PBD Podcast - Bret Weinstein On Why America Is Divided | PBD Podcast | Ep. 229 | Part 1

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

On this episode, Patrick Bet-David and Bret Weinstein will discuss: Bret Weinstein being accused of Racism  Bret Weinstein's beef with conservatives  Why Joe Rogan is not running for president  Why America is divided  The consequences of the birth control pill  Protect and secure your retirement savings now with this complimentary precious metals guide. Go to http://goldco.com/pbd FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/ Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/ Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

I feel I'm so close I can take sweet the story. I know this life meant for me. Yeah, why would you plan on galiah when we got bad day there? Value payment, giving values, contagious, this world of entrepreneurs. We can't no value that hate it. I'd be running home, you look what I've become. So we got a special podcast here for you today with an evolutionary biology professor of evolutionary biologies. We can even say former professor of evolutionary biology.

It's got a podcast called Dark Horse podcast. Joe and I were talking because of a clip, you guys that are on the podcast together and I put it on Twitter and it got a lot of feedback and I said, man, I love that clip between the two of you guys. He said, you should have them on. I said, send me his number and then Rob's like, he's scheduled to come on us. You got to be kidding me. How weird is this, right?

But it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Yes. You're making a lot of friends the last two years. You're making a lot of new allies. You're pissing off. Some would say the institution, some of the people that are

telling people what to do without wanting to hear the other side of the argument, but you are definitely making a lot of friends. I am losing friends and making more and better friends. Are there any friends you've lost without naming them that your surprise you would have ever lost that friend? Well, I've now learned this lesson a couple of times. Every time one confronts one of these really difficult puzzles in which there's a lot at stake, you lose people that surprise you, and then people emerge in your life that you didn't expect. And so, you know, in the evergreen situation, I don't know how familiar your audience will

be with that, but I think it's good they know about it. I know about it. I think it'd be good if you'd share with all right. I'll give them the very brief version. Sure. And if they want a better exploration, they can look at Mike Naina's three-part documentary on it. It really covers it very well, or Benjamin Boyce's channel also does. But my wife and I were professors at Evergreen for 15 years, and Heather was

literally the college's most popular professor. I wasn't terribly far behind. We had a really dedicated group of students who went back and forth between our programs, and because of the way Evergreen worked, we knew our students extremely well. We could go into the field with them for weeks at a time. It was a great place. And on May 23rd, 2017, 50 students that I had never met before streamed into the building where I was teaching, chanting my name, demanding that I be fired or resign. And their accusation was that I was a racist, an idea that they had actually picked up

from some faculty members who didn't like me very much because I stood in the way of their attempt to change the college, which would have been a threat to the college if it had happened. And I said so in faculty meetings. And then when that became impossible, I said so over email. In any case, that protest became violent. It descended into violence over the course of a couple days. And the protesters made the mistake of filming everything they did and then uploading it. I think they uploaded

it to Facebook, but it was later put on YouTube by somebody who wanted the world to see it. And when the world did see these students confronting me, something was clearly off. So the incident did not work out the way they had hoped that it would. And that catapulted me into the public eye. We requested, demanded, and then initiated the process of suing the college because they had obviously created an unsafe working environment. Students, the president of the college who in some ways had triggered this whole episode ordered the police who were subordinate to him to stay out of the conflict between students and us and the students created a patrol. They wandered the campus with baseball bats, they actually battered another student, they were looking for me, stopping traffic, searching cars, this sort of thing. To put things in perspective, this was 2017. 2017.

Right. Yeah. Were these students within the school, or they just came out of the woodworks to show up at the school? These were very definitely students at the school. And so, you know, this was, of course, downstream of a diversity equity and inclusion movement that had become quite powerful. And the school was a very liberal place. And so it's not surprising that we would have seen such a movement. And the problem is that the policy changes at the college

that that movement wanted to initiate would have destroyed the place. They were going to be lethal to its functioning, and it was my obligation as a faculty member to point that out. To be fair, Brett, politically, are you a pro-Trump supporter, Maga guy, because if they're doing that to you,

you must be a big supporter of Trump. Well, they might think so. I describe myself as a reluctant radical. And the reason I say reluctant radical is that I believe, after many years of studying the question, that our civilization can't really continue this way, that what we've done has been brilliant. There's, of course, been lots of carnage,

but our system is not sustainable in the way it currently exists. And so it has to be retooled for humanity to continue to prosper. But, so that's the part that makes me a radical, is that I believe only radical change can save us. But I also know that if you take a system that functions, and our system does function and you alter it you are very likely to do harm and you are very likely in your solution making to bring about unintended consequences which can be disastrous. So I am a

progressive but I am one with trepidations about change and and anyway, no, I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm also not a Biden supporter, wasn't a Clinton supporter. I believe we need to find a new direction. Well, you're like a Bernie Sanders supporter at some point. I was. I am no longer. Okay. I think that Bernie did represent a actual challenge

to the power structure that has us locked into this bad trajectory, but I think he's lost his way. That said, even when I was a supporter of his, I wasn't overly convinced that he understood what direction we needed to go, but he did represent the possibility of breaking out of the death spiral that I see

or Duopoly is having speaking of, speaking of Duopoly, would you say over the last five years since 2017, you've had to do more mental wrestling with who you identify with more than ever in your life, politically speaking? No, because 2017 is not where these questions arrived on my desk at first. I've been thinking about the question of how civilization functions as an evolutionary biologist. I was a member of the Game B movement, which was a small group of people who were interested in complex systems and interested in figuring out what the next phase of civilization should look like. So I had done a lot of thinking about it.

