The Joe Rogan Experience - #1055 - Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Bret Weinstein was a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Sign up for a free crash course on Evolutionary Thinking at http://bretweinstein.net/early

Boom and we're live. How are you? What's going on man? I'm doing alright. A lot of stuff is going on. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. Since your settlement, Jamie and I were hoping that you would come in with one of those Paul Wall grills with like diamonds on it and maybe some furs. Yeah. Pull up in a Cadillac.

on it and maybe some furs pull up in a Cadillac. Well, unfortunately, it's enough money to make a difference, but it's not enough money to no longer have to think about such things. Yeah, you could temporarily ball, though, if you were irresponsible and you didn't have a family. If I didn't have a family.

You'd get crazy for a couple months. Yeah, now, as it happens, it gives us room to think about how to replace our incomes. We have about two years at our current rate of burning to keep the family afloat. Yeah, for people, just so this is a standalone podcast, so people can kind of, what you need to do if you're really interested in this, if really interested, is Google Brett Weinstein, and you will get the full story from beginning to end with Evergreen State College, where I'll just give you the short version of it. There was a bunch of what you would kindly call social active people, social justice

warriors, people who, there's a movement going on in this country, and it's very aggressive. there's a movement going on in this country, and it's very aggressive. And one of the things that they wanted to do is they wanted to have a day where all white people stayed home. You thought that was racist. They thought you were racist for saying that was racist. And they decided to literally take over the college for a short period of time. The dust settled. You just got a big fat settlement.

You're out of there. And then the woman who was kind of at the head of it, she got a nice little chunk of change too, which I thought was quite odd. Yeah, the college settled with her even though it was quite clear she had no legal case. So there's a bit of a mystery about why they would have paid her to resign when in fact they could have just stood their ground She could have probably become the president of the college if she wanted to the way the way that guy Had responded to the students when they told him to put his hands down because he was being threatening

And then he put his hands away He's talking to them and using hand gestures, and they're like put your hands down you're threatening us with microaggressions He puts his hands down they They all started laughing, which just tells you everything about what their intent was, what was really going on there. But after I saw that, I'm like, God, she could have been the president. They should have just had her be president. The whole thing, it was a kangaroo court. It was mockery. The whole thing was absurd. I will say it's very hard to get the story right in any sort of short synopsis. And so for anybody who really wants, it's not even complete. But Heather and I, my wife Heather was also a professor at Evergreen,

and we wrote a more complete version of the story that allows people to see how the internal politics of the college played out into what they ultimately saw on YouTube. So that's in the Washington Examiner last Tuesday. I read that. Yeah, it's deeply disturbing. But it's not if you've been paying attention. And, you know, you and I and Jordan Peterson and, boy, a bunch of people have tried to figure out what's going on today. Boy, a bunch of people have tried to figure out what's going on today. Like, why has this movement become so aggressive and not just aggressive, but absurd?

It's not logical. Like, the way they're approaching things is from this very strange, entitled, and just oddly fanatical way. You want to be careful not to mix what they say with what they're actually up to, because what they say is very confusing. It can't be parsed logically. There's so many contradictions so close to the surface that one has the sense that they are deeply confused, and some of them are. But there is also a strategic movement under the surface, which we can't listen into directly. And it is more sophisticated than we think. In other words, it is managing to wield power in spite of the fact that its explanation for why it is entitled to wield power doesn't make any sense. So what do you think the underlying motivation is? Or at least their underlying plan? I would say we have to be careful.

There are a lot of people who go along with it who I would argue are tools of the movement. And they are doing its bidding without understanding the objective. But the prime movers are quite clearly interested in taking power. They want power. They have a superficial rationalization for why they are entitled to power. And they are wielding power, and they are wielding weaponized stigma as a mechanism for gaining it. So you said that Naima could have become the president of the college. I don't know whether she could have. It would have been a very

unusual path. But I do know that for more than a year, I watched people unable to resist anything she said. Even people who knew better would, in faculty meetings, they would reflexively thank her for anything she said, no matter how absurd it was. And that was clearly a sort of, you know, it's the equivalent of wolves bearing their jugular. It was, don't hurt me. I'm with you. Don't hurt me. And so that kind of power is something that a person who is cynical enough to wield stigma to get it might covet. And so anyway, I think there's a small number of people who really do know what they're doing. And their point is we can wipe many of the obstacles to our having power off the map by throwing accusations at them that they cannot resist. Yeah, the big accusation is racism.

That's always the big one. That's one that you never want to have thrown your way. If you are deemed a racist, it's akin to being deemed a rapist. deemed a racist. It's like it's it's akin to being deemed a rapist, even if it's a false charge. Like, boy, most people are going to hear the first statement before they ever look into the possibility of you being exonerated. It's you being called a racist is a very, very dangerous thing in today's society. It's a very dangerous thing. I do think it's important that we not do their bidding by inflating that danger beyond what it actually is. So I do, we will never know for sure what the trajectory would have been absent what happened at Evergreen. But I do think standing up to the mob at Evergreen

and just saying, frankly, no, I'm not a racist. Well, here's what's really important for people who don't know you. You're a very progressive guy. You're very left wing, very left leaning. You're not in any way, shape or form a conservative. And so this like this is this is the left eating itself. It is the left eating itself. But I was also in the lucky position of being able to imagine what was going to happen when that accusation broke. And knowing that there were so many people who knew that that couldn't possibly be right about me, that I was going to survive it.

And it's not as if there aren't huge numbers of people who still to this day apparently believe I'm a racist in spite of the fact that nothing has emerged in all of the time with all of the incentive for somebody to bring something forward that would suggest that I have an issue with race somewhere in my history. It never emerged. And so people do need to understand that it is possible to survive that accusation. Well, especially with your background, though. I mean, people don't know your background. Was it at Yale that you had? Penn. Penn. Yeah.

Tell that story if you could. Sure. I'll do the quick and dirty version. Cliff notes. I was a freshman at Penn. A friend of mine was rushing a fraternity and that fraternity was holding what they called a mystery event. And I wasn't rushing a fraternity. I wasn't interested, but he convinced me that I didn't have anything to do that night and that I should go with him. And I did. And after some

relatively standard fraternity shenanigans, the event turned into one in which the fraternity had hired prostitutes, black prostitutes from the local environment. And the situation, Penn is in a pretty rough neighborhood, and this was a pretty wealthy Jewish frat. And so there was, you know, something pretty unsettling about a wealthy Jewish frat hiring black prostitutes from the local neighborhood to engage in what started out to be a strip tease. As this thing began to unfold and I realized I didn't have any interest in being part of this event, I made one of the bigger mistakes of my life and I members of the fraternity rolled into the dorm that night and told me what happened. I was absolutely appalled because what had happened was the fraternity had enacted a mock rape of these prostitutes using cucumbers and ketchup. And the idea that there was anything acceptable about a, you know, an organization that had special privileges on the campus behaving this way, I couldn't get past it. And so anyway, I went to the paper and various things unfolded. The paper botched the story and made it look like I was troubled by the fact that there were strippers rather than troubled by what actually had ended up happening.

And I ended up writing an editorial for the paper, and all hell broke loose. I got death threats. The police started tracking phone numbers on my phone to see who was threatening me. Ultimately, there was a trial of the fraternity. The college did not want to put the fraternity on trial, but ultimately public pressure forced them to do it. I testified at the trial, although since I hadn't seen the thing directly, what I could say was limited. But while I was in the witness room with the other witnesses, people who had rushed the fraternity but had not pledged it, the fraternity brothers, including, I believe, the president,

came into the witness room and started bullying these witnesses and coaching them on what they should say in front of this university panel. Anyway, ultimately, the university threw the frat off campus for a year, forbid them from pledging a class. And anyway, there's a lot more to the story. I got an award from the National Organization for Women, actually, for, I forgot their terminology, but for basically for standing up for women who needed to be defended or something like that. You said you've made the biggest mistake, one of the biggest mistakes of your life by leaving, meaning that if you were there,

you could have probably stopped it or you could at least have known exactly what was going on. There's no way I could have stopped it. But I left because I didn't want to be party to this event. But sometimes, I think journalists know this. I was a freshman in college, so I didn't know it yet. But journalists understand that sometimes something horrifying happens, and the job that you are best positioned to do is documenting it

so that the world can understand how such things occur and do something about it. And if I had understood that that was probably my highest and best use at that moment, I would have stuck around and paid attention to what had happened rather than having to go through convincing the world that something had happened, which I had not directly seen. Yeah. But how could you have known? There's no, I don't think you should be hard on yourself at all.

You're 18, right? Exactly. How could you have known? How could you have known even if you were 30 how could you have known what was going to happen it looked like prostitutes and you're like i don't want to be here right see ya exactly you didn't know there was going to be a mock rape right i couldn't have known but in any case in retrospect it was a mistake it's so it's so crazy that they let groups of kids live in a house together and get hammered when they don't even have their frontal cortex developed yet i

mean they're just all living together, feeding off of each other. You have mob mentality, all this diffusion of responsibility because you have a large group of people that's also like you and everybody's, it's so bananas that as few incidents happen as they do. I mean, you would think that those things would just be chaos the moment you opened up the door to every frat house. Yeah. And you know, there's more chaos than we know because a lot of what takes place we don't I mean, you would think that those things would just be chaos the moment you open up the door to every frat house. Yeah. And, you know, there's more chaos than we know because a lot of what takes place we don't we don't find out about.

But it's a shame because one could take the thing that drives people into those organizations and one could use it to power something that was useful and interesting. Yeah. And, you know, really was deeply enriching. And I know there, you know, how much flack am I going to take for giving the fraternity system a hard time on your podcast? But plenty of people will tell me how enriching their fraternity experience was. And, you know, even at Penn, there were a couple fraternities that were I was, as you can imagine, hated throughout the fraternity system at Penn after I had come forward. But there were two fraternities that actually didn't hate me and were welcoming even in that climate. So I don't want to portray them as a monolith. They're not. But it does seem like a wasted opportunity that that kind of energy that goes into fraternity life could be directed to something really amazing. And it's a shame that it doesn't happen more often. Well, I'm sure there's a lot of great camaraderie and it's probably a lot of fun to go through that experience together with people that are your same age and you're actually living in a house together.

But just, man, you should probably have some fucking adults in that room. Something like that. I mean, it just seems like, you know, just to limit your liability. Yep. Right. I have a few 35-year-olds running around going, hey, what are you doing over there, Mike? You sure about that? That's going to light the whole place on fire.

