The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Professor in Exile

Episode Date: June 21, 2019

Bret Weinstein

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, here on Sirius XM Channel 99. My name is Noam Dorman. I'm the owner of the Comedy Cellar. I'm here, as always, with our producer, Periel Aschenbrun. I still can't say it. Aschenbrun. Aschenbrun. And my partner, Mr. Dan Natterman. Hello, Dan. How do you do?

And as you know, I will be in Vegas next week, Noam, so I won't be here. You'll be on your own. Well, I'll be here. Right, but we're not discussing you at the present moment. We're discussing me, and I won't be here. Okay. Where are you going? I'm going to your club in Las Vegas.

Oh, okay. So we have a guest who I am really, really excited to have on the show. His name is Brett Weinstein. I'm going to read. Weinstein. Weinstein. I'm sorry, Brett Weinstein. I have a friend, a childhood friend, Andy Weinstein.

And anyway, say Weinstein. Brett Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology. By the way, maybe at the end of the show, you'll be able to give me the sociobiologist explanation for Dan. Anyway, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan before teaching at the Evergreen State College for 14 years. He is currently working to uncover the evolutionary meaning of large-scale patterns in human history and seeking a theoretically stable path forward for humanity.

Well, actually, I'm just reading this for the first time, and that's actually along the lines of what I wanted to ask you about. Cool. You also became very famous for this whole Evergreen College controversy, and I have to tell you, I'm amazed at how many people still don't know about that. So maybe can we cover that quickly? And you're probably sick and tired of explaining it and talking about it. Well, it is really profound.

I dread the question. Can we cover it quickly? Because you really, you're stuck in a bind, which is you can either cover it imprecisely and quickly, or you can cover it as it should be covered and at much greater length than anybody would want. Well, the quickly was for your sake, because I feel that you probably are tired of talking about it. So let's say the best thing people can do if they want to know what happened at Evergreen

is they can look at Mike Naina's three-part documentary on the Evergreen story, or they can look at the piece that my wife, Heather Hying, and I wrote for the Washington Examiner. Those are the two best sources to figure out what actually happened. The short version is that I opposed a set of equity proposals that were moving through the governance structure at Evergreen and became public enemy number one for the campus equity movement. And they arranged a protest at my class accusing me of racism and demanding my resignation or firing. And then those protests quickly descended into riots. I was literally hunted by protesters. They stopped traffic and were apparently looking

for me. The college president told the campus police to stay out of law enforcement. So the campus was literally descended into anarchy for a week. And ultimately my wife and i settled with the college and left and we are now in the outside world and let the record show you're not a racist correct absolutely not in fact quite the opposite but that didn't matter somehow portraying me as a racist was very important and so they went about that irrespective of my actual background. And because you objected to a day where there had been a tradition where people of color would stay home from the university. I'm trying to get this from memory. And then they wanted to change it one year to that all white people would stay home.

And you felt that was quite a different thing for people to stay home voluntarily or from asking other people to stay home because of their color. Well, what I said was there's a big difference between deciding to absent yourself to make a point and telling other people to stay home because of the color of their skin. And I said I would be on campus, which I was, and that inflamed matters. And in 2000, what happened, was it 2017? 2017. That's what passes for racism.

Yes, opposing segregation passes for racism in 2017. That's what passes for racism. Yes, opposing segregation passes for racism in 2017. This is not the order that I want to take it, but just because it comes to mind, then Dan has a lot of things. What do we do about this stretching of words to mean everything? everything. So a racist can be a Nazi, or it can be someone who opposes affirmative action, and they'll use the term without any hesitation to describe both those people. But then how do you distinguish between those people? I mean, how could what you got accused of be racism in the terms of that word well it it can't be but but the thing to understand is that the

shifting definitions are feature not a bug and the idea is that there are two versions of the word as a familiar version and then a modified version the modified version gets used as a weapon uh... and then at the point that somebody challenges the weapon, there's a retreat to the original version of the term. Or another way it can work is that the standards for a word,

like, for example, white supremacy, the standards can be lowered to the extent that nobody could help tripping over them. And then at the point that somebody has successfully pinned that label on you, then in the penalty phase, the meaning of the term goes right back to what it was before. So it's as if you've burned a cross on someone's lawn. And anyway, the point is these are really strategic modifications of language, and we have to oppose them, both because it's very important that we have language that allows us to speak to each other in a useful way, but we have to oppose them also

because it is designed to create leverage, and that leverage is being hoarded for a purpose, and the purpose is a very frightening one. So I think it is incumbent on all of us to fight this at the level of language so that we retain the ability to defend ourselves and to speak to each other in some manner that actually has content. You have something to add? Well, the current controversy, the controversy of the du jour, because there's always something, is Kyle Kashuv, his acceptance to Harvard.

