Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.
Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions.
I actually took classes from Bret Weinstein, and knew him semi-personally outside the unversity.
He is a pompous ass who really feels he has the keys to understanding and analyzing all topics.
It was good for facilitating evolutionary biology discussons and seminars. It was terrible for everything else.
I recommended he needed a sabbatical after my classes, and in 2 years he was chased off campus with baseball bats.
My dad was a professor (in the humanities). So many of his colleagues thought that they knew everything about everything because they got a PhD on 13th century Lithuanian poetry or whatever. It really turned me off of academia growing up and seeing them all act like that.
Oh Bret had a whole rant about the humanities without a single drip of irony. I remember he handwaved the entire study of ecology in a seminar as “postmodernism.”
He was my last class at TESC and he made me feel far more over it than I needed to be.