Don't do that. You won't be able to put that out. Yep. Don't light that one on fire. Yeah. Just, I don't know, just crazy. So that's your situation. So anybody that would think of you as a conservative or a racist, it's like,

it's clearly the evidence points to the contrary. Well, I, you know, this issue of conservatism is one that I would like to also get right. And I'm not sure I ever say this in a way that people know what I'm talking about. But I'm, I'm very progressive, but I'm very progressive because I live in a world that's really screwed up. And so the idea that we have to make some progress seems just transparently correct to me. I would like to live in a world that is so well structured that I could be a conservative in it. And I don't mean a conservative in the sense, the ideological sense. I mean, I would like to be in a world where tinkering with it stood a better chance of making it worse and was unnecessary. And so that would turn me into a conservative because it would be the right thing to be. And then a proper analysis would tell you this is the time to conserve the structure rather than change it. But in this world, yeah, it turns out I'm a progressive. And the events that people keep telling me that they, they're sure I'm now a

closet conservative, that the, what I faced must have turned me against the left. And that's, that's not at all what happened. Yeah, I agree with you. I've, I've faced that myself that people say, Oh, you know, you're, you're going to turn more conservative with all this. No, I'm just more resentful of these, this fake progressive movement, like you said, has ulterior motives. There's more to it. And it's not accurate. Like the portrayals of humans in these movements are not accurate. I don't think it's healthy.

I don't think it's normal. And I think there's a lot of – the look the game of capitalism is a very confusing one and there's certainly certainly some very evil aspects to it right but the idea that uh the the answer is marxism seems to me to be just as just as poorly thought out oh it it's it it's at least as poorly thought out um you know, Marxism, the flaw is more obvious. I think the flaw is what we in biology would call group selection. The belief that if we just all row in the same direction, we'll get somewhere marvelous. And that's true that if we did all row in the same direction, we would.

But there's a very good game theoretic reason that that can't be. Yeah. That as soon as you have everybody rowing in the same direction, then the win goes to the person who figures out how not to row and gets the benefit of everybody else's rowing in that direction while they sweep in the profits. And so that tears apart anything structured the way communism is structured. Yeah. And that's conveniently ignored. I think I really have always believed that competition is good and it's because I've been involved in competition my whole life. And I think it's it it helps you understand yourself. You're competing against other people, but ultimately, you're really competing against yourself, because you're trying to better yourself. And I believe that that's the argument for getting children involved in athletics or games or something that's very difficult to do, whether it's chess or pool or something. I think things that are hard to do

are good for you. Competing is good for you because it teaches you about focus and discipline and understanding that you can reap the rewards of hard work. And obviously, this can get distorted and you can get these billionaire ol know, billionaire oligarchs who, you know, control vast amounts of wealth and then they have their family and everyone inherits it. And you have these fucking mutants that are all inbred and they're all in the same bloodline. I mean, that's history, right? I mean, that has taken place. But I think that we should work very hard for equality of opportunity. I think equality of opportunity, give everybody a chance to play a game, everybody a chance to get into something and try to better

themselves with some endeavor. But whenever I hear equality of outcome, that's when I put my foot down. I'm like, that's not real. You can't say that because some people work harder. And if you have true equality, you're never going to have equality of outcome. Because true equality is, I have friends that are brilliant, that are fantastic human beings, but they're essentially beach bums. You know, they just like kick back and relax and do the minimal amount of work, get things done, and just enjoy life. Have a couple cocktails, go to the beach, have laughs with friends. That's what they like to do. And then I have other friends that want to be world martial arts champions.

And you have two different kinds of lives, two different types of human beings, a style of human. lives, two different types of human beings, a style of human. One person is going to be extremely satisfied with one life and extremely dissatisfied with the other life. And you can interchange them back and forth. Well, you said a bunch of things. We could spend three hours unpacking what you just said. Let's say a number of things. One, equality of opportunity is something I have yet to find the reasonable person that does not agree on this point in principle. Lots of people will tell you it's not worth the effort of trying to pursue it because of the danger of what happens if you do. But nobody disagrees. Nobody reasonable disagrees that it would be desirable to have that.

Equality of outcome, it's impossible. If you pursue it, you end up with a dystopia. And even if it were possible, it would not be desirable for the reasons you point to about the benefits of what you're calling competition. And I would want to tear competition into a couple different values. There's true competition against yourself. You know, you're skiing down the slope and you're paying attention to how you're doing and you're trying to do it better than you've done it before, right? And there's competition against others. And the thing that unites those two things is that what you are trying to accomplish is real.

it is the world telling you how successful you are at something directly rather than through some sort of social channel, some sort of reward handed to you or some compliment given to you by somebody. And there's a tremendous danger in a socially mediated world in which those who are successful are successful because some social thing has told them that they are correct. Because you can be dead wrong, seem correct, and move ahead in a social world, whereas if you're doing carpentry, if you're in some sort of competition, the nature of the beast is one that will tell you when you've got it wrong. And therefore, it will allow you to actually improve your insight in whatever form you have it.

So I'm a tremendous fan of the idea that even if your world is largely socially mediated, you have to make sure that some part of it isn't. And you are confronting something real enough to tell you when you're confused so that you can learn how not to be confused. But there are people in this world that do want to push towards an equality of outcome. Yes. And they make it sound as if this is not just logical, but ethical and possible in the future. And that you are on the wrong side of history if you think that capitalism and competition and all these things you just talked about are good. And that really the best thing is to force people to become some sort of utopian creature that works together in unison and everybody is egalitarian and there's no need for feminism and men's rights activists

because everybody looks at everyone as an equal. Well, there are two kinds of people who will advocate for equality of outcome. One kind of person who will is confused. They don't understand what happens if you go down this road. And the other one is cynical. And they're using this as an excuse to justify something that just so happens to reward them. But equality of opportunity isn't this way. It solves all of those problems. Nobody believes that you're going to have it ever realized in a perfect form. There's always going to be bad luck that's going

to reduce somebody's opportunity. What you don't want is any systematic bias in luck. In other words, we're all going to suffer some bad luck and we'll all have some good luck. And some of those things will actually shape the trajectory of our lives. What you don't want is some population that just so happens to suffer more than its share of bad luck, which is what we have now. So there is something to pursue here, but we're so busy on this other pointless conversation about equality of outcome that we can't get back to the thing that we all agree on that's actually the right goal. And there's also some background chatter that you get from the less thought out where the people are really just upset that other people have more.

And so this is an uneducated, not very well thought out perspective on equality of outcome. They just are upset that someone else has something and they're trying to somehow or another diminish the effect of their hard work and get something for themselves. Well, you can imagine, though. So maybe we take a little digression here. My experience over the last six months has done a bunch of things in my life. One of them is it has put me in touch with quite a number of black conservatives, which I must tell you, it has changed my understanding of the world substantially because I knew there were black conservatives, and I always thought, are they confused? Are they not understanding which side they should be on?

And that is not what's going on. What is going on is that there is a dialogue, which I couldn't hear at least, which looks at the world. You can view the unfairness in the world two different ways. You can look at it and you can say, well, there's structural unfairness in the world. And the cards that we in this community are dealt are not fair. We're not getting our share of the good cards. Or you can look at the world from the point of view of personal responsibility. And you can say, well, it's kind of an academic question, whether the cards you got were fair, you should play them as best you can, given what they are. The thing that

I didn't get was one has almost no ability to address the question of how the cards are dealt. It's just not in the range of somebody, an individual who discovers that the cards are unfairly dealt can't do very much about that fact. But that individual can do a hell of a lot about their own position in the world by recognizing that actually you, especially if the cards are unfairly dealt,

you need to play them very well. And that developing the skill to play them well has the ability to overcome at least some of the unfairness in how they're dealt. And so I have now listened in on this conversation. I've been invited into the conversation amongst some of these black conservatives. And this is what they are really saying is that there is, from the point of view of where to put one's efforts, dealing on the personal responsibility side pays back better, which I don't think frees us in civilization from addressing the question of how the cards are dealt. I think we should be focused on it. But anyway, it more or less solved the mystery in a way that I thought was quite fascinating. And, you know, I'm heartened that they were willing to invite

me into that conversation so I could hear it and finally figure out what was going on. So they advocate towards discipline and personal responsibility as being core tenets that you should reinforce. Right. And they are very sensitive to the issue of what happens when you focus on the unfairness of how the cards are dealt, which is that, What happens when you focus on the unfairness of how the cards are dealt, which is that, you know, what what progressives typically miss is that it really does create a culture of dependency. If you focus on the fact that the cards are unfairly dealt and that that's why you're facing a disadvantage, which is largely true. Nonetheless, it demotivates you from pursuing success because you you recognize that you're starting at a disadvantage and that, you know, you're unlikely to win the game. On the other hand, the game isn't what we think. If you can make progress and deliver your kids a head start relative to where you were,

that's a win in the game. So anyway, again, I don't want to trivialize any part of this. I think the unfairness of the way the cards are dealt is really important, and we have obligations to address it. But from the point of view of individuals within a community trying to plot a course, being focused on the personal responsibility side makes a ton of sense. What are your thoughts on affirmative action? I've changed my tune. I used to be for affirmative action because it is justified. I used to be for affirmative action because it is justified. But now the downsides of it are they loom very large for me. And so what I would say is we want to separate the whether or not it is justified to engage in some kind of intentional intervention to fix a problem that has become chronic.

And then we separate that from what it is that we individual level. Because I will say before any of what happened to me at Evergreen happened, I did have the experience of having quite a number of black students in particular who suffered a totally, a stigma that had nothing to do with them. Students who did very well on their own merits, who lived in a world that was quick to judge them as having succeeded based on some advantage that for all I know, they didn't even have. I don't know that any of this, I mean, you know, in the role of professor, you don't necessarily know how your student ends up in front of you. But I had no reason. I had some very bright students who I think suffered a stigma that came from the fact that people in general imagined that affirmative action was playing some role in their world that it wasn't.

I mean, affirmative action isn't even legal in Washington. So the fact that the stigma appends to people is preposterous in that context in particular. That's fascinating. appends to people is preposterous in that context in particular. That's fascinating. I had a friend who was a fireman who told similar stories, and he was talking about the resentment of the other people that were on the fire force if a guy got in, even if a guy was qualified, if a guy was black, because they assumed that he wasn't as qualified. And the reason why he got through was through affirmative action. He was like, it's so crazy, because what it is, is they're trying to combat racism by

fueling racism inadvertently. Yes. It creates this whole cascade of effects. And so the question really, the civilization wide question is what do we do about, I mean, and we could retune the analysis for each of the populations in question. In the case of black people in the new world, that is the Americas, putting them together in a synthetic culture that was built to serve the masters, right? obviously limits access to the huge library of insights that happened to be housed with the population that transported these folks from Africa. So in any case, my point would be that is hobbling. That was intentionally hobbling during slavery. The legacy of that hobbling is one that's hard to quantify.