He was one of the Parkland survivors of the Parkland school shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting. And he's actually a pro-gun rights person. But he was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, or he is a student, I guess. And he applied to Harvard. He got accepted to Harvard. Then somebody revealed that he had said something in a private message chat room, used the N-word, and also said some anti-Semitic stuff as well, although he's Jewish. And his acceptance to Harvard was rescinded. And this is after, by the way, he already told the other colleges that he applied to

and was accepted to that he can't go because he's going to Harvard. And then Harvard said, well, we found out you said the N-word in a private chat room online years ago when you were 16. This was two years ago. I'm not really aware of this. Did he say it in a way which betrayed an ugliness of heart? Was he saying it? No, it displayed youthful indiscretion. Essentially, I've seen the texts, and it does appear that what he was doing

was attempting to be provocative by deploying all of these slurs. I mean, it was foolish, but he was a kid and it does not appear to betray the content of his actual beliefs. It appears to have been some kind of

a juvenile experiment in pushing the boundaries of language. Does it matter necessarily because it was a private conversation? And isn't that a dangerous precedent to say that all our private conversations now are going to be investigated and could lead to being fired or being rejected or expelled from a college? I mean, we can't really read his mind.

We don't know what he was thinking when he said those things. I think the best course of action would be to judge him by his actions. Well, I mean, I'll let President, but I thought at times that we're coming very close to wishing that we could punish thought crimes in the sense that, you know, okay, you caught somebody saying it somewhere where it wasn't supposed to be heard by anybody else. That's very close to me to wishing that we could just find out if he was thinking it. You know, and, you know, it's very disturbing.

I don't know what you... Well, I agree with you completely that this is about punishing thought crimes and divining the content of one's mind from little wisps of conversation and things that would be better left private. I do think there are a couple things in play here. One, this is a private conversation that somebody dug up to hurt him. But the other thing is he was a kid, and the idea that there is no path to redemption,

that having uttered such a thing in any conversation means that it doesn't matter if you apologize, it doesn't matter if it's not who you are today, that you are essentially, in the parlance of the moment, cancelled by virtue of the fact that you had an ugly thought at some point, is absurd. And the fact is, religions all contain a mechanism for redemption. And there's a reason for that, which is if you deny people a mechanism for redemption,

then once they've tripped over your standard, they have nothing to lose, and they become very, very dangerous. Well, we do allow for redemption, but we also allow for punishment. So I think just because he was a kid, I mean, that is a factor, but of course we punish kids for certain things. We might send them to a juvenile facility. I mean, had he done something really bad, you wouldn't be objecting to him being

expelled. Had he beat up a black student, you wouldn't say he was just a kid. There's a question about whether or not it's Harvard's place to be punishing kids. We have a system in which you get to defend yourself. That was our issue here with Louis C.K., by the way. I don't know if you followed it at all, but that was exactly my argument. I'm not saying he did something good or didn't do something, did something bad or didn't. But there are institutions that have the ability to take evidence, to cross-examine, to punish perjury, and they can sort these things out. Well, and you have rights in those circumstances. You have a right to face your accusers and to see the evidence against you and that sort of thing.

And so this happened at Evergreen also. It very explicitly happened. There was a moment in a faculty meeting where my woman who became my nemesis in this circumstance accused me of racism with a capital R. And I, yeah, wow, capital R. And not even at the beginning of a sentence. But anyway, she accused me of this. And I spoke up and I said, you know, you might want to check as to whether or not that accusation fits my history because you might be very surprised. And the president of the faculty said, Brett, this is not the place to defend yourself against accusations of racism.

And I said, that's fine. Where is the place? And then this faculty member spoke up and said, that's fine. Where is the place? And then this faculty member spoke up and said, you shouldn't expect a place to defend yourself. And so it's a Kafka trap. There's no way out. It's insane. And so Harvard has no right to punish this kid. We don't punish people in general for things that they have said. We punish them for actions. And in this case, what are the chances that he was in earnest deploying anti-Semitic terminology when he is in fact Jewish? That suggests that

his explanation is likely accurate. That he was just being provocative. He was being provocative as an experiment, which again is stupid, but being stupid is part of being a kid. What if he had been accused, say, for example, of physically attacking a black student and using racial slurs during the attack, and somebody came forward and said, he did this to me? Would Harvard, do you think, then have a reasonable grounds to dismiss him, or would you also say, well, go to the courts and see what the courts have to say?

Well, we can come up with exotic circumstances, but again, what I would want to see is at the point that he has violated a serious norm, that some process that is built to handle this is then deployed, not Harvard's admission process, and especially not after Harvard has granted admission. At the point that it has granted admission and he said no to the other offers, and then they rescind this offer, they're actually doing harm to him. They have actually limited his option. And then also, why not go back and investigate all of the other students that are already attending and that have used that word?

The problem, I think they make these standards up as they go along, and that's very disturbing to me. Very often, I can't think of specific examples, but I've had arguments with people I say, you know what, why don't you tell me what you would have put in writing as the standard? And maybe we could all agree to that, and then we could

look at it and say, and Harvard could consider this, but they don't have that standard. It'd be very unlikely in my mind that a black student would get shut out of Harvard for saying something terrible, almost anything. It's hard to even imagine that scenario. So, and people do have a right to be treated fairly. They have a right to a written standard. And this goes also to like YouTube taking people off. Like, I don't mind that YouTube takes people off, but there should be some written standard and some binding arbitration. You should that YouTube takes people off, but there should be some written standard and some binding arbitration.

