they get dragged into a group based on something like skin color
and their exceptional capabilities aren't allowed to shine through.
It's basically considered counterproductive or race trading, really.
So the idea was that they wanted to make everyone equally capable in some way,
but the only mechanism to do that would be that you had to lower the
performance of the people
that were at the highest levels of achievement?
Well, they never said that.
That is, as a biologist, that is me telling you that when you have a group of
organisms
that have different capabilities, the idea you're going to bring every
individual of low capability
up to the top performer, the only way to do that is to lower where the top
performers are.
So they never finished the sentence.
They basically described a utopia in which we looked at the top performing
student
and then suddenly brought everybody up to their level.
This was like the very beginning of the public being aware of some of the
madness
that was going on in some universities.
Well, I think there are a number of things that are true about it.
One is the protesters at Evergreen were foolish enough to film everything they
did,
and they uploaded it first to Facebook and then an account called NotMyFault1,
I believe,
transported it over to YouTube.
And when people saw how absurd it was, it made it much harder to deny that
something had gone very wrong.
Now, of course, the response at that point was, well, that's Evergreen.
And I, at this point, now famously said, no, Evergreen is maybe more dramatic
in this way.
It's earlier, but this is going to spill out into everything.
It's already riddled throughout the other universities, and now that's just undeniable.
Yeah, I remember the early days when this was happening, when I would do
podcasts about it.
And I think this is back when I was still reading comments.
And one of the comments was, why would you care about what's happening in these
universities?
Like, this has literally no bearing on you.
And my thought was, I don't think that's true because the people from
universities are eventually going to go into the workplace.
And if this ideology is so radically different than anything I experienced when
I was in my early 20s,
like, there's a shift in the culture that seemed to be a groupthink shift
that was forcing people to accept these crazy ideas.
And that this is going to have some spillover.
And now we know that that's 100% true.
Like, Jordan was ringing the alarm for this a long time ago, and I'm sure you're
aware of what's happening to him now.
I am aware that something new is happening to him in the last couple of days,
but I have not caught up to it.
I don't know if he wants me to discuss this publicly.
So I'm going to hold off and wait until he does, because I believe he's
addressing it publicly.
Has he addressed this on his, see if he went to, go to his Twitter page, see if
he said anything.
Okay, he's getting in trouble for retweeting some person who was critical of
Justin Trudeau.
And the, some, the, whatever board of psychologists that they have in Ontario
is bringing him in for disciplinary discussions.
And I think they're, they're having some sort of, they want him to be involved
in some sort of a class or some sort of a thing.
Here, I'll, I should just read it.
And if I don't get, I'll contact him.
If I don't get his permission, I'll, I'll delete this, this aspect of it.
But, so here's, here's what it says.
It says, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, the government mandated
professional college of psychologists, has disciplined me and is threatening my
clinical psychology license for retweeting the conservative party leader,
Pierre Polivier, how do you say his name?
Not sure.
Not sure.
Criticizing Justin Trudeau, the chief of staff, Gerald Butts, someone named Jacinda
Arden, and, in Ottawa city councilor.
He is required to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining
to modify, it says, to modify my objectionable behavior, which I absolutely
refuse to do.
So, they'll go to the next step, which would be an in-person disciplinary
healing, hearing, excuse me, with my license on the line.
I'm going to make all this public this week.
If you're interested, take a look.
Canada has given over to the commissars, something I thought I'd never see in
my lifetime.
Happy New Year.
Well, I can't say I'm terribly surprised.
You know, ultimately, anybody who remains inside an institution is going to be
up against disciplinary hearings if they insist on seeing reality and
discussing it.
But the term retraining, like, I'll read it again because it sounds so bonkers
that someone would think that this is a good idea.
This term is so crazy that he is going to participate, have to participate in
mandatory social media communication retraining.
Social media communication retraining, retraining.
Like, you have to do it the way I do it.
You have to do it the way other people that we have decided the way you
communicate is not proper.
We don't agree.
You're retweeting people who are critical or criticizing the government, and we
don't agree with that.
So we're going to retrain you how to communicate on social media, and this is
mandatory.
You have to do it, and then you're going to have to adhere, right?
Because if you do it, if you go through the retraining and then you don't
adhere, well, then it doesn't count.
Like, you have to be a different person.
Yeah.
I mean, I am simultaneously shocked.
Myself from 10 years ago is absolutely shocked.
Myself that has lived up to this point through the last five years is not
shocked.
Not at all.
No.
The disciplinary hearings are part of the structure that keeps the last holdouts
from doing their thing.
And in this case, you and I both know that Jordan is not going to bow to this.
There's nothing that they can say that is going to cause him to do that.
Well, fortunately, he doesn't have to.
This is the most important part about it is that Jordan has achieved escape
velocity, and he doesn't need them anymore, and so this is an empty threat.
And so this removing his license, you're not going to take away his education,
his degrees.
If you say you're removing his license, well, I don't think he's seeing clients
anymore.
He's not really acting as a clinical psychologist anymore, is he?
I don't think so.
I don't believe so.
And I agree with you.
I think what we have to discuss is this.
There's a question about where each of us are with respect to what you're
calling escape velocity.
Yeah.
In fact, you and I sitting here is an interesting test case because I haven't
– I've come close to escaping escape velocity, but not quite.
Well, you've been hobbled by the demonetization on YouTube for things that are
now being printed in the Washington Post, which is wild.
Because one of the things that you got in trouble for was – how do you say
his name?
Geert van der Bosch?
Geert van den Bosch.
Van den Bosch.
He was talking early on on your podcast about how these vaccines are in some
way going to aid in variants.
Yeah.
Right?
And he made a video today.
Did I send it to you yet, Jamie?
I don't think so.
I'll send it to you now because he made a new video that's quite chilling
because he's been very accurate about what he said up until now.
And he made a new one yesterday.
You're going to have to airdrop it.
I'm not going to get it.
Oh, okay.
Oh, really?
I'm literally having – I'm trying to talk to the IT guys now.
Something's wrong with our network.
Oh, no.
Can I text it to you?
It won't work?
Yeah.
I need my internet on my computer to get that.
Oh.
You could text it to me and I could airdrop it to myself.
Yeah, tr