And frankly, I think people make a mistake. They tend to affiliate with people and adopt their ideology. And my sense is that ideology is a problem, especially if you pick it up because of the people who hold it. So my sense is even if there was nobody else on Earth who agreed with me that we have to change the way civilization functions, I would still be a progressive by the technical definition, because I still believe we have to alter things if we're

to do well and my job is to convince people that that's true. If I'm right, or if I'm not right, I have to allow them to convince me that I've got it wrong, and I will change my position. So you said something that we do need to make some radical changes, but if we do make it too radical, we may have some side effects or repercussions for making the changes as well.

So we had Neil deGrasse Tyson here. I asked him about how he would change the educational system. There's a few topics I want to go through with you. Chad GBT, just an article came out saying it just passed a bar exam. I wanted you to feed back on that one right there. A poll that I did on Twitter, which you and I talked about, the poll, hey, which one of these is going to be the biggest negative consequence in US that we're experiencing right now.

We'll talk about that. And then of course, we'll talk vaccine and a few other things. But isolating this specific concern here, Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, how would you change the educational system to improve it? I know on the election side, you came out with a program, Unity, something you called Unity in 2020,

where the president would have a person from each side to make sure, almost like a vice president model that you have from both sides, that you can get some counsel from each one and they can hash it out in debate. One, how would you improve the educational system yourself and two, election that we have, presidency that we have to be a little bit more united?

Sure, so let me just explain the Unity 2020 structures people understand why I bothered. Unity 2020 was an attempt to use a game of theoretic perspective to solve the problem of the duopoly. So we can't escape the problem of the duopoly because anytime you try to escape it, you tend to empower the force on the other side.

In other words, if you tend towards progressivism and you put forward something that's actually progressive, you'll divide the Democrats and you will give power to the Republicans. So the problem of the lesser evil is the thing that keeps us locked in. And Unity 2020 proposed a structure in which a liberal and a conservative would team up and would co-president. This is all possible within the confines put out by the Constitution. The president and vice president could flip a coin to see who ran at the top of the ticket, and then they could agree to switch who was at the top of the ticket after four years when they ran for reelection, and in the meantime, they could govern by consensus.

In other words, the two of them would sit down for each policy decision. And they would hash out what the right direction to go would be for the country. And only in the case where they couldn't reach agreement with the person who was in the top office have to make that decision, or in the case where there wasn't time for them to confer. So, the point is that formally solves the problem of the lesser evil because it doesn't award

either side extra power. And my contention is that really if you had, I mean imagine, look at who's currently in the presidency and who the last president was and go backwards through history. It's been quite a while since we've had somebody who was really effective in that office. And my point is we would be far better off if we had people who were courageous, capable and patriotic. All right, if you offer me somebody who meets those three criteria, I don't actually care which side of the...

What was the second one? Courageous, capable, patriot. Those are the three. And if you take two of those people, one from each side, I'm pretty comfortable that two people who come from different sides of the aisle and have those three characteristics who sit down and have a conversation about what the right direction for the country would be. Will arrive at something that I can respect.

They might be wrong. That will happen. This is a difficult puzzle to solve. But I know it won't be born of corruption or an aptitude or... How do you avoid that, though? It's very to say, you know, if we have somebody that's courageous, okay, people would vouch for that. Somebody who's capable, fantastic, somebody who is patriotic, phenomenal. How do you manage that?

Because the system can't filter those three things out. An actor can become a president based on our current system that we have. Well, let's take our our mutual friend, Joe Rogan, for example, and I don't mean to put him on the spot here, but can we agree that he meets my three criteria? No question about that. No question. Okay, so let's say that Joe Rogan is the progressive

in a unity kind of team. Okay, what does Joe do? Does Joe know anything about how to architect a civilization? No, no, but what would he do? Bring in the best of the best. There you go. How hard is that? No, no, I'm not, I'm not sane with you, dad. I'm not telling you, I don't want to courageous, capable patriotic person. What I'm saying is, why isn't the system attracting those types of people to become

president? Now somebody from the right may say you're saying Trump isn't courageous. He is. He's not capable. He's built businesses. He's not patriotic. He loves America, right? Somebody may say, you know, Bill Clinton may fit that quality or John F. Kennedy may fit that quality. And I don't know who your last capable president would have been in your eyes. Do you have somebody they think was the last capable one? Well, let's put it this way. I don't know who your last capable president would have been in your eyes. Do you have somebody they think was the last capable one? Well, let's put it this way. I don't want anything to rest on whether or not my evaluation of somebody's characteristics is accurate. I could be fooled by somebody.

But yes, I think there are people. I mean, you know, again, Joe Rogan meets those criteria easily. I would say Tulsi Gabbard seems to meet those criteria. Looks to me like Rand Paul meets those criteria. So there are lots of people. Your question about why such people don't tend to end up, and I wouldn't say it's that they don't tend to end up attracted to the idea of governing.