You should be able to appeal it. But they make it up as they go along. Right, I mean, Harvard can do whatever they want, right? They're a private institution. No, they can't do whatever they want. They have obligations. They do have obligations. And the important thing is not only that we have a written standard,

but that it is applied evenly. And the fact is, your point about a black student being unlikely to face the same kind of scrutiny, it brings to mind the Jesse Smollett issue, where he seems to have done something absolutely egregious, where he has abused the process that actually protects people from violent acts of racism, and in some sense seems to be getting a pass in the context of jurisprudence. So we have to understand what selective enforcement actually allows. Selective enforcement is as old as the hills. If you set a speed limit on the main thoroughfare going through town

so low that everybody violates it, and then you decide to pull over gays or hippies or Jews or whoever you don't like, then the law appears to be unbiased, but the effect of the law is very significantly biased, and that is a mechanism for populations to, without any justification, go after each other. So the system has to be structured in such a way that that's impossible. I agree. So you're a biologist by trade, right? And by the way, do you believe in sociobiology? Well, let's put it this way.

I come from that tribe. I have concerns about places where the sociobiological viewpoint isn't rich enough to really do the heavy lifting. Ultimately, we will have a very complete account of human evolution and how it has functioned and what it implies about how we're structured. But at the moment, what we have is too much of a cartoon for my liking. So it's not really ready to be operationalized. It's certainly worth listening to and thinking about. We should all be schooled. Well, what exactly is sociobiology, Noam? I think I'll let the biology professor answer. Well, sociobiology is a term that I rarely hear anymore.

It was in the 70s the place where human behavioral evolution was discussed. And the idea was, much as Darwin anticipated, that humans could be understood in their behavior, different human cultures could be understood as being a response to selection of a recognizable kind, and that we could sort those patterns out. And there was a lot of excitement at first, and there was a lot of resentment of people who would attempt to do this. Ed Wilson famously had a pitcher of water dumped on him at a conference as he was deploying a kind of sketch of the sociobiological landscape. The stigma that went along with that term was significant enough that the field essentially rebranded itself as evolutionary psychology so that's the modern term for

it and there's a lot of good there again I still think it's too cartoonish to be useful so far but it does tell us a lot about for example how people from different sexes should be expected to interact based on evolutionary dynamics and based on competition within each sex. Perfect. So we had a big argument. So is gender a social construct? Wow. Well, let's put it this way. I don't think...

You have to do a little groundwork to get a good answer to this question. So the thing that I say that surprises people most is that culture is equally biological as genes, right? So equally biological and equally evolutionary. So genes and culture are two different ways that adaptive content, information, gets passed down, and they get passed down in parallel. So is gender a social construct? There's a way in which you could argue, yes, what I say is that gender is the software of sex, right? We have our physical beings, that's the hardware, and then gender is the software. Software evolved because it is more flexible, so

there is a way in which gender can be tinkered more easily than the hardware side, the sex side, But that doesn't make it arbitrary. So it may be a social construct in a sense, but it evolved in response to a landscape in which some strategies don't work at all, some strategies work very well, multiple strategies function within a given sex. And so basically the point is,

just because gender is largely passed down at the software level doesn't free us from an evolutionary analysis. So what feminine traits would you say are hardwired? Understanding everything distributes on a curve and not everybody, but in general. Nagging. So the problem is the term hardwired, because what I'm saying about it being software means that there can be patterns that might be shared across cultures that travel the female line rather than the male line. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they are carried in the genes. It means that cultures that have succeeded have these traits that are displayed by females and they pass them down in some way.

That they're not passed down biologically, they're passed down culturally. Well, but this is my point. Culture is biological. And that's a very hard idea to get used to. But once you get used to it, the world becomes a much more intuitive and sensible place. Can I ask you a dangerous question then? Are you saying that culture might diverge across gene pools because they are gene pools? Meaning like, could Asian culture also be a reflection of the Asian gene pool?

Oh, more what I am saying is that Asian culture is going to be responsive to the realities of Asia and that it does not have to be passed down in genes at all and that, in fact, what you might find is that people of Asian descent who find themselves in circumstances that look closer to Europe or Africa or Australia, may find that the behavior patterns that are passed down amongst people indigenous to those places would be more natural.

And so the thing about software is it can be swapped out very easily. And that swapping process means that it's going to be very hard for us. We may not be able to look at somebody's genome and predict their cultural attributes because cultural attributes are tuned to the particular more immediate realities of the circumstance that the individuals are in. But if they're not passed down in the genes,

in what sense is it biological? That's a wonderful question. Well, if you think, so realize this. Darwin didn't know anything about genes. He couldn't, right? The technology did not exist to see DNA, and the work had not yet been done to detect that there was this particulate inheritance in the genome.

So Darwin was talking about phenomenology. He was talking about the fact that the features that organisms have make sense in light of the environments they exist in, and the way that that happened was that features that were better suited to those environments were passed on, and features that were less well suited were driven out. So the point is that description applies equally well to culture as it does to genes. So the point is we have narrowed our understanding of Darwinism to genes in the aftermath of Darwin's work.