We don't know what role that plays. But I can say any population that has, I'm going to speak now as I do as a biologist, I think of us as robots that have a computer on our shoulders that runs software. And our culture is the software. that runs software and our culture is the software. If you take that robot with the computer and you delete the software package and then you install some other software package designed to make it do one particular job, that has tremendous harm built into it and it's reversible. But it is not, I don't, I think we know that we didn't succeed in fixing this problem. I think emancipation did not properly deal with how much harm had been done by bringing understanding because our understanding of biology and culture wasn't sophisticated yet. It still isn't. And so I think we do at some point have to do an honest accounting of how much damage happened in that process.

damage happened in that process. And we also have to realize that that damage, you know, I mean, I know right now, having been active in trying to make the world a better place, I know that I'm running afoul of an argument called white man's burden, right? And so we all know that this is a narrative. But the point is that white man's burden argument will be wielded against me for even saying this. But nonetheless, I don't see any way around it. I think the real story of what happened in the Americas is not, um, a nice story and the implications are with us to this day. Nobody knows how deep they go because we haven't studied the question properly. And in fact, many of the people who are on the left pushing this sort of naive narrative about equality are, I think, fearful of what will happen if we study the question. I don't share their fear.

No, I think you're right about fearful. There is a lot of, like what you were talking about before, like with that woman bringing up ridiculous things in meetings and people just sort of showing their jugular, please don't attack. You get a lot of that. I think of us in terms of the United States or just this mass of humans. I think of us as a super organism. And I think if you had an organism that had a broken knee, you would go, well, I got to fix that knee. I can't just give that knee less work. Is it possible to fix the knee? Yeah, well, I got to fix that knee. You know, I can't just give that knee less work. Is it possible to fix the knee?

Yeah, well, let's fix the knee. You don't want to just give the knee less work. You don't want to make it easier for the knee to get by. What you want to do is, like, strengthen it. So my thought, and I've said this, this is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but if you really wanted to make America great again, right, you really wanted to make America great, what you would want to do is have less losers.

So you'd want to go and find these places where people are in these economically deprived areas where there's a ton of crime and violence and they don't have like a real good sense of like a potential positive outcome from where they're at. And transform that. With a fraction of the money that we spend trying to rebuild nations and invading Afghanistan, we could invest in many of our gigantic problems that we have in inner cities and completely rebuild them. It could be done. I mean, and it could have radical implications on the entire country as a whole. If you have instead of like a place like Baltimore, for instance, right? I had Michael Woods on who was a former police officer in Baltimore.

He sort of explained all the different issues that happened in Baltimore, particularly where there was areas where they literally weren't selling homes to black people. They would not sell homes. Like, this is like a white-only area. Like, they had systematic racism built into the system for a long time. And just, if someone just invested money into the, not someone, the United States government, you know, if we systematically invested money into these places and rebuilt them with community centers, places where people could go where they were safe, staff them with a ton of people that were motivated, counselors, people that wanted to help, give them activities, give them skills and trades and show them ways out. Give them, like, design it. That's not nearly as impossible as trying to rebuild Afghanistan or nation building.

But we're doing that. We're doing that all over the place. I mean, Halliburton got no-bid contracts for billions of dollars to do shit that we don't even know what the fuck they were doing over there, right? If we could have a fraction of that money and invest it into inner cities, you could literally change entire generations of human beings that are coming out of there. A couple of things. One, by the way, I love the analogy of the busted knee because in fact, we used to make this mistake medically, right? Until recently, we didn't really understand that

part of the healing process was not protecting the knee, but putting it through physical therapy that properly exposed it to stresses so that it rebuilt and came back strong. And so we are making that error and we have made that error. In terms of what to do with the stratification of society in a way that locks up opportunity in some communities and not others. I think we should be honest with ourselves about why that happens. So I agree, you could make what would be massive investments in communities for a fraction of what we spend tinkering abroad in ways that have just spent huge amounts of treasure on projects that didn't work, right? So we could do that. The reason that that doesn't happen, I don't think

has anything to do with it being inobvious that it would be a good thing to do. I think it has to do with the same group selection issue that we were talking about with respect to communism, which is to say, if you are at the top of the system, do you want to educate somebody else's kids to compete with yours? And so there's a reason that we, why do our public schools suck? Is it because we don't know how to make a school? I don't think so. I think it's because people know how to make a school when it's for their kids, and they're not so interested in making a school for other people's kids. And so this is a deep, chronic problem with our sociopolitical system. We have to confront that. And actually, I think we have to come to agreement that actually, it is in the long term wise to educate other people's kids, even if in the short term it's economically frightening. stupid and making sure that the school system is frustrating.

And I mean, that's, uh, I've always felt like that conspiracy was really just, there's no motivation to, to make it better. I mean, and, and the, the, when you look at the amount of money that teachers get paid, I mean, it's just disturbing. The, you think of the, uh, the, the job of, I don't have to tell you, you're a goddamn teacher, but you got paid. Don't go about it that way, folks. But what we're talking about here is the most important thing that can happen to your child in the developmental phase, right? The education, like giving them a view of the world, explaining them all these things that they had

not known before. Your first experiences with so many different subjects and topics and concepts come from your teachers. And I got really lucky, man. I mean, I went to a public school in high school in Newton, Massachusetts. I went to Newton South High School, and it was a really good school. And I still had shitty teachers. I still had, you know, even in that really good school, comparatively really good, because I went to a school before that in Jamaica Plain, which was like an inner city school, and it was scary, real dangerous. Just like, just, you know, not like the most dangerous in Boston, but very sketchy. 17-year-old kids in seventh grade that had never graduated, like violence, like a lot of weirdness.

Like I had my head down, got through that year. And then all of a sudden I was in this, we called it fast times at Hebrew high because it was like predominantly Jewish neighborhood. But it was, uh, even then there was, there was still some terrible teachers there. You know, it's just the job is so important. And we in this country have done some weird thing where we've taken one of the most important jobs that you could ever, you could ever hire someone to do educate children and made it almost like it's inconsequential.

Yeah. You know, I'm hesitant. I'm not always hesitant about conspiracy. There are conspiracies and we don't deal well with it. But one doesn't need conspiracy to explain this. This effectively can evolve without anybody's consciously thinking I want to sabotage somebody else's kid's school. in school was, it was horrifying. School did not work for me. And maybe, you know, every five teachers, I hit one who invested and cared and took the time to scratch their head about why I wasn't succeeding. And, uh, that must've like had an impact on you though, as an educator, though, you remember those people, those one out of five. Well, this is the funny thing is I, while I was teaching, I taught for 14 years at Evergreen and I felt like maybe I wasn't the only,

but I was very nearly the only person on faculty anywhere that I could think of who had not been a good student. And well, but this was a very interesting window because I, you know, I became a professor because I loved science. And so the academy was where science happened, not because I wanted to be a teacher. My experience in school made me want to get away from the thing as fast as possible.

But having had the experience of school completely failing and my, to my own surprise, learning how to think without school, that's not where I learned it. I learned it primarily from my grandfather and my brother and other people in my environment who weren't associated with school. Being a professor. And I think this was only possible at Evergreen. Evergreen made no rules about what you did in the classroom. Literally no rule about what subject you taught. They could hire you as a biologist and you could teach dance if people showed up to take it. Wow. So you could teach whatever you wanted. And the key was you could teach in whatever way you wanted. And so.

That's so crazy. Well. It seems like a great idea if you're super motivated. It worked two ways. People abused it and they would use it to reduce their workload to next to nothing and they wouldn't invest in their students. And then other people looked at this and they, you know, it was, it was glorious to have that kind of freedom. And so I taught in a way that would have worked for me if I had been a student there, which changed a lot of things. And it actually worked for a lot of, you know, bad students don't typically become

professors. So there's almost nobody on the faculty anywhere who has a clue why bad students are the way they are, right? They just don't intuit it because it wasn't their experience. But if you were like me and you were a bad student and then you ended up with a class, suddenly all sorts of bad students aren't uncommon. And so suddenly somebody who's speaking to them and says, I know that you're being a bad student isn't synonymous with you not having potential. Right. That's really empowering for them. So anyway, it was it was an interesting experience. And my wife actually was a tremendous student. She loved school. And we would actually often teach the same students either together or they would take my program and then they would bounce over to her program next.

And so they would get these kind of two different views. You know, each of us, we were both enlightened by our relationship with each other because, you know, to the extent that I might have been dismissive of the great students right here, I had one who, you know, was my my closest person on Earth. And, you know, I got a window into how she saw the world and she got a window into what the kids who weren't performing well in school might have been thinking. And so anyway, that was a very, very useful background to have for teaching. There's a tremendous amount of power in teaching people. It's a weird relationship between and especially when you're teaching someone and you're giving them credit towards their degree. their degree. I was a very poor student in high school and I wasted a ton of time just going to college so people didn't think I was a loser. But I taught at Boston University. I used to teach Taekwondo and I taught an accredited course. It was pass fail A, but it actually counted towards your GPA. So I had kids in my class and I would tell them, it's really simple. Just try, and you get an A.

