The Bizarre Case of Bret Weinstein

A lesson in how not to think

Bret Weinstein on the Diary of a CEO podcast, credit: YouTube

On his podcast The Dark Horse, Bret Weinstein takes a deep breath: “It will probably sound arrogant for me to describe it but I’m gonna do it anyway because it’s later than we think…” He then goes on to declare that he thinks he is like the girl from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who knows the answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything but can’t tell anyone because the earth is about to be destroyed, “I feel a little bit like I might be the young woman in that story” he says.

He then proceeds on a meandering speech about evolutionary frontiers that I actually find difficult to condense into a few sentences because it’s so lacking in content. He argues there are evolutionary frontiers, territorial, technological and apparently a third frontier that means attacking other people to get their resources. According to him, the only way humanity can survive is if we find a “fourth frontier,” which is a society that gives people the feeling of evolutionary frontiers without there actually being one, thus producing a steady-state society in which we’re all happy.

Sounds great. How this happens Bret does not elaborate because he “doesn’t think we’re going to make it” because instead we’re going to “destroy ourselves,” but instead of explaining what any of this actually means he then moves on a sentence later to claiming he has a “model for consciousness.” Humans in evolutionary history share ideas around a campfire and because consciousness is “things you can report” so therefore consciousness is what allows us to solve collective problems. Which is kind of fine except amid all this he isn’t talking about consciousness he’s talking about language, and he’s offered nothing by way of a “model for consciousness” but then once again he drops it and goes back to complaining that again this doesn’t matter because we’re not solving our problems anymore and we’re all doomed.

As far as I can work out from watching his interviews on and off over the years out of a weird kind of curiosity, this section from one of his podcasts pretty much summarises the thought of Bret Weinstein. Ever since covid he has become possessed by a conspiratorial belief in the imminent end of the world, claims somehow he and only he has thought through the answers, then when he offers said answers the result is the most weird, quasi-evolutionarily reasoned and sloth-like arrival at something either transparently wrong or else just stating the obvious as if it’s some kind of epiphany. Watching one of his podcasts is like watching a tortoise spend three hours going very slowly in the wrong direction while telling his tortoise friend he’s the only one who knows about directions because of his new theory of directions.

Pre-covid this meandering quasi-intellectualism was reasonably harmless. Bret became part of the ‘intellectual dark web’ after his genuinely unfair ejection from his university, and took to doing things like going on Joe Rogan and waffling about the evolutionary difference between beauty and hotness for ten minutes in monotone with an entirely straight face. One might suggest the early signs of Bret’s bizzare evolutionary rationalising were already visible, given that he was mixing subjective and unclearly defined terms like ‘hotness’ then talking about their ‘parameters’ and going on about various evolutionary strategies, which is the kind of evolutionary theorising that uses the the metanarrative of evolution to justify speculating, which may be mildly interesting at 2am in the pub, but isn’t remotely scientific or evidence based. Basically, he’s using evolutionary language to imply he’s saying profound and scientific things when actually all he’s doing is saying there’s a difference between someone you want to have indifferent sex with and someone you want to have children with. Duh.

But at the same time it was Joe Rogan and who cares, at this point Bret seemed fairly harmless, like the kind of Uncle you’d rather not get stuck with at a family barbeque lest you had to hear his evolutionary theory of why we like burgers in spherical shaped buns with mayo squeezing out of them, but there was little point in objecting to stuff that was largely benign and onerously dull. You’d just go “oh that’s interesting” then pretend you needed to go to the toilet.

Then lockdown happened and Bret was radicalised. Suddenly all of this intellectualism was no longer just waffle about hotness but was a justification for various beliefs about nefarious forces: in a speech to a senate meeting on covid he said “every single institution dedicated to public truth-seeking is under simultaneous attack–they are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly…if we do zoom out and ask ‘What they are hiding?’, the answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing: they are hiding everything…I cannot tell you with any certainty who they are, or what they hope to accomplish.” Rather than simply adopting a questioning stance and making reasonable objections to the vaccination rollout and its messaging, Bret went full rabbit hole.

