Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
Uploaded: 2018-02-21T00:14:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-02-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

boom and we're live ladies and gentlemen heather hying brett weinstein i didn't
screw it up this
time nope you got it right gotta get that steen stein thing messed up with you
gotta get it
apologize it's a bad time to get those messed up it is so thanks for having us
thank you for being
here both of you i'm very excited about this conversation really excited about
it too a little
bit nervous in one way but but pretty pretty jazzed well i think it's good to
be nervous about it you
know i mean uh what we're talking about folks uh what we would like to talk
about is why don't you
explain it well uh i think heather and i have been on uh an interesting
adventure we are evolutionary
biologists we trained with some of the the finest evolutionary biologists of
the 20th century and
we have been teaching we taught for heather taught for 15 years i taught for 14
years at evergreen and
we spent a lot of time dealing with students and trying to help them see how
clarifying an evolutionary
viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we
function and how we
interact and that was very uh enjoyable to us and it was very empowering to
students to discover that
there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person
and we're now watching
the conversation out in civilization about uh sex and gender devolve into an
absurdity and on the one
hand that's kind of frightening i mean for for for us it's not uh directly an
issue we're happily married
and so we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days and our
kids are too young to be
navigating it yet maybe this will all be uh clarified by the time they're
involved in dating but we also
have a tremendous number of millennial friends former students who are trying
to navigate this stuff and
finding it uh difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that frankly
there's a much better
alternative if one can stand to think in evolutionary terms if we can really
look at ourselves as we are
as we came to be through evolutionary uh forces then actually we can improve
the landscape for romance and
dating a great deal but we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms
that actually aren't right
what is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now
well i think we'd love to see a third way so they're the pre-moderns as it were
who have a very
traditionalist conservative sucker up close to you sorry sorry about that no
worries yeah perfect the
the pre-moderns who have a very traditional conservative approach to gender
roles to sex to
relationship and uh there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject
a lot of that and then
that there are the post-moderns who want to throw out everything want to throw
out everything that
evolution handed us and in the meantime pretend that it didn't happen right
pretend that it's not
even based on reality and there's a there's a third way and you know maybe we
need to call it modern as
opposed to pre- or post-modern but uh there's there's a third way to navigate
what evolutionary is
what evolution has given us what we can change what we can't change and how to
actually recover some of
you know the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance
and you know understand
that human beings are what we are from not just a hundred years back but a
thousand and ten thousand
a hundred million years back we've had sex since you both taught at a
university level you you've been
around these students and you've seen this sort of post-modernist movement gain
steam what what do you
think is the cause of it like what what is the reason why people are projecting
this sort of distorted
idea that there's no differences between men and women and that all the
differences in the genders are
all it's all propaganda or cultural or so i i think it actually arises from a
relatively simple cause
that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught we
detect there's
something not right about the way civilization is structured we can tell that
there's nobody really
at the helm and you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to
them is incredibly glaring
something that just absolutely needs to be solved and so what they do is they
look at that issue and they
say what would we have to what would we have to say in order for that issue to
be fully addressed and the
problem is that we're dealing with a complex system and if you optimize for any
one solution you cause a
catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to and if you're
not focused on those
unintended consequences you tend not to understand why people are resistant to
your solution so for example
let's deal with the transgender issue for the transgender community and i don't
you know this is not a
monolithic community i actually know quite a number of people within it who
have a heterodox position but
in general there is a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize
anybody who has decided to
transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved that
seems right and if you are
focused on the humanitarian side of the question maybe it even is right but the
problem is if you say
a person who identifies as a particular sex is that sex suddenly you've
actually caused a whole bunch
of consequences that you weren't thinking of over in a biology class over in
the prison system i mean is it
true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison
do we want to put
violent sex offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be
female so not tracking
the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular
solution is the reason that
that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions and part of
what i hope we will get
to today is that there is a a principle at the core of understanding all