Just show up and try, and I'll give you an A. Because, like, athletics, it's not fair. You know, there's people that are just extreme endomorphs, and their body holds on to too much fat. They didn't have a background in any athletics. They're not flexible. It's very difficult for them to understand how to move their body correctly. It's essentially like trying to teach someone to be a professional speaker

where someone has been speaking English their whole life where other people are just learning it for the first time. It didn't seem fair to me. So to judge them in terms of their actual outcome, that was like, it's almost contrary to what I said. I was giving them a quality of outcome, but not really. No, I was, I'm pretty sure I know what you were doing because I did the same thing. So I would tell students, you show up and try and you are completely safe. You're going to get full credit

and you'll get a nice evaluation. We wrote written evaluations of them. But if you want an evaluation that raves about you, that talks about, you know, your extraordinary capacity, you're going to have to strive. And so what I wanted to do, which sounds like what you were doing, is make them safe enough to discover what they could do. Because I don't know whether this will make sense to your audience or not, but I think we are overly concerned. We have been sold the idea that the job of a teacher is to assess how much the student has learned. That basically the job of the teacher is largely to report out to the world how qualified this person is. That's a very hard job in some disciplines. In mine, you know, the student who did brilliantly, I would know. And the student who did nothing,

I would usually know. But there were lots of students in the middle who might have gotten the lesson really deeply. And it might have matured over the course of two years after they were no longer in contact with me. At the point I was writing the evaluation of them, that might not have been a good place to assess how much they had actually learned. So I steered away from the idea that my job was to tell the world how well this person had done, unless they'd done great. If they'd done really well, if they'd surprised themselves and me about everything that they were capable of,

I loved saying that. But I didn't want to run down a student who hadn't really shined in the classroom because it was a totally artificial moment to judge how much they had picked up. Yeah. No need to run them down. Yeah. And, again, everybody's starting off at a different position. It's not like everybody's on the same line and the gun goes off and everybody runs with the first step, you know, in the same spot. It's just not the

case. Right. And there are some or many activities in which your how you do initially doesn't necessarily predict ultimately whether you'll be unusually good. Sure. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I found, particularly with athletics, is that people who are extraordinarily gifted oftentimes don't excel because it seems to come too easy for them and they never develop the proper stamina for hard, difficult work. They shy away from that because if things aren't easy, they, here's a perfect example. shy away from that because if things aren't easy they here's a perfect example people that are really gifted in one one martial art like say like someone who's gifted as a striker well they'll enter into mixed martial arts and find that they really are not very good at grappling and so they they don't like that feeling of being dominated in training so they don't give it a hundred percent

they don't throw themselves into it instead they avoid it and they try to find workarounds and they're almost always defeated by grapplers. It's like they've, because of the fact that they're gifted and talented, they've avoided the difficult, real character-building moments. So this is interesting that you say that. I was on a train in New York and looking at Twitter and somebody had posted an article that caused the dime to drop for me with respect to mixed martial arts and why they were suddenly a thing in my life where they hadn't been.

I had assumed that it was simply the fact that I'd showed up on your podcast and obviously you're in that world. And so a certain number of mixed martial arts people were now following me and I was seeing their tweets and things. But this guy, I think his name is John Kerbo, posted an article that he had written about Bruce Lee and his argument. Did you see this article? His argument was why Bruce Lee and mixed martial arts points the direction to how to fix our political dialogue, something like that. And so anyway, his argument was, and you, you know, I'm no expert on this at all. But his argument was that Bruce Lee, effectively the, the innovator at the beginning of mixed martial arts was interested in testing a martial art against all comers rather than requiring the person debate style requires somebody to be debating in the same way on the other side of the argument, then it isn't very strong, right? Then it's a formalism.

But if you're really good at arguing, then it shouldn't really matter. As long as the person speaks the same language, you should be able to meet them on that playing field and hash stuff out. So anyway, I think a number of things link up in this way, that there is a kind of artificial boundary placed between things and that those who are interested in tearing down those boundaries, even though that opens up a huge range of things that they may face often have something to teach in their particular realm. And I was trying to think of other examples of this and Lars Anderson, the archer, again, this is a place where you're an expert and I'm not, but what do you think of Lars Anderson? Well, he does like a lot of weird trick shots with archery. It's kind of fun to watch, very interesting stuff. And what he's essentially done is he believes he has not reinvented, but rediscovered a method of holding arrows in your fingers so that you could, with practice, repeat, here, Jamie's got video of this character, that you could release a bunch of arrows in a row.

And he's capable of shooting, like, way faster than the average person and multiple arrows. He can throw things in the air and hit it with multiple arrows before it hits the ground. Yep. So my thought here is that this is – I have a number of different examples. So there he's throwing a – oh, here he's going to hit that. He's throwing a bottle cap in the air and he hits it with an arrow. That's crazy. Even if there are lots of cuts here that we're not seeing where he misses, the fact that he can do this with enough reliability –

To make a video. To make a video, you can tell there are enough things where he hits two things in one shot that it's not, it can't be completely fiction. And if you look at his explanatory, so he took a lot of crap for this from people who were in the archery world who didn't like the way he violated all of the rules about what good archery form looks like. And so he made a response video. English isn't his first language, so it's a little hard to follow. But anyway, it's pretty clear that what he's a little hard to follow. But anyway, it's pretty clear that what he's done is he's just said, well, okay, there are bows, there are arrows. What is the best way to think about these things from the point of view of solving these different problems? And he's discovered a whole landscape of stuff that I don't think you would discover

if you took archery and took it seriously and learned from, uh, you know, a master who had good form, you'd never discover it. And, uh, I guess there might as well put the other examples on the table. Um, let's see. There's, uh, Danny McCaskill, the bicyclist. Are you aware of this guy? I feel like I've heard that name before. Scottish kid. He's very young. I think at some point, unfortunately, he became a surprise sensation on YouTube and Red Bull figured out that he was a moneymaker and they've sort of pushed him. So he's now had a couple of serious accidents. But anyway, he is capable of doing things on a bicycle, especially in an urban environment, hopping from. Oh, this guy? Yeah, this guy. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Look at this. Did you see that one of these guys, these daredevil YouTube guys just died? A guy in China. Oh, God. Yeah. This guy's out of his mind. He's out of his mind. But I mean, check that out.

For people that are listening only, this guy's on a rooftop and he's doing these stunts where he's riding his bike, doing flips from one side of the building to the other. He's riding on the edges of the building, looking down, hitting the brakes, certain death on either side. Jesus. Yeah. I mean, look at that. Oh, I have a hard time looking at that, Brett.

It's pretty rough. Look at that. It's pretty rough. But, you know. This guy's fallen and hurt himself now? That's not a BMX bike either. No, it's like a regular bike. I think it's not quite standard, but it's more mountain bike proportions.

But anyway, just- It probably has to be to be so rugged. Right. Oh, yeah. It's souped up in particular ways so that it can endure the kind of forces that he's putting on it. Yeah, the impacts. But he's discovered stuff about what you can do with a bicycle that I think you just wouldn't. I mean, in fact, you know, in the era we grew up, we didn't know that these

things were possible. And you know, what he's doing emerged from, uh, from observed trials, which was a very regimented, uh, kind of competition for, for mountain bikers. But, um, but anyway, he's discovered a landscape of possibilities on a bicycle, Yeah. I thought, you know, frankly, I thought that Olympic gymnastics was pretty interesting. And, you know, now I look at Olympic gymnastics and I think that's a I mean, I get it. It's tame. It's tame. And the thing is, it has one advantage, which is that everything is so standardized that you can compare to competitors. If you want to award a medal, maybe it has to look like Olympic gymnastics. award a medal. Maybe it has to look like Olympic gymnastics. But these guys who can look at an urban environment and figure out how they can make use of these objects and their relationship to each other are discovering something about what the human body is capable of that isn't obvious if there isn't somebody to point it out. So there are innovators. I don't even know

if we know who the initial innovators are with something like parkour. Probably somebody does. Probably Russians. Could be. Those Russian kids. You ever see those videos of them hanging off of the side of buildings? I really think that they were the innovators of this. That was the first stuff that we ever saw.

Maybe. And, you know. French word, right? What's that? Parkour French? It is. I think so, yeah. Maybe. And, you know, French word, right? What's that? Parcours French? It is. I think so. Yeah. But in any case, one of the things and, you know, you when you when you asked me to come on, we decided we would talk a little bit about what to do about planet Earth, because I had mentioned the first time I was on your show that that was a let's get is about parkour. And my point is where we are with civilization, we are stuck.

And we are on a trajectory that you don't have to be deeply knowledgeable to recognize that it is unstable on enough different fronts that we can't go on like this much longer. We're playing with powerful enough tools that we're in tremendous danger of something going wrong. And so the question is, it's very hard to imagine how you use normal tools. Are you going to win an election and get policy through Congress that's going to change the world and suddenly make us safe? It's almost impossible to imagine something like that happening. And so the question is, is there a parkour kind of innovation, something that is not obvious to us that's it's there. The city was always there. People were not always doing parkour with the objects in it, but they could have been. And so are we missing the obvious? Is it in front of us what we're supposed to do to take a civilization that's hurtling out of control with too many

people consuming too fast and using mechanisms that are dangerous? Is there a route to put us back on track to something reasonable that looks like one of these innovations that you don't know it existed until somebody shows you that it's there. Trevor Burrus So what do you think those things are? Matthew Feeney Well... Trevor Burrus I'd assume there's more than one, right? There's more than one... Matthew Feeney I would say the conversation doesn't sound familiar.

And I don't think anybody has the answer to that question. Before I go deeply into this question, I should probably say something a little bit self-protective, which is talking about the question of what to do with planet Earth can be an idle discussion, in which case there's nothing to be navigated. But if you want to do it seriously, there's a danger of triggering a kind of reflexive penalty that we all carry around. So arrogance is something that we don't like. People don't like to hear people being arrogant. And so we all have like a detector for that, that we listen. And when somebody strays into arrogance, maybe it goes off. In order to have a conversation about what to do about planet Earth, obviously, we're talking about very serious stuff. And for anybody

to contemplate that they might know or might be tuned into a conversation that could find its way to some new answer, we are in danger of triggering that, oh my God, that's arrogant circuit. And so at some level, in order to have this conversation properly, I need to turn off my own sensitivity to hearing that little warning bell in my own head. that little warning bell in my own head. And, you know, if the conversation is preposterous, fine. That's something a reasonable person could conclude about anybody who was talking about changing the way the world functions. Maybe it is preposterous. And I leave that possibility open. On the other hand, you know, I have kids. I'm pretty sure I can do the math myself on how much danger we're in. I may not know the full extent of it, but I can tell that we're in enough danger that we have to do something counterintuitive and different enough that it stands a chance of changing the way

the place functions or my kids and your kids are in serious trouble. So anyway, that's why I would would go down this road. But I have to do it in that kind of context where I'm not too worried about whether people hear this as, you know, me being full of myself or something like that. Does that make sense? Yes. Why would why would I get it? See, I lack those self-protective instincts. I just spout off. All right.