And what we really need to do if we're going to understand humans, you don't have to do this for most creatures, but if you're going to understand mammals or birds and humans as the extreme case, you have to figure out how to handle culture as an evolutionary phenomenon, because the magic of human beings is that we are the most highly cultural creatures that

have ever existed on this planet by far. But could it also be, could there be a genetic component? Our human psychology is genetic. I mean, you know component? Our human psychology is genetic. I mean, you know, certainly mental illness is genetic. We know that. So if mental illness is genetic, can other psychological features be genetic? Well, mental illness is not genetic in the sense that people who were excited about the Human Genome Project thought it was going to be.

Right? There are genetic influences, interpreting them as difficult. But nonetheless, I'm not saying that a particular trait will not be genetic. What I'm saying is that you have two paths that can travel, and it can travel them in complex ways. So if you think about language, for example, it is quite clear that human beings are genetically wired to speak a language, and that the only thing you have to do in order to get a child to pick up language at a remarkable rate is speak language around them.

If their ears are hooked to their brain and their brain is normal, and you speak around them, they pick up language in an absolutely remarkable fashion. Is that genetic? Well, the wiring for a language clearly is, but the wiring for what language isn't at all, as far as we can tell. There's no predisposition whatsoever. If you come from a part of China where they speak Mandarin and you're raised in Manhattan, then you're going to speak English just like everybody else raised in Manhattan. So there's no predisposition to English or to Mandarin whatsoever. On the other hand, the underlying predisposition to speak is absolutely common to all humans, and it is clearly

carried in the genes. So the two things, speaking English is a hybrid. It's partially passed genetically, speaking the language, and it's partially passed culturally, the language itself. Except that the genes presume the existence of the culture. The genes are there, and it would only make sense given the fact that the hardware is there, but you wouldn't build the hardware without expecting the software. Well, let me... One little, what will seem a niggling point.

No, no, I like this. Don't say that word. That word is fine. Look it up. The point is, they don't expect the culture. They expect a culture. And they are perfectly happy. As long as they get a coherent cultural package, the genes are happy. But the interesting question, the one I think that you're trying to figure out how to ask is, why did the genome offload so much information about how to behave to the cultural layer? I mean, this is the thing that makes human beings so unique, is that we are more software-based than

any other creature. And the reason that the hardware, the genes, allowed that to happen or actually facilitate it is that that creates a flexibility for human beings that has allowed us to do in human history what we've done, which is to inhabit a much wider range of niches than any other creature could manage. Can we talk about, I just want a couple of things, just getting back to the gender thing and then move on. So is there a contradiction here? When a female presents with a lot of typical feminine qualities,

people on the left, feminists will say, she's just reflecting the way she's been socialized. That's the patriarchy. There's nothing about those feminine traits which are genetic. That's just the way she's been socialized. That's the patriarchy. There's nothing about those feminine traits which are genetic. That's just the way she's been raised. However, if a four-year-old XY displays extreme feminine qualities, they will say, oh no, he's transgender. How do those two add up?

So what happens? How come that four-year-old, just to make it clear, how come that four-year-old boy didn't take on the socialization of a boy? And why did he then take on these extreme feminine qualities which nobody ever tried to impose upon? Well, so what I would say is one of the more difficult things about this moment is that there is so little logical discipline

that one is somehow not expected to maintain any consistency from one argument to the next. And so what you're hearing are arguments that are consistent only within the narrow confines of the particular discussion, but nobody is allowed to say, well, but in the last discussion... I call it making it up as you go along.

Making up as you go along is a pretty good description. So, in any case, there are things that are historically female and historically male. And one of the things that my wife, Heather Hying, and I have been trying to explain is that the fact that something may be historically female does mean that it has a particular relationship to evolution. It does not mean that we necessarily have to carry that pattern into the future. In some sense, we are, just as we are free to choose not to produce as many children as we could possibly produce. Family planning is actually surprisingly easy

because of an accident of evolutionary history. But we choose to have fewer children than evolution would have us have. It's relatively easy to do. We can do that with lots of things with respect to sex and gender. For example, women in no culture tend to go to war, right? That's a universalist, that war is the province of men. In the era of fighter jets and even more extreme drones, are women equally capable of fighting in a war? Well, yeah. Now, if they're in the infantry, no. But if you're flying a jet, yes, women can do that job.

And so that doesn't mean, you know, it would be wonderful if we didn't have war. If we're going to have war, we can decide whether we want women in a jet. Do we have to consider what happens if they get shot down? Should that be, you know, should the vulnerability that a woman has if she's shot down impact whether or not we allow them equal access to the fighting ranks in the Air Force? I don't know. I would also add that we don't want our women getting killed.

I mean, there's a certain chivalrous notion that a decent society does not send women into combat. Well, so I think the point is, this is a discussion we can have, right? There is something to be said for not putting women in harm's way that way, and there's something to be said for the fact that if women want to go,

who are we to say no if they're capable, if they're equally capable of doing the job? On the other hand, you know, we have to deal with the thorny issue of the draft as well, right? So, you know, there's a question about women who do want to go, and there's a question about women who don't want to go. And then there's a question about what we should expect the rest of the jobs in civilization to look like if men are doing that particularly awful job at a disproportionately high rate.