They don't tend to survive. That's my question. Not attracted because Tulsi did, Rand did, Joe doesn't want to have anything to do with it. At least that's my understanding from what he's smart. Yeah, he's too smart. But that's also the thing. A lot of times, you know, I had Catherine Gale,

I don't know if she is or Michael Porter. They wrote a book called The Industry of Politics. So I had them on four years ago, I don't know the exact timeline, I had them on a few years ago. And both of them lean left, but they had this idea about how to elect a president in a complete different way. It's a model that's more on Andrew Yang, the direction he's going with forward party, and he's also kind of pushing a third party person

to get elected, but it's all so gathered when she was on the left and she said anything about Hillary Clinton, boom, they ousted it. Now she's out as an independent to win, or Rand Paul, Rand had very good ideas. A lot of people from the right like Rand Paul, he's got audacity, he's got courage, he went up against Fauci, he's not afraid,

he has values, he's got principles, he stands up for him, he seems reasonable, he seems smart and intellectual. But why the current system doesn't allow those types of talent to make it to the top? Well, it's worse than that. Our current system ensures that if you make it to the final round of the competition, that you are excellent at corruption. And that's really the problem, is that you have an evolutionary dynamic in which we are constantly forcing the people who will ultimately have that kind of power to demonstrate that they are exceptionally good at figuring out, you know, on which side their bread is buttered.

And then, when they get to the top office, we're shocked that the corruption continues. And so another aspect of the unity proposal was that it effectively took courageous capable patriots and sped them past the system that forces people to become excellent at corruption. Now somebody who had been sped past that corrupting steeple chase would be in a position to purge the system below them of corruption. If you try to do this from the ground up, the corruption will win. If you did this from the top down, and I'm not in general a fan of top down solutions, but in this case, I don't believe there's another way you could do it.

If this, you know, I popped this sort of experiment, actually came to life, this unity party, this ticket correct me for wrong, speaking of Andrew Yang. I believe your proposal was Andrew Yang on the left and General Bill McRaven on the right. I want to say in 2020. That was the initial formulation of it. So if that came to be this two-part question, how do you think that governance would look today? 2023 and you know you call yourself a progressive, almost even a radical, your words, that to me sounds as moderate as it gets, meaning someone on the center left, someone on the center right come together.

I guess maybe it's not moderate, as you're shaking your head. I guess how would they be fairing today if that ticket did come to life? And what would the moderate versus radical approach be? That's a great question. So I will say, I am a radical because I believe only radical change can save us, but it's not like I like radicalism. I don't like radicalism. You are a radical, but you don't like the concept.

I'm a radical because in 2023, that's what's required. Okay. I don't want to see a radical civilization. I want to see a civilization in which the tension between conservatism and progressivism results in dynamism, which we've seen. I mean, that's what built America and the West. It is that tension, right? What you need is progressives who can see what solutions actually might be worth the

freight, and you need conservatives to put the brakes on them to make sure they don't get carried away with fanciful notions about what might be that are utopian nonsense, right? It's both things. So, I have said sometimes in the past that I am a radical who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative, right? So some may say you sound confused. Right, they may.

And then they're not getting it because, you know, and this is one of the problems I see on the left is that people fall in love with the idea of progress. They don't understand how dangerous it is. And so the point is we can't reach a place where they'll stop, right? We can't reach a place that's good enough that they will stand down and say, all right, how do we, you know, we've succeeded? How do we keep it? How about this? Just to be clear, if you could send a clear message, clear concise message to your friends on the far left, and then a clear concise message to the friends on the far right about this unity ticket, what would your direct message to these types of people be?

I think the message is if you don't break out of the dynamic that you're stuck in, then this is going to be a short ride. We don't have a good plan to go forward and we need one and frankly we're 30 years late. We needed to see this 30 years ago, then we would have had time to do this. Now we're in an emergency situation and I would just say it is situation. And I would just say it is as much as I see conservatives have completely lost patience with liberals, and they've done this because the liberals at the moment seem insane. And so I would ask them to rethink that and just recognize that this is actually the moment at which conservatives have a very clear and vitally important role to play, but it is not to the exclusion of aggressive.

What do conservatives lose you? So for them to get somebody I like to order they lose you, what would they need to do to get you? What would they need to do to get you? The number one thing is conservatives need to understand that the environmental crisis is not synonymous with climate change, that we have a clear environmental crisis. What we are doing to the planet cannot be undone ever. And so we must figure out how to stop doing it. And that's true, irrespective of the reality or fiction involved in climate change, and I'm pretty convinced there is both. So that's one. What else? Where else did I lose you?

The idea that we should return to a prior state with respect to how we deal with each other socially. So there is a recognition that something has gone very wrong, for example, in the relationship between the sexes. That's simply true. It's gone very wrong. But we can't go back. There's nowhere to go back to, right?

Things began to change radically at the... I mean, we can't go back to. Be specific. So when you're saying they want to go back to, what do they want to go back to? A traditional relationship between men and women. And there are aspects of a traditional relationship that I think ought to be resurrected. But we can't go back because what changed our circumstances was the introduction of reliable birth control.

That was the thing that changed. And everything else, it's sort of a cascading set of dysfunctions that have a risen downstream of that because what it did is it removed the central logic of the system. And I'm not claiming that the central logic of the system was fair, I don't think it was, but the central logic of the system was reliable and had been reliable literally for, well, there's an argument to be made for hundreds of millions of years, right? The reality of male and female, and the relationship between those two phenomena had some consistency

for hundreds of millions of years. It had certainly been consistent for human history and prehistory, and then suddenly the introduction of birth control alters that relationship in a fundamental way and there was not the, I mean, there was a certain amount of consternation over what would happen, but I don't think it properly understood that it was going to rob the system of the incentive that had driven civilization forward.