Fair enough. But go ahead. Okay. So there are a lot of, so I should say, where does this all come from? My initial foray into this style of thinking actually starts with Eric, who you had on your podcast. I saw a lot of feedback about him on your podcast. He was great. People were really jazzed about that. Brilliant. You have a brilliant brother. He's great. I have noticed that. He is absolutely amazing, and there's no place to hide from him because he is so good across all levels of analysis. So he obviously, even on your podcast, he was

playing around in biology space very adeptly. I can't do that. I can't go over into math space and do the same favor for him. But anyway, yeah, he's a very interesting thinker and across many more levels than I think anybody else I've encountered. But anyway, he, some years ago after the financial collapse of 2008, decided that there needed to be a proactive discussion about what had gone wrong in economic space that had allowed that catastrophe to happen. And so he and some collaborators put together a conference called the Economic Manhattan Project. It was at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. And so I went, I attended this conference. conversation about changing a large enough piece of the puzzle to actually fix the way the world works to prevent another financial collapse like the one that happened in 2008. And I also met

people at that conference who have continued on in these conversations. I joined Occupy. I mean, not that there was anything really to join, but I participated in it in hopes that it would turn into something capable of changing the way we functioned. And I ended up being very disappointed and frustrated by the quality of the conversation inside of Occupy Wall Street. But anyway, it revealed some things to me. And then after that, there was a group of people who gathered in something that ultimately was called Game B. And Game B is really where the thinking that I want to talk to you about emerged most clearly. Game B no longer exists, but a group of us from across the political spectrum, various different kinds of expertise, we had tech people, we had professors from various different disciplines, we had a Buddhist. I mean, we really had a lot of different people who were united basically by an understanding

that they had each arrived at, that the trajectory we were on was so dangerous that it required us to take action. And we tried out various different ideas about what might be sufficient to avert the danger we were heading towards and give humanity more time to find a way to exist on the planet. So I should probably say something about what Game B means, and it carries a relevance into what we might do in the present. Game B was basically proceeded from the idea that what we live in is a game theoretic landscape, right? That the winners in this game theoretic landscape are individuals who have figured out where there's a niche.

Some of them have figured out how to engage in something called rent-seeking, which rent-seeking basically means making money without producing value. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on in our economy that is not productive and good, but nonetheless generates fortunes. So that's rent-seeking as opposed to innovation or productivity. You're talking about like hedge fund type stuff, moving money around? Well, I want to be a little careful about this because it is quite possible for things like hedge funds to actually correct inefficiencies in the economy in a way that is productive. That doesn't mean that that's the average thing that they do.

So what things are you referring to? Well, I mean, you know, let's take the ultimate example that will make it clear. A warlord is not responsible for building the road that they then stand by the side of and extort money from people who want to travel it. Right. A cable company may produce some benefit. They obviously have infrastructure that allows you to get content. But what fraction of what you're paying for is actually about them delivering a service at some price and making some reasonable profit? And what fraction of it is

about the fact that they are an economic Goliath and that you don't have enough choice to be able to negotiate a decent price with them? So there's some fraction of what they're producing that is productive, but then there's a large amount of profit there that isn't about productivity or innovation. It's about the fact that they own a choke point and you can't get around it. So we don't know what fraction of the economy is rent-seeking and what fraction of it is productive. But especially if one is broad-minded about thinking about all the ways that one can engage in rent-seeking, one can actually be destructive of value. If you destroy future well-being for our descendants, it may look productive in the present, but it isn't productive. It's actually destructive.

So that's a kind of rent-seeking that we don't even typically model. But where are we headed? So, oh, yes. So we live in a game-theoretic landscape. That's both good and bad. As you point out, competition is a healthy thing. And competition in markets produces a huge amount of value. So I hear people deriding capitalism, and I always want to make the same point to them,

which is you've got two things glued together, and you are challenging them as a package, but there's no reason they have to be packaged. So we would be foolish to give up markets. Markets are amazingly powerful engines of innovation. They are capable of solving problems that we cannot solve deliberately, even if we wanted to. So we need markets, but we don't want markets ruling the planet and deciding that anything that spits out a profit is therefore good and that we should be exposed to whatever the market discovers can be viable. So what we want is ultimately to provide incentive structures that cause the market to produce things that are good for us. Right? In other words, if you tell the market that you want the solution to some problem,

the market can figure out how to solve that problem and it will do it very well. But if you allow the market to decide what problems to solve, it may end up, for example, addicting you to your phone, right? Addicting you to your phone in a way that harms your social relationships, harms your parenting of your children, harms all kinds of things that are really important, breaks the ability of your children to have an educational experience in school. We don't want the market discovering how to disrupt useful functioning of people. We want the market to stay out of that stuff and then to provide us benefits that only it can provide, like all of the mechanisms that now allow us to navigate seamlessly in places that we've never been, avoiding traffic that we wouldn't know to worry

about, right? Those are huge benefits and they're capable of taking a city that is too snarled with traffic and reducing the degree to which it is snarled with traffic. So they're very powerful, but we shouldn't, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Markets are good. Allowing markets to discover any and every mechanism for exploiting you is not good at all. And in fact, it's a large part of why we're in the predicament that we're in is that we let the market decide what problems to solve and then if it solves them and they're very lucrative there's no way to say no once but aren't they just attractive to people I mean that's one of the reasons

why a phone is so addictive is because it's attractive because you can get access to information the drop of a hat So you just constantly want to feed that machine. You constantly want to like, Oh, what, what can I do? Can I play a game on it? Ooh, can I take a picture of myself? Ooh, can I give myself a dog nose? Ooh. Right. But imagine, I mean, it's, it's amazing to me that it's even hard to do this thought experiment, but put yourself in, you know, in your own mind 15 years ago and present yourself the deal that the phone represents. You know, hey, Joe, check this phone out, right? This phone is going to allow you to navigate in a place you've never been. It's going to connect you with all sorts of people who share your interests.

You're going to be able to say a sentence that you think is clever and suddenly hundreds or thousands of people are going to be able to react to it. I mean, all sorts of marvelous things. And then the point is, well, here's the downside. Okay. You're going to be hooked into mega corporations that are going to study your psychology and they are going to compete in order to keep you paying attention to their site. And they're going to become so sophisticated that you're going to lose control over your own mind. You are going to become addicted to it in the way that you might become addicted to nicotine, right? So that's a pretty high cost. What's more, you are going to surveil yourself. You're going to surveil yourself and your only protection from surveilling yourself are going to be end user license agreements that you're not going to be legally sophisticated enough to understand.

Whoever has access to your phone camera, your metadata, your, you know, all of these things. So the point is, if you said this to you 15 years ago, you'd know to be afraid of it. Right. I probably wouldn't. You wouldn't? I'd probably be like, ah, I'll put it down if I don't like it. Okay. Well, I must tell you, if you told me that I was going to be bugging myself with a sophisticated device like that, that I can't even turn it upside down because there's a camera on both sides of the damn thing.

I mean, the cost is really high, but we signed up for it incrementally in a way that never left the ability to say no. And what's worse, it is now inconceivable. If we discovered that the net cost of such a device exceeded the value of it by 10 times, we still couldn't get rid of them. You can't pull them back. You can't unmake them. There's too much benefit to them, though. You're making it seem as if it's only a negative.

But it's not only a negative. It's also answering every single question you could ever have about anything technical, anything involving history, anything involving facts. And obviously, in today's day and age with hashtag fake news, you're going to get a lot of bullshit facts in there as well. But just the sheer access to information, the ability to contact each other instantaneously, there's a lot of pros to it. Huge number. Believe me, I'm not underrating the value of it.

I mean, you just, you mean, you pointed to it yourself. Having even just Wikipedia in your pocket is like, that's such a fantastic gift to have that access to information, not only on your home computer, but right there in your pocket. That's amazing. So I'm not saying the benefit isn't spectacular and I've signed up for it like everybody else, but the cost is very high and didn't have to be. In other words, if you had set the bounds in which the market was going to solve this problem so that you, for example, prevented it from breaching our ability to protect our own privacy, you could have had the benefit of Wikipedia and instant communication and all of these things without the huge downside.

So the privacy issue being cookies or cameras, like which one are you referring to? Well, first of all, I think the cameras are a bit of a red herring. I don't think anybody, first of all, there's a huge amount of data involved in video. To the extent there's an issue, it would be more about the microphone and the fact that it can listen into conversations and basically track who's thinking what. And there's so much power in that potentially that even if it's not being used presently, it's only a matter of time before somebody taps into that data and starts using it to shape things they are not entitled to shape.

Right. So how do we fix it? Well, so let me, we've gotten a little off track here. Game A is what we live, right? It's a market in which we decide how to behave. And if we have insight, maybe we come out ahead. If we don't have correct insight, maybe we lose. But anyway, that's game A. It's the market as we find it. Game B was the idea that there are ways that you could restructure the deal we have with each other so that you could compete in game A's terms without losing to game A. So the conclusion, and again, game B is not a live organization anymore, but it was a place in which a lot of work was done that I think feeds into the conversation about what we do very clearly. In order to change the way the world functions,

most of the mechanisms that have functioned in the past are no longer viable. It is almost inconceivable to imagine that you could have a revolution in any standard sense that would successfully capture power and then wield it wisely. I can't even imagine it happening. So game B is the idea that one needs to create an entity that is capable of competing in the market, is capable of competing in game A's terms and winning against game A. So game A is the way things run. Game B is an alternative that can compete in game A's terms and win. And that sounds, first time you hear it, it sounds preposterous

because the system has so much inertia in it that you would think it is completely impervious to any challenge. But there's a hidden factor, which I think is evident in those various examples we were looking at in parkour, in Lars Anderson and his archery innovations, Danny McCaskill. Anderson and his archery innovations, Danny McCaskill. I would also say Jane Goodall and her success at sorting out what was going on with chimps. The point is systems that become very difficult to dislodge, that have great inertia, are almost inevitably feeble in a particular fashion. So this is true of academic disciplines too. If a discipline becomes stuck, it is very hard to get a hearing within the discipline, but the discipline loses track of where it has made assumptions that aren't true or aren't certain. And so it becomes relatively easy to compete against it

if you're not requiring it to validate your perspective. So that feebleness is a feature of our system. Our system is delivering the goods to people at a low rate. Most people are dissatisfied. They are unhealthy. They are not well protected from things like bad luck. And those are all problems that can be solved by an entity that is capable of restructuring the deals between people. of restructuring the deals between people. In other words, let's take an obvious one, like insurance. Insurance is not well delivered by a market. And there's a very good reason it isn't, which is that the strategy for winning in the delivery of insurance is perfectly obvious. You want to insure people who need it very little, and you want to uninsure people who

need it a lot. That's how you win at the insurance game. So the insurance industry is always looking to make that deal with the world, and it's always looking to figure out how to disinsure those who are most likely to need it. And what that means is that we can't provide a risk pool. A risk pool just means you don't know if you're going to get a brain tumor or I'm going to get a brain tumor. So how about we both agree to pay for whoever's treatment needs it and whoever has the bad luck wins in that deal and whoever has the good luck loses. But because we don't know who it is ahead of time, it's a win for both of us. So that structure is one that you can build inside of this competitive architecture. And what I'm getting at is that

the conversation of people that has coalesced, people who are discussing the question of how to make things function in a way that solves the problems that we all face without having to win some unimaginable electoral victory or to challenge these governments outright. That conversation centers around a game theoretic insight. And this is something I mentioned before that I had participated in Occupy and had been quite disappointed. And really where I was before I ran into this conversation was I was, if I'm honest with myself, I was becoming a little desperate because I could see how much trouble we were in. But every mechanism that you might use to fix it seemed very unlikely to function. But every mechanism that you might use to fix it seemed very unlikely to function. When I heard a presentation that said actually there's a mechanism that does not go through any of the familiar historical means but uses tools that we all see deployed, right?