And, you know, I'm not telling you I know the answers to these questions, but what I'm telling you is if we can calmly lay them out, we can discuss them. If we're going to have to watch our words so that each sentence is secure and it can't be taken out of context, then we can't have that discussion. Yeah, well, that's a theme which we go back to again and again here on this show because my biggest fear is saying the wrong thing. Do you know Coleman Hughes? Of course.

So Coleman was on, and he's kind of a friend of the place, and he spoke before one of the House committees today on this reparations bill. And I was so petrified that he would say the wrong thing and do harm to himself. I think he did great. You don't have to agree with him. That's my biggest fear, too, that you're going to say the wrong thing. It's just kind of funny that this wasn't like this when I was a kid. People were totally willing to listen to somebody say outrageous things.

Geraldo could have David Duke on his show. Dick Cavett had Lester Maddox on his show. And we could handle it. But it all ties together. By the way, what can evolution teach us about our ability to deal with Twitter and the provocations, the fast pace, the inability to sort out statistical probabilities in our heads so you see something happen in one place in the world you think is going to happen to you tomorrow. You come at all issues from that point of evolution, right?

Yeah, for me it is a toolkit that is so broadly useful that it's my go-to. There are very few things, you know, if you get to cosmology, it's not very useful. But for all living creatures, it's really the key. So when you see people going at it on Twitter, you're like, oh, of course, this is totally predictable. Well, I mean, Twitter, so it's predictable in one sense, which is we have an epidemic of evolutionary novelty. So novelty effectively is creatures in

environments for which they are not built, right? So novelty makes us physically ill. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us do things that make no sense. And Twitter and every other piece of social media is both playing on the novelty. The algorithms that keep us addicted are designed to fit in our blind spot, and so we don't detect that we're addicted, and it makes us vulnerable. But they also function in a space where,

I mean, if you think about it, this is not a new process. A picture of, let's say, a beautiful woman in a magazine, right? Maybe she has a particular look in her eyes. Well, you're not really built to understand that something that looks like a woman with a particular look in her eyes isn't a woman. Your conscious mind knows that it's not a woman, but advertisers know that some other part of you doesn't know that, and it will respond by thinking favorably of the car on which she's sitting, right?

So we are not built for photorealistic versions of people. We are not built for them to move on our television. We are not built to understand that the living room we are looking into on our television isn't an actual living room. We're not built to understand that Jon Stewart is a funny guy, but he has a team of writers, and so he's preternaturally

funny, right? No, we know him. He actually is funny. Well, we've had this debate before. I mean, he's funny. He's funny. Oh, he's very funny. But he's not the genius. I don't think's funny. He's funny. Oh, he's very funny. But he's not... All right, all right. Go ahead. But a team of writers... The genius, I don't think that Noam believes in debate. Let's not sidetrack.

He may be, but even a genius who has a team of writers is better off than a genius who's on his own. So anyway, all of these things trigger us because we are built, we are wired to understand our social world in a particular way. And even to the extent that some of our wiring is the software layer and it updates, nobody's software is good enough to understand Twitter. We haven't had enough time. We haven't had enough room to fail on Twitter to learn the lessons of it. So I'm constantly trying to understand Twitter because, frankly, I'm on Twitter and I constantly feel an obligation to say things about events as they happen and a fear of what happens. Every so often I say something and boom it causes a reaction that I didn't see coming and suddenly I'm fielding critiques I didn't expect and then

other times I say something and and before I hit tweet, I think, oh, this is the one. This is going to cause a firestorm, and it doesn't. And I don't know. Do you run it by anybody? You run it by your wife, your brother? Very frequently I run it by my wife. Eric and I lived in the same city.

I might sit down with him and talk to him about it more, but we don't end up doing that. But we also don't know. There's a ghost in that machine, and it's a corporation, and it obviously pays attention to, you know, part of it is algorithmic, and it's behaving in an automatic way, but we don't know what the algorithm is designed to do. We can detect certain patterns.

There's a way in which a tweet will begin to take off, and then it will dip, right? So it begins to take off very off, and then it will dip, right? So it begins to take off very quickly, and then it will dip. And it's like, oh, the algorithm flagged this for some kind of scrutiny, right? And then it will either pick back up or it will die. But you can tell based on the fact

that what happened early on doesn't continue, that somehow it stopped getting seen. Sorry, but they also do something, I guess, called shadow banning, right? Yep. Well, go ahead. What's shadow banning? Shadow banning is something you say puts you, that basically the algorithm stigmatizes you.

And in fact, there are, I don't know how good they are, but there are some, and you have to be really careful because I think some of them are fake, but there are a couple of sites that will actually test. You put in a handle and it will test whether or not the person has been shadow banned. And then people don't see your tweet. Like Nick DiPaolo actually talks about this a lot, that he's been shadow banned. So they, like people don't see what you said intentionally my understanding is that twitter does that intentionally because they don't like what you're saying or well you know

we're kind of off the subject but but i mean i had picked up on something even before twitter and i used to tell my my employees that they were not allowed to have uh contentious conversations via tweet or email because it became very clear early on that all the social cues were gone, and this is even before emojis, right, which actually help. They were designed to help. They truly do. And now you have this fast pace of Twitter,

and there must be some sort of proclivity for the ad homonym within us because it's just so common to attack people personally when they say something you don't like and that's probably across the whole world i don't know what the evolutionary advantage of that is but even the most even the smartest intellectuals i see them just attacking people dismissively for their just making making fun of people, essentially. I would suggest that not everything we do necessarily has an evolutionary advantage.