So let's stay there. Okay. So one, conservatives don't have climate change as their priority. As what you're saying? Not climate change. This is the problem. In environmental sustainability, let's say. Okay. When conservatives hear somebody say environment or environmental crisis, their mind transmutes that into global warming because this has become the flagship issue. And the problem is conservatives, I believe, are correct that they detect nonsense around that issue, that they are being told something that is not a complete story, that where they're told, we must follow the science on climate change. We have an emergency, and then the science amounts to models that they cannot evaluate.

They have the sense that something is being smuggled in, and I don't think they're wrong about that. However, that's not the same thing as saying climate change isn't real and important. And more to the point, the issue of environmental sustainability is a real issue, irrespective. Even if you found out that climate change was a complete fiction, right, it doesn't change the fact that we are in an environmental crisis that urgently needs our attention. So those are two different things though, right? Because what you're saying is one is, I don't know if conservatives are saying

that climate change is fake and it's 100% fabricated, et cetera, et cetera. When they're saying the money's being used, let's not fool ourselves. There's a lot of gaslighting going on behind closed doors. I mean, did you see the clip? These guys at Rebel News Media, did you see them interview in Greta Thunmork?

Did you see that fake op-ed she did with the police in Germany and that video and then this, have you seen this one or nowhere? She's, you haven't seen this? I'm aware that it exists. I'm trying not to process it too much because I don't even know what it is. So, but the point is like she was doing a picture

like she got arrested and she tweeted saying I got arrested by the German police and and these guys at Rebel News followed her. If you can just click on it, I've got permission from them. They responded back to me. Who is filming your arrest? Watch this. To Germany. Because it looked like you did that in several takes, didn't you? Watch this. You were posing with the police He's answering for you He's he's answering for you. He said you had an agency

What I wish I had one it would be much simpler than well who was filming you then? I don't know media. You don't know who was filming you in Germany He said he knows. He says it was an agency. Do you normally have reporters defending you? Yeah. It's very likely that German police and our WFOSLFU company? And the rest? How many times did you were arrested? Because you posed for several times, didn't you? You don't want to be right now. Sure.

So, for example, a, that's not a conservative that says, why are you making propaganda videos using a young girl who's no longer young, she's 19 or 20 years old right now I'm sorry I don't like to be gaslighted. That's not a conservative thing I relate more to libertarian philosophy But if I have to choose between the two on who I vote for I'm gonna go on one side I think the position from conservatives haven't debated a lot. I haven't had a lot of these guys on on that specific topic is look

We don't know You know where the left says no we know this is the number one crisis we're dealing with and the conservatives are saying, we don't know for a fact. The earth's been around for a long time. How do you know for a fact? How do I know for a fact? So let's keep that as a discussion versus I know for a fact.

And then the second part you talked about, on going back to family nucleus, going back to, you know, family, well, family nucleus, you know, going back to traditional family values, birth control, you know, which 1950 kind of changed again when that came out. Well, sometimes, you know, I see that as a test we do. Like, I would assume as a scientist, I'm not a scientist, but we run a company and we'll say, let's test this comp plan to see if it works. And in all of a sudden, you're like, oh, this comp plan produces terrible results. Guys, let's go back to the old comp plan. There is nothing wrong with that. You know, when you introduce a new compensation

structure or a new model or a new segment or a new show and you're like, this is a terrible show we just launched. We did 10 of them already. They don't like it. Let's just cut it. We're not going to continue funding this show. What's wrong with saying this one area we were willing to be gentle with and open-minded to? Guess what?

It's not producing the right results. We got to go back to the principles that produce results. So are we talking about climate change or are we talking about? Not climate change. We're talking about family dynamics. Oh, nothing's wrong with it except that it's never going to happen.

What do you mean by that? What I mean is prior to reliable birth control, there was a structure that was imposed on us by nature. And again, I'm not defending it as fair, but what it was was coherent. And that structure came from the fact that human babies are incredibly expensive to raise. And I don't mean that financially. I mean the investment that goes into a human baby is like no other creature. But that means is that it requires more than one person

to raise one, which then means that a woman would be crazy if she had a choice to choose to produce an offspring that she would have to raise alone if she had the option to raise it with a partner. So it is that extreme cost which falls initially entirely on women, that they can then redistribute with a partner. That cost drives the system. On the flip side of that, you have the fact that sex for men is one of the, maybe it is the most potent motivator in the universe. There is nothing that tops it. And so, in a world where women guard their reproductive capacity carefully

because they do not want to accidentally produce a child for which they will be fully responsible for raising it. Men have to live up to whatever standard women set in order to be worthy of a sexual relationship, which is the ultimate goal of the evolutionary exercise. That was a coherent world, not fair, but coherent. You introduce birth control in which sex and reproduction are now technologically separated from each other, and that logic no longer works.

Now, it took decades for it to fully break down, but we are at the point where this logic has now given way. And young people do not inherently see the logic of finding a partner. They don't inherently see the logic of producing offspring. And while not having a partner and not producing offspring are valid choices, I would defend people's right to make those choices, the degree to which people have lost sight of why they might want to do those things should be alarming to us. So, is your position pro-choice pro-life?