complex adaptive systems and it is
diminishing returns and diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane it has too
close an association with
economics where it was first outlined but the message of diminishing returns is
that you can very often
get ninety percent of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly
but if you say i want
a hundred percent of the solution to this problem you'll cause a catastrophe so
getting people to realize
don't shoot for the utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100
solved if you can accept
a ninety percent solution then you can have a whole bunch of other things that
you don't even realize you're using
in defense of people that would try to go for a hundred percent though isn't it
one of those things where
like you if you would negotiate you would if you want a hundred dollars you ask
for 150
unfortunately i mean i think you're identifying something correct that in part
the positions that we hear
being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the
people who are espousing them
they are a negotiating tactic but we can't do that with biology you can't
negotiate with biology biology
is what it is and then we can talk about which parts of it are amenable to
being changed and as heather
pointed out we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of
interacting between the sexes
we're advocating for an enlightened way that takes advantage of the freedoms we
have that our ancestors didn't
and tries to navigate the hazards that we're stuck with um so you can't you can't
uh negotiate with
biology you really ought to listen to what it is that nature is telling you and
then say all right
what does that leave open where can we shift things but if you're going to
require that we lie about
what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution i guarantee you it
will be unstable in the end
yeah the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a
continuum you know there
are x chromosomes and there are y chromosomes i haven't heard that one um one
of our children just heard
that at his school what did they mean by on a continuum who even knows i don't
i don't think they meant
anything i think what they intended to do was carve out freedom from a
biological truth and so if you say
chromosomes are on a continuum then it's very hard to disagree with that
because it doesn't mean anything
that we can right i would say it's actually really easy to disagree with it and
say no you know
gametes aren't on a continuum sperm is sperm and eggs are eggs sorry discreet
two of them right
chromosomes also not on a continuum at least in mammals sex yeah a continuum
their intersex is real
but it's strongly bimodal right there's there are males and there are females
and there are a few
people it's rare but real that there are intermediate phenotypes and gender is
even more of a continuum
but still strongly bimodal have you folks heard about that new crayfish that
they're battling in europe
there's a giant crayfish in europe that's female and female only and
essentially is a clone they they
reproduce by cloning so they don't need a male partner and uh they're going
crazy and there's a
lot of them for your first two sentences there it sounded like there was a
giant crayfish descending
on europe it was a female and she's mad she's pissed she's tired all these
lobster dinners yeah
and that's going to work for a while right and like asexuality has actually
evolved in a few
lineages a few vertebrate lineages there are some lizards that are asexual and
it's all females
and it goes great until the environment changes because if you're cloning
yourself you your children
are going to experience exactly are going to be exactly the same thing that you
were so
if you were a good fit for your environment the next environment better be the
same or else your
kids aren't going to be a good fit so my feeling is that crayfish i haven't
followed the story a lot but
that crayfish is going to do terrifically moving into exactly the landscapes
that it first mutated into
existence in and if you change the landscape a bit it's going to stop doing so
well i think they just
farm it for food if it's tasty yeah we don't have to worry about them breeding
just get a ton of them
together crayfish are delicious they are delicious right this is a good tasting
variety it's free food
yeah you know i mean it's kind of crazy that's right so heather and i were
talking before the podcast
started about i think a very important point when it comes to a lot of these uh
either progressive or
right-wing issues is that people tend to be extremely tribal and what they're
really concerned with is
winning it becomes a competition of us versus them it becomes our side versus
their side and they tend
to exploit weaknesses and then attack to score points and all ideas of being
honest intellectually
or looking at things objectively kind of go out the window you ignore facts
that diminish your position
or your team's position and highlight things even if they're not real that
would diminish the other
side's position this is a real problem that humans have with arguments with
with with being tribal with
being on different sides i mean we see it forget about tribes we see with
people where when there's a certain
time when you see people arguing there's a certain point where the argument has
deteriorated to a
competition and it's no longer about what you're actually discussing it's about
who can win
this is what science is for yes yeah well this science ought to be indifferent
when it's done well
it is indifferent to who's the stronger team it should really just tell you
what's true and in fact
the reason to use science is to correct for biases um but so eric and heather
and i have a uh a phrase
that is just shorthand for something which is um bad faith changes everything
there's a lot you can
do in discussion with people with whom you disagree as long as you are on the
same page to a large extent yes
and wha