Evolution is a trial and error process. Therefore, things that are not advantageous can crop up. Whatever it is, it's in human nature. Well, there is actually a logic by which you can figure out what things ought to be treated evolutionarily and which

things might not. And basically the logic is this. If a trait is longstanding, you know, if something has existed for 500 years, enough that we have a name for it that we can refer to, and it has a major cost. So, for example, religions. Are religions a product of evolution? I would say they have to be, because the cost that goes along with subscribing to one is absolutely gigantic, and they are certainly long-standing and widespread. Therefore, were they not serving us evolutionarily, they would have been driven out by a bunch of atheists who were saving on those expenses. And the fact that that hasn't happened tells us that they at least have served an evolutionary function.

And this is your argument with Richard Dawkins, I think. Yep. He feels, he doesn't feel that way. He feels... Well, we're Team Weinstein. Well, I appreciate that. Well, what's his explanation for religion if it's not an evolutionary characteristic?

Well, so let me steel man his argument. I would say his point at its strongest is that this is a case of overfitting where we have a propensity to see intention in things

and that we apply it to parts of the universe that have no intention. So you can imagine if you're built to understand that people are up to things and then the weather pulls a fast one on you and suddenly it's raining when you had planned for sunny skies that you could see the weather being cruel when in fact the weather is actually indifferent. So overfitting is one explanation. The other explanation that he would deploy would be that in very small tribes, you know, 10, 12, maybe 30 people,

that there was some belief system that evolved and that it has become expanded by the rapid growth of civilization without it actually having a use in the present. But if it doesn't have a use, but as long as it's not too costly, it will remain. Yes, but it is too costly. That's the problem. It's so darn costly that there's no way these explanations could possibly be right because if they were right, then the advantage, the savings that would accrue to populations that simply abandoned these beliefs

would be so great that they would win in competition. I think we all recognize that within us. I mean, I'm about as atheist as they come. And still, you're always fighting to remain pure that way. You probably know him. There was some famous philosophy, atheist philosopher. He wrote about it in the Times, and he was on his deathbed recently. And he was riddled with cancer and

just in terrible pain. And he said to one of his closest people, he says, why is God making me suffer this way? Is it because I don't believe in him? I don't know. Was that Hitchens? I'll send it to you, actually. And to me, it was like, here he is in his deathbed.

And he was known for his disbelief in God and still it was in some way popping into his head for him to make that joke there was a very similar story with Peter Singer do you know who he is? the sewing machine guy?

he's Professor Yale I believe is this another joke? no, he's a very famous Australian He's Professor Yale, I believe. Is this another joke? No. He's a very famous Australian ethicist. Yep. And he believes that his whole argument... I mean, he's written like 40 books.

That the quality of life is far more important. That nobody should suffer. And that you should just euthanize people and end your life. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. And then his mother became very sick. He's an anti-natalist? Whatever. His mother became very sick. And he hired all of this very expensive care

to keep her alive well beyond any of his arguments. What do you regard then as a potential explanation for religion, the evolutionary advantage of religion? You must have some theories. It keeps us in line. Tremendously useful.

I would say if I have to pick one thing as its primary value, it is the reduction of intra-group competition. In other words, humans are always caught in a bind where there's competition within the group and competition between the group, and that the value of frustrating outbreaks of intra-group competition, I should probably say, because I have an argument not just with Richard Dawkins, but I also have one with David Sloan Lewis, and I should be very careful with my terminology. Group is the more useful term for the lay public, but what I really mean is lineage. Intra-lineage competition is a great danger, and lineages of humans are always in competition with each other, and so let's say a clergy is in a great position

to prevent outbreaks of competition within the group by emphasizing certain things from a sacred text at the right moment. I mean, in the extreme case, let's take Catholics who do a wonderful job of making all this stuff pretty obvious. You have to go talk to the guy in the box about what you've been doing wrong. Let's say it's adultery, right? You have to go talk to the guy in the box about the adultery, right? And you fear, if you say, well, maybe I won't mention it to the guy in the box, but what if the person you're engaged in adultery with mentions it to the guy in the box? So you gotta. So the guy in the box knows that there's adultery going on and he can flip

through the book and he can find the exact passage that will scare the living shit out of people sitting in the pews when he gets up there and he starts talking about exact passage that will scare the living shit out of people sitting in the pews when he gets up there and he starts talking about adultery and think, oh my God, God knows, right? So that thing is capable, that it's frightening enough to prevent people from engaging in this kind of behavior. And a parish in which people are not betraying each other because they fear God and because somebody is in a position to speak on God's behalf, that lineage is in a better position to compete with the neighboring lineages than one in which everybody's an atheist and people figure they can,

as long as they can get away with it, it's no big deal. So, Noam and I, who are, if not atheists, I hate to use the term atheist, even though it's probably what I am. I say agnostic. But so, how do you explain that we exist, and are we evolutionarily unfit and destined for the trash heap of evolution?