Is that what you're saying as your second one to make it a little bit more specific for the audience? I'm not really advocating for a solution here. We could talk about what solutions might be. No, no. A question I'm asking is, like when I said, what do conservatives need to do to get your vote? And you said number one is sustainability, the fact that they don't even want to give the, you know,

where I said to you, I think the left is more certain that there's climate change to right as just saying, let's be skeptical and let's be open to fact that maybe there isn't. Maybe this is a natural cycle. The second one, you said how, you know, how 1950 the word control, so is your second one saying that the right is too convinced that it has to be pro-life where it's pro-choice? You know, this is a funny issue. I have known for, since I started thinking about it,

decades ago, that there was vastly more agreement on the issue of choice than we acknowledge that our discussion has become extremely polarized. But most people fall out in a camp that believes there is some right to terminate a pregnancy very early, while we are talking about something that has certainly the potential to become a human, but does not have the characteristics of a human yet, and people grow increasingly uncomfortable the closer we get to the moment of birth. That's where almost all of us are.

Now, there's a group of people who has a religious perspective that I respect, which says, you're interfering in a divine process. Something has decided to produce a child and you are deciding to override it. And that is the reason that a certain brand of religious conservative does not see any room for terminating a pregnancy. But that is a small fraction of the population. Most of us believe there is some right to that technology and that that right grows less and less compelling the closer we get to the moment of birth.

So by and large, I don't need religious conservatives to give up their commitment to their understanding of how the universe works. And frankly, I think the bias that this is a sobering decision is the right one, for sure. But you know, how should society be governed? Well, it should be governed approximately where we all fall out. We're not overly comfortable with this process, but what we believe that it has to exist in some form for lots of reasons. I mean, you know, rape and incest being an obvious case where for most of us, the idea that a rapist can inflict a pregnancy on a woman

and that she has no right to end it is preposterous. Yeah, that, that, that, by the way, that's also where conservatives are conflicted, meaning amongst each other. So I don't know if that makes sense, like some of them are from the standpoint of, no, even if it is rape, even if it is this, even if it is that, you know, you still got to do it, which, you know, that's considered extremist if a person wants to take that position. And some say, no, that's not the part I'm talking about. The part I'm talking about, which by the way,

I saw a joke the other day, fight by a guy, I'm gonna give this guy a shout out, Jeffery Asmuss, which I thought was very funny. Have you seen this one where he gets up and he says, I never understood why conservatives are Republicans pro-life. He says Republicans should stay pro-choice. He says, you know why?

He says, wait for it, it's gonna take you five seconds to get this, he says why. He says, because most kids that get aborted are liberals. Did you get it? So you're sitting there kind of think about it where what a heavy joke right there, because if you think about who and what ethnicity pro-choice hurts the most,

it's, you know, most of the abortions in America, if you can look at the data, you know, the data already yourself. But okay, so let's go pass this one. Let's go away with it. I think there's one point that needs to be on the table, because I do know that conservatives are conflicted amongst themselves about this question,

and there is an argument that absolutely belongs on the table in that argument. What's there in that context? The argument is there actually has to be a right for a woman who has been raped to terminate that pregnancy, and I would hope that it happens as early as possible for many reasons. The reason is an evolutionary one. If you create a scenario in which a woman is forced to carry the product of rape to the point of giving

birth and raising this child. You are opening up a strategy for rapists to reproduce. And the problem is that that's like streambrett. You're taking a very extreme position in what way? I mean, so here's a part that both the left and the right does, that they take an argument that happens less than 1% at a time, and they use that as the basis for the argument on why 100% of the other side's position isn't right.

But I'm not saying that. But that's a very small minute position in case that we're talking about. Why? Tell us why. Because rape is not something that is, you know, as if we take a hundred of the pregnancies that happen. And we say, well, let's really get some data on what caused these pregnancies. One night stands, boyfriend, girlfriend, didn't, you know't use a condom.

You were on the dates, you were off, you forgot to take the pill, how often do people forget to take the pill? There's a lot of kids that are born because somebody forgot the Wednesday pill or the Friday pill. You got somebody that just wants to have the kids because the tax code benefits. Somebody having kids and getting free money from the government.

Another one could be, let me lock up a guy who's got money. And if I have his baby, he has to pay me, you know, child support. There's a lot, the tax code benefits women getting pregnant as a, to a certain sect that do take advantage of that system. But to say rape, rape would be at the bottom of a very low, low, very, small, fracked. Very. Let's keep it that way. That's my point is that if you if you if you open the door to a strategy in which a rapist who can trigger a pregnancy can have we can basically force a woman to give birth to that

child and in most cases to raise it. What you are doing is you are inviting a future in which rape is more common, right? Because it becomes a viable evolutionary factor. I don't know if I agree with that, because there's two things to it. Forget about the viable strategy. One of the strategies of raping is you're going to it. Forget about the viable strategy. One of the strategies of raping is you're going to jail. So the crime, the punishment, we can make that more severe, where in certain cities

in America, it's not treated that way. Certain cities in America, it's kind of like, wow, he's okay, let's give him a second chance, third chance, four chance. There's a lot of cities in America that have rapes walking around because they're forgiven rapes. That's not the fact that we're saying, let's keep the baby if you're raped by a man. That's because of laws are forcing some people to say, I can get away with murder and rape. Well, I would certainly support stronger laws in cases where you actually prove a stranger rape is the case that we're talking about here, then my sense is somebody who would engage in that doesn't

really deserve a second chance. If you're capable of that, what are the chances that when you get out of prison, you're going to be the chances you're going gonna do it again or high. But the fraction of rapes that are actually successfully prosecuted is low. And so both things are true. Yes, by driving the penalty up for somebody who gets caught, you can reduce the viability of the strategy,

but not sufficiently. And so all I'm saying as an evolutionist, I know it's a rough argument, but the argument is you don't want this strategy to be a winner. I don't think I don't think conservatives are going to be sitting there supporting that, but the question then becomes to so so flippant. So you got two sides here. As a person who is you and your wife evergreen, you're the top, your wife's the top professor, you're right behind your top professor.