It seems though that like Russell Brand this conspiratorial end of the world attitude was unspecific enough to suggest it indicates a state of mind rather than an actual rational case with either causes or solutions. In an appearance of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Bret argues we need to be preparing for the end of society, at one point citing concerns about a shift in the electromagnetic poles. He admits not being an expert on the subject and says most of his knowledge comes from Ben Davidson. Davidson is an ex-lawyer with a Twitter account and a YouTube who makes content that has been repeatedly debunked as full of flagrant misunderstandings of scientific papers, and a glance at his Twitter where he keeps predicting the next apparent imminent disaster, brags about being a “research expert with hyperthymesia”, posts topless selfies, calls people “faggots” on multiple occasions in the comments and brags about how many women he sleeps with on dating apps, all of which would tell you about how serious he is.

How then does somebody like Bret who seems to believe in the supremacy of his own rationalism become to be so, well, irrational?

Part of this is simply a problem with the way our algorithm-ruled world shapes who does or doesn’t gain a stupid amount of popularity. Even with all the added conspiracy stuff, Weinstein is still the proverbial Uncle whose waffle has just got a bit weirder since covid, yet he now has half a million YouTube subscribers, appearances on podcasts like Diary of a CEO with millions of views and over a million followers on Twitter. Like many people who have been “cancelled” Weinstein is able to maintain a view of himself as being “silenced” while at the same time curating huge viewing numbers. His Diary of a CEO appearance is ironically titled “The Professor Banned From Speaking Out” even though by this point Weinstein has spent years “speaking out,” ever since leaving a university where nobody had ever heard of him he’s now become someone with access to huge audiences through platforms like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson. As ever, being “cancelled” just means getting a free pass into a career doing podcasts and complaining on Twitter all day.

What this means though is living in an absurd siloed world. Bret talks to people who flatter his opinions, and with it his tendency to meander in bad evolutionary speculations has resulted in him wading in quagmires of bad thought that audiences tune into because it seems to be giving a veneer of intellectualism to what is essentially poorly informed doomerism.

Yet the result of this doomerism is nothing except harm and division. If you see the world as so existentially at risk and contaminated then meaningful solutions, as illustrated by Bret’s handwaving above, end up becoming meaningless. We could solve all the problems, here’s some waffle about why, but we won’t so there’s no point in bothering. Like most selling such content, the solution is simply to watch more podcasts.

But I think Bret Weinstein gives us important lessons about how easily our use of the internet can engender bad thinking. The first is that the “lone wolf thinker” who isn’t a nut-job is actually mostly a myth, or at least a rarity. In thought as in life we need each other, and what happens when you think your rationalism can independently reason everything without the rigorous conditioning of the criticism of people you respect but disagree with, you are just going to think rubbish and not know it because you don’t notice the areas in which you are blind to challenging yourself.

Then there is the danger of becoming blind to the way that feelings condition thoughts. Why on earth would anyone think Ben Davidson is a reliable source of scientific theories about earth’s magnetic poles? Because you are in a state of perpetual angst about the end of all things and in a social media context suddenly stuff sounds convincing. One of the reasons lockdowns were so pernicious was because people were anxious and on top of that isolated from the kinds of social context that might make such things seem more silly, thus proliferating the kind of audiences Bret now speaks to. Bret might come up with some theory of consciousness and feel that it sounds right, but without someone to point out that he isn’t really talking about consciousness and that it’s really just not anything but pontificating, there’s nothing to stop a bathtub thought becoming something broadcast to millions.

Importantly though, Bret has a habit of misusing evolutionary arguments. The issue with a lot of his claims is that he’s essentially thinking about evolution like a kind of philosophy where you just rationalise an answer rather than an epistemology that requires rigorous evidence in a scientific context that recognises evolution is not an abstraction but a history. In his speech about his four frontiers he claims events like the holocaust are simply caused by a kind of evolutionary resource scarcity that causes people to attack some other group to get their resources, an argument that involves zero nuance, completely misses any contingent facts about ideology or context, and makes no sense in the context anyway. Rather like his ponderous waffle about hotness, it’s just not science, it’s bro-science. Any such claims, be they about why the Nazis did anything to what consciousness is evolutionarily requires evidence, not just for something to sound good when you happen to think it.

So Bret Weinstein is not another David Icke, he’s just a ponderous evolutionary professor who I hate to say needs the exposure of an academic context to give his attempts at scientific explanations the rigorous undressing they deserve. Unfortunately he has erected a belief that those institutions are so corrupt that this is no longer possible, and so his massive YouTube audiences will have to do where questionable information goes unquestioned and terrible arguments are met with approval. And it’s a shame, I hate it when people are “silenced”; the worst thing about it is you never stop hearing from them. Given his brother’s recent confrontation with Sean Carroll, perhaps it runs in the family.