Well, that's an interesting question. So I also don't call myself an atheist, even though I don't believe there's anything supernatural going on in the universe. What do you call yourself? I try to resist categorizing myself, because somebody who believes that religion has been very valuable can't really afford to sign up with what atheism has become in the present. Now, I would like to see atheism become less vitriolic and less ideological and more of a factual description, in which case I might contemplate joining up.

But until it does, my feeling is it's not my team because it thinks it has a dog in this fight. I didn't even realize that's what it's become. But the strict definition of atheism, meaning you don't believe in God in the classic sense of the term, would apply to you nonetheless. Probably in a technical sense, it would.

But then if evolution says that being religious is better, or believing is better, then we're just unfit evolutionaries? Well, here's the thing. You might be. I don't know that you should care. One of the things that doesn't get said often enough is once you understand what evolution is, I shouldn't say trying to accomplish, but what it fosters, you couldn't possibly want to participate, right? There are certain things that it produces that are wonderful, but it produces all of the horrible stuff as well. And so at some level, I do think once we understand evolution,

it's our obligation morally to sideline its influence and to replace it with something better. So the fact that you may not be evolutionarily successful, I don't think should trouble you. I do think we have to be concerned about if we step aside from our evolutionary imperative, we effectively hand the planet to those who refuse to step aside. And so we have to figure out how to step aside without providing an advantage to others. Otherwise, we will just simply perpetuate

the game into the future. So, you know, I've seen in my kids, I have a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, now he's six, and my daughter buys everything religious, hook, line and sinker. They go to Hebrew school. Don't ask me why. And she just believes the whole thing. And my son comes

home and he's like, I don't believe in God. And I'm like, shocked. I tell you this, why don't you believe in God? He says, I don't believe. I said, why don't you believe? He says, well, because I prayed to him and he didn't answer my prayers. This is a five year old. I said, what did you pray for? He said, I prayed for superpowers and I didn't answer my prayers. This is a five-year-old. I said, what did you pray for?

He said, I prayed for superpowers and I didn't get them. I don't believe in God. And I was so proud of him. And then I said to him, Manny, do you believe in Santa Claus? And he looked at me like I was an idiot. He says, of course there's a Santa Claus. Are you a barbarian? Anyway, I thought that was a cute story.

I saw an interview. Your brother, Eric, is also a very famous national intellectual, public intellectual, I guess they call it. And I think he's remarkable. But I saw an interview like a year ago with the two of you. And am I getting right? Did both of you say you had learning disabilities? Oh, yeah, in spades.

Although I don't think either of us really believe that that's what they are. But, yeah, if you accept the category, then we both got them. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were like as a child? Because I'm a parent, and I see the issues that my kids are having. What are your learning disabilities? So I had an incredibly difficult time with spelling, with handwriting, with reading. Reading is still, I'm very good at it. I read very carefully, but it's a chore. It's like jogging. I don't, I don't love it. So I tend to, I try to be efficient about it. Book on tape. Yeah,

book on tape works. Although there are ways in which it doesn't sometimes, particularly technical material, you kind of have to run it doesn't sometimes, particularly technical material. You kind of have to run it through your eyes. I'm a terrible speller. I cannot get it. I'm not even that good. You're not even that good. Not even that good.

To this day. And it's humiliating, right? Especially on Twitter. Well, who edits your tweets to make sure everything is spelled correctly? Would that be Heather Heyer? She does correct them often while shaking her head at how i've still things to begin with and you know of course like everybody else i have auto correct which i don't

know whether it's doing more good than harm sometimes it gets into you lean on it you lean on it but you know you have to spell well enough for it to know what you get map you got that uh... you have no idea that now does your brother suffer from the same? Your brother hates me, by the way, but I'll tell you that in a second. Does your brother suffer from the same issue?

His spelling is better than mine, for sure. But let's just say there's some sort of a familial trait that made school incredibly challenging. And I mean, I more or less just simply failed at it. And I remember in the second grade, you know, every time I turned something in, the fact is your writing and your spelling are a bottleneck. And, you know, my teachers had too many students to deal with,

and so they looked at my work, couldn't figure out what it said. Frankly, when I write myself notes, if it's been a couple days since I wrote looked at my work couldn't figure out what it said frankly when i write myself notes if it's been a couple days since i wrote it on i can't figure out what it said it's that bad so anyway when i handed in work they just didn't know what to make of it and so anyway i started getting dumb tracked you know where they put you in the classes wow right and so anyway the thing is it sort of created a choice for me, which was if I turned in my work, then I got slapped on the wrist. If I didn't turn in my work, then I was understood to be enigmatic, you know, smart but broken or something. And that was better. It's definitely better to be thought enigmatic than to be thought stupid. And so I kind of opted out of school and stopped paying attention to it and it stopped paying attention to me and I was lucky that my grandfather was a very smart guy who took kids very seriously and he took me and Eric very seriously and he was he was a scientist chemist

and he was very he was a lot of fun but he also he never said this out loud but I think he was a lot of fun, but he also, he never said this out loud, but I think he had a principle, which is when a child asks a question, if it's a good question, you should do your darndest to answer it well. I try to do that with my kids. I think it's a very smart thing to do. And then the point is, if you do that with a kid, then they come back at you with the next question. And then there's a point at which you've exhausted your knowledge,

and the answer is, you know, I don't know how to answer that one. And so he would answer questions up until that point, and then he would be very honest about the fact that that's where we were. And, you know, you couldn't ask for a better mentor. That's an amazing story. How did he... So you ultimately went to the University of Michigan. It's a fine school. So you got

somehow... You turned yourself around at some point. You somehow were able to get through school. Still haven't. And in fact, as a, so yeah, I. It gets easier for, because I'm similar to you in certain ways. I couldn't do homework. I had terrible handwriting. I kind of reversed things, but I was always a really good reader. But I found that the busy work of high school was much more challenging to me than cramming for an exam in college.