The same tools that cause Facebook to be successful can be used to repair the system, that begins to sound plausible to me. Does that make any sense? Sort of, but we're on a long road. Yes. Is there a way to boil this down? Well, let's try an example. Okay. How do you feel about Bitcoin?

I think it's fascinating. You wish you had more of it? Well, no. I have some of it, but it's not mine. It's all donated towards Fight for the Forgotten. They're building wells in the Congo. I had Andreas Antonopoulos on, and he introduced me to Bitcoin,

so he set up a Bitcoin wallet for me. I took donations from people, but I didn't think it was right. They just gave me money. It was very little at the time. But I said, I'll just give this to my friend Justin who builds wells in the Congo. So now it's worth, what is it worth?

Like 70 grand or something like that? Something like that. He's got to figure out when he wants to cash out. It's up to him. But so far they've gotten at least 10,000 out of it and we've built a bunch of wells with that money so i think it's great in that regard it's it's served an amazing purpose

for those people in the congo well but people were actually mad at me that i didn't buy those things with bitcoin that instead used the i kept the bitcoin but gave him the money value of the bitcoin they were upset like why didn't you just pay for it with bitcoin but about i wanted to see that instead used the, I kept the Bitcoin, but gave him the money value of the Bitcoin. They were upset. Like, why didn't you just pay for it with Bitcoin? But I wanted to see as an experiment where the Bitcoin goes. And it turns out it was a lucky guess on my part, and now it's worth far more. Because what was worth $5,000 at the time is now, yeah.

It's on her grin. Right. So I like it. Okay. I like it too. And whether it's Bitcoin or not, there's something clearly happening in the blockchain cryptocurrency world. So the world is trying to figure out which of these currencies is going to function at the moment. Blockchain is looking the most promising.

There are obstacles to it functioning. There are ways in which those obstacles are being addressed. And, you know, it'd be pointless to get into the details of it. I like the community. I really, I really like the idea behind it. To me, I like things that don't have a whole lot of rules where people sort of figure out what's right. Right. Good. So if we take Bitcoin as an example of something that addresses the problems of fiat currency, like the dollar, nobody asked permission to build it. In fact, we don't even know who innovated it. It's a pseudonym that we have. We don't know whose identity it is. I heard recently someone thought it was Elon Musk, which I would not be surprised, that crazy guy. You know, I couldn't say, and I think it doesn't

much matter. What we know is that somebody, without asking permission, found a better model for a currency that addressed issues that we all face and we're not individually capable of addressing ourselves. And it's pretty clear that something in this realm is going to win and it's going to become an important player, if not the important player on the world stage currency wise. That is an entity which exists in game A space, right? You can convert Bitcoin to dollars. That's not hard. Bitcoin functions in Game A terms. It's winning in Game A terms at the moment. Now, I'm not saying it isn't going to crash.

It probably is going to crash because it's probably overinflated at the moment. How much will it crash? Will it come back? Are we going to go through repeated bubbles and Bitcoin will still win out? I don't, nobody – clearly nobody knows. But the idea that it is a superior solution invented inside this other system that is winning against the dollar at the moment, that's a fine example. Likewise, you could use Wikipedia as a fine example. This is an entity that is functioning inside. It is competing with the old encyclopedias. It is competing with for-profit

services that would deliver information. And frankly, it's winning because it's superior. Is it perfect? No. But it's a demonstration that you can do things inside this space that, in fact, have reorganized our relationship to information. And, in fact, in a way that we don't typically acknowledge is challenging the academy was so feeble at the point that this social justice madness started to challenge it had to do with the fact that without the academy's permission, information became free. The fact that everybody, there was a level playing field for information, meant that the academy needed to figure out what it was going to deliver on top of that information, and it didn't figure it out. And I would say there was an obvious answer, which it missed. It needed to deliver stuff that didn't scale. It needed to teach insight and critical thinking and how to wield that information properly rather than continuing to deliver textbook level information when effectively textbooks are obsolete. But these are examples

of successful, competitively successful, innovative challenges to the model that preexisted them. Okay. And the question is, can that set of models be systematized so that it, without having to do the impossible, simply replaces the system as it stands because it delivers the things that the system claims to deliver more successfully than the system delivers. Okay, like what things we're talking about? We are talking about insulation from bad luck. Luck is a tremendously negative influence. So like insurance, but something that we collectively utilize? Correct. Something that we collectively utilize. So imagine that you could have wonderful insurance, but that in signing up for that insurance, you were agreeing to some sort of larger social

entity. So like your taxes would go towards life insurance, but meaning like things that go wrong in life, like some part of what you would spend on things would be attributed to this fund. Yeah. And it's I think we unfortunately default to thinking of everything in monetary terms. You could also invest in such an entity. Let you know, let's talk about the question of teachers that you were pointing out. Why are good teachers so few and far between? Well, of course, we pay at a level that we get exactly what we ordered. And the few good teachers that we run into are by and large people who are doing it in spite of the fact that they're being economically penalized for doing it. But what if your insurance, your

access to excellent insurance that correctly hedged out the danger of bad medical bad luck came with some sort of social obligation in which, you know, I don't know, the three years after you had gone to graduate school and gotten your advanced degree in something, you spent teaching in some school that needed that. So you didn't sideline yourself from the economy for the rest of your life teaching in some school where you were forever going to be hobbled by bad administrators. But you decided to take some period of time and invest it in your community or somebody else's community using expertise that you got that you'll be highly paid for later. So it's almost like you have mandatory military service. Mandatory military service is, yes, it is one version of a much larger space of potential agreements that you could sign up for in exchange for benefits that you can't,

most of us cannot negotiate on the open market. So to get your education, you would agree to use that education for the good of the community for a certain amount of time? Absolutely. Absolutely. So instead of walking away with massive debt that is going to hobble you in economic terms as you're trying to to find your niche that you would sign up for some agreement that was you know but wouldn't that still benefit the elite because what if scrooge mcduck has a kid and scrooge mcduck's kid uh he pays for his kids education listen son you're not going to do any service what you're going to do is use those three years to get ahead and those little fucks when they get out of that service

they're going to be working for you they throw the gold coins up in the air right so this is another place nice look this is another place where two things are fused together that we need to tease apart.

Okay. I'm trying to remember. I think Eric may have actually said this on your podcast. If he didn't, he said it elsewhere. But elites is not a good category, right? Elites takes two things that don't belong together and it decides that they are one. And so the Scrooge McDuck thing becomes it blocks the other thing. We want people to innovate.

And one of the reasons that equality of outcome is absolutely not desirable, even if you could arrange it, is that the inequality of outcome is the incentive that drives people to achieve amazing stuff that we want them to achieve. Right. Right. Of course. So how far ahead of everybody else should you end up? Well, this is a difficult problem because you, to the extent that somebody earns a fortune because they have innovated in an important way, but then they have gone on to be a rent seeker. We don't want them rewarded for their rent seeking, but we do want them rewarded for their innovation. individuals who are members of the elite are composites of both things, where you get into the elite because you innovated something amazing, but the degree to which you have been rewarded is, I don't know, 60, 70% the result of rent seeking rather than what you innovated. And again, for people just tuning into us now, rent seeking, meaning doing things to which you extract money from the system

without any real benefit to the people that are around you. Yeah. It's any time that you get paid without producing something of value, either innovation or productivity itself or something like that. But how would you regulate that? How would you figure out a way to regulate the amount of profit that someone could, like if you have a system, right? And if you build something and then you, some sort of a residual benefit from that system, because

you built it. And so you're not really doing anything, but you're just constantly collecting money from this thing. How would you stop that or regulate that? Well, example of it, what I just the way I just described it? Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty good example. We do want – so it's a very tough unproductive. But to the extent that you are correcting the fact that certain things are undervalued and other things are overvalued, you are actually doing a kind of service that is not as obvious on the outside unless you've spent time thinking about the logic of why you want the market to be efficient. So I don't want to declare that certain things are in and of themselves bad because we can't see the obvious value of them. On the other hand, there's an awful lot of stuff that is either totally valueless for which people are very handsomely paid or worse, counterproductive, destructive of value.

of value, right? If you take waste and you get paid to dispose of it and you dispose of it in a way that it creates cancers where you can't detect that they've been created by what you've done, but it's not that you solved the problem of that waste. You just caused cancers in random homes that won't be able to trace their misfortune to your action. Not only is that unproductive, but it's counterproductive. It's harmful. So how do you address these questions? Well, A, you, this is a much harder problem if you imagine that what you want to do is fix the landscape that you're walking into and say, you're a rent seeker and you're productive and you're 30% productive but 70% a rent seeker. Nobody believes you can do that.

What you can do is restructure things so that going forward what is rewarded is actual productivity that is not harmful or actual innovation that is not harmful. And what is penalized and what you really want, if you, if the system is to function, what you want is a disincentive to do anything that hurts other people that has a net negative impact on the system. Like the BP oil spill. BP oil spill, the Aliso Canyon, uh, leak. Three mile island.

Three mile island, Fukushima okay the 10th degree so how do you i'm still confused as to what's different like what's going on here um what is going on is that if you if you array incentives so that at the point you have solved a problem that is good to solve, that the well-being starts flowing in your direction. You made a perfect widget. Everybody goes, oh, my God, this fixes my life. Right. I love this widget. I'm going to buy a bunch of them.

You start balling. You get a Paul Wall grill. There you go. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Big house. Exactly. But as you start moving in the direction of doing something that interferes with other people's well-being, but nonetheless, they can't help themselves. If you're innovating how to addict people to their phone, then actually you're hurting people. And we don't want you to do that. Now, it's very hard. Are you going to tell Facebook, you know, what it's allowed to study. Well, there's also people that have good intentions, but it turns out that they're,

like Facebook is a perfect example. One of the executives from Facebook, I was just reading on Dig the other day, there was an article where he was sorry for what they've done. It was one of the original guys from Facebook. It's like, I really think that we've done a terrible thing with Facebook and we've made people addicted to social media. Facebook seems to me to be particularly addictive, and I'm not exactly sure what they've done different than anybody else,

but so much so that I kind of avoid Facebook. You know, it's funny how many conversations I've had in the last month in which somebody has said that they're avoiding Facebook, including me. I can't go there anymore. I like Instagram because I just see pictures, and they look pretty, and I'm simple. Well, yeah. I mean, each of these things has their value. I'm not on Instagram.