So essentially you guys are the top to professor in school. 15 years, you got a 16 year old, you got an 18 year old. I think it's fair to say your kids are not gonna go to evergreen, is that a pretty good assessment right there? Now they want to be right there. All right, you have a green team. But here's a part, as a parent and now,

it's different when you're a 29 year progressive Versus a 44 year. I don't know your age, but I'm assuming we were the same age 44 year old Progressive you're I'm 53. Well great. You look good Okay, so a 53 year old progressive, you know your Your optics have changed you're looking at it from your kids. You're seeing how you were treated. You're seeing how maybe you were even on their side and arguing on their side.

Now you're sitting there saying, listen, you know, certain things and life of values are no longer the same. What I used to vote for, that was number one. That was number 13. What I voted for, that was number two. And that was 28. But what I've thought it was number 17 is now number two. What's, what is, what are your top three, four, five reasons on to say, I think this party has what I support, and I think this

party does. What are the top four, five things you vote for? Well, I should tell you, neither of these parties are viable. They're both so deeply corrupt that I don't see either of them being resurrected in some form. And, you know, again, this is exactly why I say reluctant radical. We are now at a place that we have to radically alter this system in order for there to be a system at all 200 years from now. And I care very deeply about this. I do have two kids as you point out, and I'm very concerned about what world they are emerging into and what world they will produce children in. So I wish I wish I could say, look, here's what you need to do to fix the Republican party.

Here's what you would have to do to get the Democrats back on track. This is too far gone. This is, these are both influence peddling rackets, and we suffer from it daily. I mean, and I know it's a very dangerous topic, but I don't think we're ever going to get a better peak at how the system really works than looking at the pandemic that we have just experienced, right?

That's the quality of governance that we've got. It's not good enough to manage a species playing with tools as powerful as the ones that we have. It's just not going to work. Could I just one follow up before we go down to the next topic? I just wanted to revisit what you basically said about birth control. And because it's very high on your list,

essentially, it's what intersectional dynamics, how men and women operate together from a human evolutionary standpoint. My question is this, you kind of use the metaphor of the gas and the brakes with the progressives and the conservatives kind of raining in, like, listen, relax, pump the brakes a little bit, progressives are bringing up ideas, conservatives. Yeah, not too much.

So to use that concept of birth control, you said that for men sex is the most potent motivation in the universe. And women birth control, I believe it was right around 1950, where that was introduced to society and women kind of had their ability to choose, who they're going to have partners with, the argument of hypergamy and all that.

My question is this, you said that women, essentially, are the gatekeepers of sex. Men will do what the women tell them to do. And it's at the point now where the toothpaste is out of the tube, or the genies out of the bottle. Women have birth control. They're fighting for the rights. We saw what happened in the midterms.

It's supposed to be a red wave. All of a sudden, they try to take away abortion rights. Boom, all of a sudden, it's not a red wave, not whatsoever. Women have this choice now. So my question is this, you said it's too late to go back to essentially a make America great again concept, or whatever that was, traditional women.

These days, you kinda highlighted this is one of the biggest problems in society today, is women having the option of birth control and a boarding baby, you're just not having the baby altogether the morning after pill. What solutions can be brought to the table now? I know you said you didn't have all the solutions, but women aren't going back in the kitchen. They're working. They're making more money than ever. They're liberating.

Many of them are though. Many of them are changing society. But I will tell you this, but I will tell you this. You're saying that because results are now, okay, so there are some things that takes a couple decades to test to know it doesn't work This is one of the reasons why I didn't take the test Because I'm like I'm taking a lot of different vaccines who have decades of tests trials 5-10 years. I don't trust nine months of testing, right? So to say you know women are now going back. I don't know if I agree with that because I think a lot of people are saying I women are now going back. I don't know if I agree with that because I think a lot of people are saying, I tested this on 52 years old single making 180 grand and I'm miserable. I wish

I would have gone married. I wish I would have had a different situation. So the results on who is happier today isn't the 185 year old female executive, not married, no kids, market value isn't the same and having to choose on who to date, you know, it's not the same anymore. So this is not everybody, I'm not telling you everybody, some of them are going that direction because I woman powered this, woman powered that, but the way we judge, you know, as at least I'm speaking for myself, is there are a lot of things that we're certain about. Not a lot of things we're certain about. Most things we're not certain about of things that we're certain about. Not a lot of things we're certain about.

Most things we're not certain about. Most things we're skeptical about. This is why when I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson, I said, tell me about debate. He says, I don't believe in debate. I don't like debate. Well, I like debate because a lot of times I sit there and I look at things and I'm like,

maybe this is the right direction we're doing. Maybe this is the right thing that we're doing. I don't know. Let me get the data. Interesting. That's an interesting point. He makes a very good point. And then five, 10, 15, 20 years, oh shit, that was a terrible experiment.