That was, that came much more easy. But how did you get into college? So how did you get into Michigan? I probably should not say this out loud into a microphone. Did you pay somebody? I didn't. But there's a thing that happened to me, and the thing is I want people listening to this to understand you cannot count on this.

I got lucky. But the way I got lucky is maybe every fifth teacher saw some reason to break the rules for me. They couldn't see, you know, failing me or whatever, because what I said to them made enough sense that it was like, oh, something's broken here with the system, and so I'll bend the rules. So enough people bent the rules along the way that I did manage to go to the University of Michigan, which is a top school in evolutionary biology. And then I found an advisor, Dick Alexander, who was a brilliant guy who didn't much care for the rules himself, right? He was a renegade. He was very successful, but he also really had no patience for systems that were too automatic. And so he, you know, in the end, he had to come out of retirement in order to fight my department for me to get my degree.

He and another professor came out of retirement to do that. And so in some sense, there was a very personal element to certain individuals seeing something of value that they thought was worth going the extra mile for. And what I fear is some kid who's got lots of potential who doesn't have those advocates. That kid is in trouble. And so I do think figuring out how to advocate for students who don't learn in a normal way, but are high potential, which I think is a huge population. But nowadays we have a lot more knowledge about learning disabilities than in the 70s, I guess, when you were coming up. I want to ask one quick question. Did your own knowledge of yourself, meaning that you could simultaneously be so smart and so stupid, did that fascinate you with human nature in a way that made you want to

study it and drawn to it? You know, the first thing it did was it traumatized the hell out of me. Because at the point that I gave up on school and it gave up on me, I thought that was the end of my intellectual life. And I was in a family where intellectual life meant a lot. And so I sort of thought, well, damn, I'm never going to be anything. And then many years down the road, I realized, you know, that was supposed to be the point at which I never got smarter. And it didn't happen that way. I got smarter some other way, right? Some way that is outside of the school apparatus. And that clued me into one of the

most important insights I think I've got, which is that school is not supposed to be the place you learn. It's supposed to be a supplement for those things that you don't learn in some other way. And because we treat it as the primary mechanism for learning, we're actually doing harm. What we should be figuring out how to do is provide people games and exercises and experiences that teach them, and then use school for the stuff that doesn't get conveyed that way. You don't learn calculus, you know, in the playground or playing Ultimate Frisbee or something like that. Somebody has to explain it to you. But it's not most subjects. Most subjects you actually can learn experientially.

What about, say, history? How would you learn history outside of the school system? Just reading on your own? Well, what I would say is we've got a problem with history, and maybe my skepticism of the scholastic system alerts me to it more than others, which is that history means two mutually exclusive things. History is simultaneously a description of what took place and it is also a kind of advocacy. And because we use the same term for those two things,

we botch the job and people who have learned history don't understand that they have to figure out which facts that they know or think they know are not facts at all. But how would we do that outside the school?

Would you say that history, like calculus, is something that you need a school for, or you do not? I don't know that you need a school, but you might need a formal structure. What we would want, I think, are some, you know, you could do this very well with movies, much better, frankly, than a textbook. But the problem is you have to have an agreement on what's supposed to be in those movies. Kind of Oliver Stone making the history textbooks. Right. You know, what you need somehow is, I'm a big fan of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs,

and Steel, right? Guns, Germs, and Steel tells you maybe half of what you need to know about history, which is how it actually functions when you stand back and stop paying so much attention to the individuals involved and you start paying attention to the large-scale patterns. So something that brings that alive would be very useful, but it's very dangerous if anybody gets a hold of that thing and starts using it to advance their own political agenda with the sanction of history.

Listen, I would like to continue to speak with you, but you have a show to go to. Okay, I was going to say I can go bring everybody else over and then come back and get you. Come back and get her. Were the shows in the underground? I think so. Oh yeah, isn't it good? I think you better go. I don't want you to miss anything.

Hopefully now that you didn't get burned and you see that we're not idiots, you might even come back again. I want to hear the story about Eric. You were going to tell that. You know what? I think I'll tell him off the mic. But he was here one night and we were drunk.

And I think I can be a little bit much. I'll tell you in a second. Okay. Well, thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. This was a great deal of fun. Great. Follow us on Instagram thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. This was a great deal of fun. Great. Follow us on Instagram at livefromthetable.

Podcast at comedyseller.com is our... The email for questions, comments... And your Twitter... And praise... Is at Brett Weinstein. Brett has one T. Brett has one T. Thank you.

Good night, everybody. Good night. Bye.