I'm on Twitter. I'm on Twitter, too. For me, what's good about it, is this it? You're being programmed, former Facebook executive, Warrens. For me, for my business, it's very important to let people, hey, Brett Weinstein is going to be on today. Stein, man. Stein. Sorry, Harvey fucked everything up.

Yes, exactly. He did. Stein. I said it right earlier. Brett Weinstein is going to be on today. People tune in, and now there's people that are listening right now because of social media, right? And then comedy shows that I have coming up.

It works for me in a lot of those ways. But as time has gone on, I've pushed it away in most other ways. Well, and the thing, the interview that you just referenced, I saw it too and was quite blown away by it. I've been tuned into that because Tristan Harris is a friend of mine. And Tristan Harris is sort of the Paul Revere on this issue who has pointed out how much danger we are actually in. And I must say he's a very interesting guy because his other area of expertise is magic. And so he's very interested in illusion. Ah, sleight of hand.

Yeah, exactly. Interesting. And so anyway, he's watched as an insider as these economic Goliaths have conspired to not let us go and to turn their product from a facilitator of social interaction into a cigarette, which is, you know, or a slot machine or something like that. But the... How would you penalize them then? Like, say, if this in this new system, how would that work? Say if you came up with this new widget and this new widget does amazing things, but turns out it also makes you addicted to widgets. Okay. So I'm speaking only for myself here. I would not penalize Facebook or Twitter, but what I would want to see is somebody generate the alternative that has the benefit of not doing that to you. Okay. So a new Facebook that doesn't work with likes and all these things,

you're not constantly checking your likes, but it wouldn't be, here's the thing. It wouldn't be as successful. People love likes. That's why girls stick their butt out in those pictures. They want to get those likes. That's what that's all about. Is that what that's all about? That is. That's what it is. That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, they've said, first of all, that people that do that, you know what those things are called?

Which things? When girls stick their butt out and they have thirst traps. Thirst traps? Yeah. You don't know about that? I don't know. Teach kids you don't know about thirst traps? I don't know about thirst traps.

I'm going to tell you. All right. Thirst traps are you look for people that are thirsty. They're like, ooh, girl, you look good. Damn, you look good. People who are like extra thirsty. You know what thirsty means? I'm getting it, but go ahead.

You never got that before? No. You ever heard thirsty? Uh-uh. Okay. You're married. You've been around intellectuals and trapped up in progressive Pacific Northwest. You're not going to embarrass me.

I'm not. You're my friend. No, don't worry. Thirsty is people who are trying too hard. Like, you're not the to embarrass myself. I'm not. You're my friend. No, don't worry. Thirsty is people who are trying too hard. Like, you're not the type of person, if you saw someone who's a beautiful girl who's in a bikini, you would say, wow, that is a beautiful girl in a bikini. What an incredible body she has. And you would move on. You wouldn't be like, damn, girl, you look so fine.

How can I get with you? Right? If you did, you would be super thirsty. Right. That would be thirsty. Oh, I'm getting it. Like, you're so fine. How can I get with you? Right? If you did, you would be super thirsty. Right. That would be thirsty. Oh, I'm getting it. You're trying too hard. Yeah. Thirsty. But the internet is filled with thirsty people. And so a lot of these girls

become famous. There's girls that you've never heard of them, okay? I had a bit about it in, yeah, my last special about there was a girl that uh she all she does is take pictures of her butt and at the time she had like seven million followers now i bet she's got a hundred million or something i don't know but that these people become these these like places where everybody goes to stare at their butt. And these pictures of them and their bodies and all these different things are traps for

all these weird people that lack normal social skills. And they're uber thirsty. Yeah. That's a thirst trap. Okay. Well, this makes it... So that's the whole reason why these people use things like Instagram. Did you see that?

Thirst trap. Had a thirst trap on Instagram with Cardi B. See? Uh-huh. See, I'm talking about the kids today. Okay. This girl. I'm beginning to think maybe we can't save the world.

Listen, we can save the world, but the problem is we have to be cognizant of normal human desires and the traps, thirst traps. Okay. So this is actually the perfect place to go then, because one of the biggest obstacles to fixing the world is that although a huge fraction of the population is actually aware that things are off and they would like it to be better, there's so much low level stuff that keeps us trapped in these unproductive kinds of cycles and one of the things that i keep running into now i'm now being included in all these conversations with folks who do aspire to something better but everybody and i mean really just about everybody, has stuff that to them is sacred and they want to take it off the table. Right.

They're very interested in the conversation about how we might fix the world. But, you know, if they're a libertarian, the point is as soon as you can't even finish the word regulate. Right. And they're just like, oh, well, sorry. You know, who watches the watchers? Well, sorry, you know, who watches the watchers? And the point, it's a bitter pill for just about everybody who's got some sacred thing that they're holding on to, is you are, if we deploy something that functions well and is capable of replacing the system we have without some gigantic catastrophe necessary in order to get over the transition. The whole point is to everyone's net benefit, right? If liberty is your thing, and I'm virtually sure liberty is your thing as it is my thing, that you will get more liberty.

that you will get more liberty. Net liberty will go up in a system that functions well. Many of the things that cause us not to be free have nothing to do with governmental regulation. They have to do with expectations that have been created by a market that does not have our interests at heart. And so if you're tracking net liberty, then a system that functions well liberates you. It may have more regulation in it than the one we currently have, but that regulation is liberating rather than oppressing. And so anyway, with libertarians, getting them to imagine, to wrap their minds around the possibility of regulation that they wouldn't hate. We are all so experienced now living in a world of malignant government where government action almost can't be useful.

And so it is natural to rebel against it and say, I don't want any more of that. The less, the better, because the actions tend to be predatory. But that is not the inherent nature of regulation. And so constructing a set of incentives that cause the market to deliver you the good parts of what a phone does without secretly addicting you to something that, you know, we now know. I mean, I don't know how many people in Silicon Valley have now issued a note of caution, but there's... And many have switched to flip phones themselves. They have. I mean, this is nature's way of telling you that these algorithms have escaped our control. The fact that the people who are in a position to make a phone call and know more or less what the algorithm does can't even protect themselves, that ought to set off warning bells for us, right?

Those people are in the best position to protect themselves. And the fact that they are bending over backwards there, they are externalizing decision-making power, they're having their secretaries tell them when they can interact with certain sites in order to keep them from getting into habits that they can't manage. This is the only warning we're going to get. This is bad. We could still do something about it, but this is only getting more sophisticated. And so if we do want to restructure things, and I would argue that even though market fundamentalists will hear their little sacred thing being challenged. What we really want to do is free markets to do what the brochure says that they do while eliminating what the brochure never mentions.

The brochure doesn't mention the fact that a totally free market produces predators and parasites at a huge rate. It doesn't have to. We can structure things such that a predator is not viable, so that a predator has nothing to eat. And if the predator has nothing to eat, the habitat won't have them, right? So that is the perspective that all of us, if we— How would we do that? These are abstract ideas, right?

How would we eliminate predators? How would we eliminate predators? How would we eliminate predators? You would eliminate predators by disincentive. So your question actually has a hidden assumption built into it. You've seen the market as a mature entity with lots of full-grown predators. But just as it is with biology, all of those predators started with something simple. And what happened was they tapped into a niche. And because that niche was allowed to exist, the predators grow and they get more and more sophisticated at doing

what they are doing. If you don't want to see the predators, you eliminate the niche for predation. This sounds like it would be functional if there was like 100 people. Well, first of all, this is one of the primary questions in the various conversations where people are trying to figure out how to bootstrap such a thing is that we have what's called Dunbar's number. Right. And Dunbar's number is basically a limit, uh, in the, the low hundreds of how many people you can keep in your head. Right. And so the point is we are, we are adapted to that. And that number is probably an indicator of something like the number of people that you can adaptively interact with. I mean, in other words, if you had, I mean, this is really the motivation for your question.

If you had 150 people and somebody was a bad actor, their reputation would precede them and you would detect, I should be careful interacting with that person. So the structure would be set up for tribes, which is essentially how we evolved, right? I mean, that's what Dunbar's number essentially reveals, is that we evolved growing up in groups of 50 to a couple hundred people. And those are the amount of people that you can keep in your mind. Right. We have hard drive space, essentially. We do.

We also, human beings are very good at taking a technological solution and kludging or hacking a remedy for a problem like that. So, for example, you on board in your mind have the ability to track something like 150 individuals with respect to their reputation so that you know how much to trust in any given interaction. In a group of, you know, 1,500, you don't. On the other hand, reputation can accumulate in some way that you can check it through people who you know. So people whose reputations are directly known to you are capable of giving you a reference. And in fact, you know that this works because interpersonally, if somebody you trusted to a great extent gave you a recommendation of somebody else, you would know how to evaluate it. So we are, unfortunately, for both better and worse, we are living in a technological landscape that doesn't look like anything that our ancestors faced. landscape that doesn't look like anything that our ancestors faced. That provides mechanisms for building solutions to problems that in an ancestral environment would not have been possible.

And this is not new. I mean, the library at Alexandria is a technological solution to the problem of information having expanded to a level that a human mind couldn't hold it. And ironically burned down by ideologues. Well, sure. I mean, that's, you know, yes. So you have to build a structure that is robust to challenge. And of all of the things that would have to be true for a replacement system for planet Earth, the key is understanding that there are certain values that all reasonable people agree on.

And in fact, you can use to diagnose who's reasonable. So assuming that we don't all start at the same starting point, right, whether it's from our cognitive ability or education or opportunities, how would you stop predators? How would you stop people from preying on the weak? How would you stop? Like, because there are predators who they themselves are unfortunate mentally. They themselves have a deficit of thinking. And we're dealing with such numbers when we're dealing with 300 and whatever million people

we have in this country alone. Yeah. There's plenty of dummies that you could prey on. Well, the first thing that you would want to do is you would want to build. So if you came to me and you said, I have a social network and it provides 85% of the functionality of Facebook, but it insulates you completely from dopamine traps being used to addict you. I'd sign up in a second. Okay.

Right. Right. But you are an intellectual and you are rare in that regard that you're worried about this. These people that are in Silicon Valley that are talking about the dangers of the things they've created themselves, they're rare. Most people are like, look at all the likes. Right. Sure. Look at all these likes. But. Ooh. Well, but okay. So there's some. Plus they're rare. Most people are like, look at all the likes. Right. Sure.

Look at all these likes. But. Ooh. Well, but, okay, so there's some. Plus they're bored at work, right? They want to check their likes. Yes, but I mean. Look at my likes for my butt pic.