And I was a part of it. And I lived 20 years in this experiment, but we're gonna know this is not the right thing we did. Okay? So you were gonna ask a question. Well, I fundamentally do agree with what you're saying that in general, in society, there's need of corrections. And sometimes there's over corrections.

I think what's happening in this instance with birth control is there was a correction and women's rights and feminists all great. But there's clearly been an over correction where it's like, all right, women have gone off the deep end in some regards of being too liberal and have the ability to do way too much, like you're saying, the traditional woman. I guess what's your take on this and what can be

improved in gender relations, because I believe that's how you started this. All right. You do remind me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and your question about education. Let's return to that afterwards. But I wouldn't phrase it that way. What I would say is that there were spectacular benefits to the consequences of birth control. The liberation of women is a triumph, right? You had a one of the sexes was hobbled in its ability to contribute to the most interesting parts of building a society because of its disproportionate responsibility reproductively. Birth control freed women to do all of the most amazing stuff involved in being human other than producing children. The costs of that, however, have been spectacular. And so this is why I say we can't go back.

What are the costs though? Well, we used to move mountains, and we moved mountains based on the fact that the system was coherent. So many used to move mountains. Why? Well, in part to become worthy of women worth partnering with, right? That was the logic of the system. And it put men on the moon. You take that logic out because now sex has become mundane. And we aren't the same people that we were.

We're not as good to each other. We are not moving in the right direction, the coherence in the system. You don't think so? You don't think we are good to each other? What kind, what intel or studies shows that we're not good to each other? Well, I mean, let's put it this way. I don't want to pretty up the past.

Obviously, there was lots of terrible stuff, including lots of lineage against lineage stuff that was for at least a few decades, definitely waning. It may be returning now, but yes, I think at the moment we are being terrible to each other? Are we being told that we're being terrible to each other? We are being, we are being induced to be terrible to each other. We're being induced to be terrible to each other. Can you unpack that please? Sure. Let us take the, I mean, you can take any of these issues in which we find ourselves so very polarized, you know.

You can take the abortion issue. We're really not that far apart in terms of what people say to each other over the dinner table about what they believe, but politically it's an unresolvable issue. Likewise, everything that happened over COVID, you were either pro-mask, pro-vax, anti-early treatment, or the inverse, right? That was not sense. The fact is, this was a complex system in which we all had a shared interest in figuring out what was going on, but we could barely even stand each other, right? That's the commonplace thing that we see on almost every issue.

And so, I don't think how it works, I don't know. But that it functions to keep us back on our heels so that we are incapable of moving in a coherent direction is clear. It is serving somebody's interests. It is protecting something that has power and has everything to lose if we are able to, you know, find our humanity and move forward as one people, right? I mean, we're supposed to do that. That's what patriotism is. We're supposed to love our country and we're supposed to figure out how to govern it

and we're going to make mistakes and we're supposed to be honest about what they were and figure out how to do better in the future. But we're incapable of that because we are now divided into teams, right? We are loyal to a jersey, right? We've always been divided. And I think that's natural for us, always, like, I'm team smoking weed, I'm not, I'm team going to church, I don't believe in God,

I'm team Lakers, I'm team Clippers, I'm team UFC, I'm team football, I'm team, you know, that's what makes us awesome. That's what makes us unique. The part that I think we're bred, we kind of fell for the trap is my wife is right now going through the journey of health. And she's like the other day, four documentaries back to back to back to back to back and she's sitting there looking at documentaries from both sides. One documentary is executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio.

The solution to the world is we all have to be vegans. You know, the other documentary is food ink. Look what big business in, you know, in the food industry is doing. Big food is catastrophic what they're doing and how they're manipulating food, what they're putting in it and we're buying into it, because it's a business model, right?

Even with big pharma, there's big food, there's big pharma, there's big, a lot of things going on. And then there's big media. Media's job is for us to hate each other. The more there's conflict, the more there's challenge, they've figured it out, the more money they make, the more we're divided, the more there's an enemy, the more there's the monster, the more there's,

you better be careful, the more there's, look at world economic form, got together to tell us, there's an extra terrestrial, you know, crisis we're facing and we're wondering if ET is showing up, you know, because the first thing I think about is ET phone home. What are we doing? They contacted ET and we don't.

I mean, what is, but people are buying into this bullshit and they're falling for this trap. So, but behind closed doors, I'm sitting. I got a lot of people. I sit down, would we disagree? Would we have great conversations? And one could be a Muslim, I'm a Christian. And I say, listen, man, you have to understand that,

ta-da-da, what you're talking about, but we walk away and have a great drinks together great food together Maybe they don't have the drinks, but we have great food together But the point is this the point I'm trying to make is I Don't know if we are as divided as we're being told we are. I don't know if we are you're maybe I'm wrong No, you're you're right and in fact there was a very interesting study a few years back called the Hidden Tribes Report in which they actually went through it. And they found that there were really five coalitions, but that the majority of us exist in a large, what they called the exhausted middle, right? Where we basically agree on things. And I believe this is absolutely true. This is also matched my experience of talking to people. I always try to talk to people who are, you know,

people I'm not supposed to be able to relate to. And it's amazing how much basis there is for us to get along. The problem though, and you know, you hit on it rather directly. We are built to compete, right? Evolution, this is the most fundamental aspect of evolution is competition. It's how we became great. And so our tendency to compete with each other

is the engine that drives the system. The problem is, or one of them, is that the competition has been between lineages, and it has built everything. Right? It is our attempt to get ahead of each other that has caused us to discover all of the things that have made us powerful and insightful. that have made us powerful and insightful. We can't keep doing it, right? The lineage against lineage competition has to end because our tools are now so powerful

that if we continue playing that game, it will be our lineage against lineage, meaning I'm black against white. I'm, you know, Asian against Middle, you're talking about like, yeah, I'm avoiding the word race because race is a Bastardization of the real concept. Well, we're not well. We're not again. I don't think we're doing that because I I see more white people, Mary and black people I see more Hispanics, Mary and Middle Eastern. There's a famous comedian, Tehran, shout out to Tehran, black Persian comedian.

His name is Tehran, the capital of Iran, but he's black. Can you pull up what Tehran looks like? If you saw Tehran in the streets, you would never call him Tehran. You would call him maybe Tyrone, but not Tehran. And that's what Tehran is. And he's funny.

I like him a lot. I saw this guy years ago and he's still at it doing a great job But I'm seeing more people that are in a racial relationships and it's happening on both sides by the way You go to Christians you go to atheists you go to all sides that's happened Maybe not as much on the Muslim side because a lot of times Muslims marry Muslims or even Indians will marry But even that has opened up a little bit where they were going through, you know, hey, arrange marriage.

And that was back in the 70s, A and 80s, some families are still doing it, but it's only 25% as arrange marriage. We're used to be 100%. We're becoming a little bit more understanding to say, hey, we got a lot of things in common. You and I made this agree on eight things, but dude, we agree on 92 things.

So let's kick it. Let's have a great conversation and let's debate the eight things we disagree with. Maybe we only come down to four or three or two, but I still think the lineage part is probably less today than before. Again, it goes back to the media's telling us we're racist. The media's telling us you're a white supremacist,

the evergreen professor who doesn't want all he wants to do is a white's meeting and other people are not invited and how dare you, you better kick them out and then the school have to pay you and your wife a quarter million a piece or whatever the number was that they have to settle with. They have to pay you guys, right, for what they did. So I don't know about that. I think we are more and more open. Like when I was dating girls and my dad one day says, look, I would like to see a Mary in a Syrian or an Armenian. I said that very slim chance that's gonna be happening.

Okay. It's most likely gonna be a black girl because that's what most of my girlfriends were or it's gonna be Hispanic or it's gonna be somebody else or it's gonna be some ideals, but maybe end up being Middle Eastern. Well, end up being a white girl from Texas, okay? And we got four kids, we fight,

we do our best to be happy, we try to make our family work. Do we agree on everything? No, but I think we collectively, those stories need to be told, rather than these bullshit stories that they don't just block against whites and run to the balance, stop it, knock it.

And by the way, the ratings are showing Americans are sick of that philosophy. The ratings, if we, if we, if we gauged whether we're divided or not, Brett, the ratings would show we're getting more and more united because we want to watch less and less of CNN and MSNBC because they're getting crushed. We want to watch less and less of Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kemmel because they're making fun of people that disagree with them and we're more like, just stop it, man.

Where is the J-Len of Days? Where are the, you know, Letterman Days or Johnny Carson Days? Too much gamesmanship. We don't want to do it anymore. I think we're making progress. Again, I may be wrong and I'm just seeing it from one lens, but I actually think we're making more progress towards being united than being divided. If we turn out too much TV, we are being divided. If we don't, and we just kind of talk to people, we're a little more united.

All right, let me try this from an evolutionary framework. Please. Let me try this from an evolutionary framework. Please. Lineage against lineage competition is what forced us to become so capable. The reason that our brains are so disproportionately large compared to other creatures has to do without thinking each other. We've been in an arms race, and it has made us all smart.

That tendency manifests as racism throughout much of history. You are absolutely right that that thing was disappearing rapidly. For most of my life, everybody knew that it wasn't a good thing. And where we are is we are in a tension between two valid evolutionary reasons to collaborate. One of them has to do with genes. That's the lineage versus lineage thing. The other has to do with reciprocity, right? When we put aside genes and we collaborate with somebody because they have some insight that we don't have and by partnering, we get emergence where the

sum is greater, the hole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is a much better way of competing. The problem is the gene-based competition is more fundamental. It has existed longer. And so, as we lose touch with the fact that we are all actually jeopardized by the same things, and we would all benefit by heading in the same direction, we break down into that tribal mode. And that is where we are. We are being divided. We went through a period in which it's not like racism had disappeared, but it was disappearing rapidly.

And now it's back with a vengeance. You are right. People are sick of it. And so they are now defaulting into demonizing people for other stuff, right? Maybe it's not the color of your skin, but it's the fact that you're unvaccinated and you're putting grandma at risk, right? So that desire to see the world as us and them is still haunting us, and we have to get past it because the future will be very bleak if that's the driving force. The future that we need is the one that the West figured out, which was put aside the gene stuff, collaborate because it's a good way of getting ahead. Right? That melting pot idea is the thing to be resurrected, and I'm concerned that we are seeing it break down. We are not tending it, and it is falling apart in front of our eyes. and it is falling apart in front of our eyes.