That's what, that's a lot of it. You must have a nice butt. My butt's not bad. Okay. But the, first of all, things spread in waves. And, you know, it is possible to just look at the landscape and say, well, yeah, only intellectuals are going to get why they should want such a thing. But it's really it's not accurate. I mean, for one thing, the world is talking about blockchain currency.

The world is not talking about blockchain currency. A very small percentage of the world is talking about blockchain currency. The same amount that are talking about the earth being flat. Hmm. I don't think that's right. I bet it is. But I would say I grant your point that it's not a huge percentage of people who are talking about blockchain currency. But it's enough that on the network news people are talking about blockchain.

Is it a bubble? So it is beginning to penetrate the public consciousness. And it is penetrating it because people have to navigate lives in which economic fluctuation jeopardizes them. And so there's an incentive. If there's something over there, blockchain is not a joke anymore. Do you think that blockchain, the people that are involved, interested, and comprehensively understand what blockchain is, are there more or less of them

than people that are in cults? There are vastly more paying attention. Than people in cults? Yeah. Well, I mean, you'd have to define it. Yeah, you'd have to define it.

I think that's way off because I think there's like a billion Catholics. Well, if you're going to call yeah i think that's way off because i think there's like a billion catholics well if you're going to call catholicism it's a cult i grew up in it okay it's 100 it's just a cult with a billion people whenever you got a guy who dresses like a wizard and sitting on a golden throne oh boy we're here are we yeah that's that's but but that is why this is a problem is that there's many people that live their lives by these ridiculous ideologies that are illogical. Okay, so I'm going to challenge you on this. So how would you protect them from predators and Facebook likes?

I'm going to challenge you on this. Okay, please do. Catholicism is not a cult. What is the difference between a cult? I had a bit for my act. Let me just. Sure. A cult is bullshit, and it's created by one person, and he knows it's bullshit.

In a religion, that guy's dead. Okay. So let me. Boy, this is rough territory. For you. Okay. Let's say. For me, this is every day.

Let's say. Yeah. All right. Let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets. Oh, that is rough territory. For you. Okay. Let's say. For me, this is every day. Let's say, yeah. All right. Let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets. Oh, that dude. Okay. I don't know if Moses did come down the mountain with the tablets. I don't think he did. Let's say he did.

But okay. Did he know he was bullshitting people? Well, do you know what religious scholars actually believe in Jerusalem, actually believe that was all about now? The whole burning bush? Tell me. They believe it was the acacia bush, which is rich in DMT. And they think the metaphor of the burning bush was actually a psychedelic experience.

And that Moses, during this psychedelic DMT experience, came back from the other dimension that you go into when you go into the DMT trance with all these standard messages that I myself have gotten from these psychedelic experiences that you have to treat each other as if we're all one and that our separations are all illusions that you are literally living a life that if i was born in your body and i had your genetics i would be you and you would be me because we are all the same and our differences are really what the illusion is we are are these temporary beings, and that negative thinking and negative feelings and all these things manifest themselves in negative actions and negative thoughts, and you can change that, and you can change the frequency in which you exist in this world.

Okay. This is essentially what the 3,000-year-old version of Moses, or more than that, Moses' tablets were, that they, the God was the burning bush. Perfect. Perfect. So let me ask you a question. You've done some hallucinogens. Oh yeah. And you've had some insight. Yeah. And that insight had something to do with treating people well.

Yes, it definitely did. Okay. Was it true? Well, it definitely has benefited me. True or false. If you ask me, is it true that you have had positive experiences from psychedelic drugs where you have interpreted those experiences and improved your life? Yes, that's true. Okay. So if you now go and you convey that thing to somebody who hasn't had the experience themselves, is it bullshit? Well, here's the thing about psychedelics as opposed to all the other ideologies is that they're very repeatable. You don't have to believe in DMT. If you smoke it,

you're going to experience it whether you believe in it or not. Right. And actually, I think this is, I mean, I am a cautious fan. I say cautious because I don't think, I'm not a fan of the idea that these substances should be used recreationally. I think that's a mistake. I agree with you. I think it's fine to have a great time, but that these things are so powerful that one should be deliberate about it and, you know, don't do it with a TV. The only thing that I like about doing it recreationally is it's going to get more people to do it. And that if you think it's recreational and then you do it, there's going to be a certain percentage of those people that go, what was that? That's not what I thought it was.

I thought it was going in there to have a good time. And I just communicated with God. Yep. Air quotes God. Yeah. Air quotes. Well, but air quotes God is marvelous because air quotes God is the real deal. Yeah.

Right. In other words, it's not a dude on a cloud. Right. real deal. Yeah. Right. In other words, it's not a dude on a cloud. Right. It's something, it is a metaphor for something lodged very deep in the mind where you can't find it directly. And this is a hack that many cultures have used to access that layer. And it's all very familiar to us. And when you talk to people that have studied DMT in particular, one of the reasons why I think it's so familiar to us, when you, when you have this experience, one of the first things that happens is you feel like you've been there before.

And they believe that this is because during REM sleep, your brain produces DMT. It's very difficult to monitor, but they have been able to through the Cottonwood Research Foundation, which all started from the work of Dr. Rick Strassman out of the University of New Mexico, who wrote a book called DMT, the spirit molecule, which was one of the very first times where the DEA allowed them to do clinical studies on people with intravenous dimethyltryptamine, which is like fucking serious shit. So instead of like this 10 to 15 minute trip, you're gone for a long time, half hour plus and deep, deep experiences that a lot of these people mirrored.

They had like super similar experiences. But through the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they found that live rats are producing DMT in their pineal gland. This has been proven now, which was really just speculation. There was anecdotal evidence, but now they know that rats produce this. So they don't know exactly when people do it because they would have to do the same thing they do to rats. They'd have to open your brain up. Until they develop some sort of sophisticated detection methods,

it's just speculation as to when the brain's producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug. But it's there. We know it's producing it. We know it's produced in the liver. It's produced in the lungs. It's endogenous to the human system. And we don't know why. Yeah. Well, I'm pretty sure I have a good insight into why, but for the moment, let's pursue the issue of what the implications are. Okay. I'll hold on to why. I'll cross my fingers. Yeah. Cross your fingers on that one. The story you've just told is perfectly plausible, whether it's 100% accurate or not,

and we don't know. But the idea that your mind contains mechanisms that go into some sort of psychedelic state without your conscious mind being able to tap into it, so your conscious mind walks around during the day not realizing that you're tripping at some other moments for some purpose. It's all very interesting. You're not tripping in your sleeping mind for no reason at all. You're doing it for productive reasons. Logically speaking, it has to be the case that if you're burning energy and going through the costly exercise of thinking, even in the psychedelic way, that it's happening for a reason, right? And that means that we have carried this with us from an ancestral state into the modern state, and we now have molecules that we can trigger it when we want to. That gives you access

to a style of thinking that you're telling me has altered your understanding of your relationship to other people and that it metaphorically lines up with what you often hear delivered in religious terms, right? Abstractly, yes. Right. And so when you say Catholicism is a cult, I don't agree because Catholicism historically must have been delivering messages that caused people to correct their thinking in ways that made them collaborate more effectively, that made them better able to find the opportunities in their environment. I'm not advocating that we should sign up for belief systems that are at odds with our modern environment. But one thing we can say I believe for sure is that religions that have stood the test of time did so because their value to the people who believed in them was so great that those that disbelieved were outcompeted. was so great that those that disbelieved were outcompeted. Now, so we get into trouble in the modern circumstance because we can look at many of the teachings of any of these ancient religions

and we can compare them to what we learn scientifically and detect that there's something not right. Can I stop you there? Sure. Scientology, is that a cult? Too early to tell. Okay, but let's stop because we know the guy who created it. Is that a cult? Too early to tell. Okay. But let's stop.

Because we know the guy who created it. Well, we do. So let me drag you back. By the way, I'm very uncomfortable with Scientology and what it does. But the problem is, as Scientology itself points out, if you looked at the inception of something like the Catholic Church, you might be equally troubled. Sure. Which is why I think they're both cults. Well, but let's be careful about that. Okay. What do you think a cult is? What do you think a cult is? Well, I think a cult is the predatory version. It is tapping into people's natural tendency to believe in what I call metaphorical truths, and it is using it

very often to extract resources from them. Like the Catholic Church? Well no not like the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is so long-standing and the population that has I guess what I would say is if a population succeeds by believing in these things then cult is not the correct... I think you and I have different terms. We're using different definitions of the word cult then. But let me take... There's a very interesting comparison. So Joseph Smith, who started the Mormon church, had a competitor. He had a competitor at the time. There's a book called The Kingdom of Matthias about his competitor at the time. There's a book called The Kingdom of Matthias, right, about his

competitor at the time. And to me, the two looked equally plausible, the story that they were selling. Now, Matthias never had more than 30 followers and his religion died out and Joseph Smith won and the Mormon church is obviously a real thing. But these sets of beliefs are advanced by somebody, whether those somebodies are cynical when they do it or whether they are earnest. I think many of these, the ones that we have that have lasted for long periods of time have been advanced by somebody who was in one way or another, conscious or not, DMT or not, tapped into something that when delivered to other people actually constituted a kind of insight. As opposed to being a con man.

Right. Okay. And so the origins of the Catholic Church most likely came from some desire for order and a scaffolding of how to behave and to give people rules and structure for how to get through this life with the most amount of positivity and love. And by disciplining them and having these grave punishments being held over their head, burning in the fires of the pits of hell hell if they decide to have sex with another man or wear two different types of cloth or whatever the other silly things that were in the Old Testament. By doing this, what they've essentially tried to do is offer people structure. No, it's not really structure.

It is an analog for truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them. So let's deal with the church on the one hand and Moses on the other. Okay. Moses is obviously important in Jewish history. If Moses ate some DMT from the acacia bush. I think it was smoke. Oh, he smoked it. That's why the whole thing, the burning bush.

Let's say he smoked it. Let's say he was super savvy and farsighted. And, you know, obviously he didn't know anything about molecules. Right. But suppose that he had some ancient model of something. There must have been something in that plant that caused crazy things to happen. Let's suppose he didn't believe that he had contacted God or that God had contacted him.

But he woke up from the thing and was like, wait a minute, I know what these people are doing wrong. I'm going to write it down and tell them it came from God. Is Judaism now a cult? I think they're all cults. I think all ideologies are cults. I just don't know. I don't think there is any one person who wrote – first of all, when you're dealing with Christianity, you're dealing with translations, right, or Judaism.

You're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore. And you're also dealing with an oral tradition of who knows how many years before it was ever bothered to be written down. Right. But written down by people. And then people decide what stays in and what doesn't. They change the rules. Like the priests used to be able to marry.

Priests in the Catholic Church, the Pope used to have wives. Sure. They ran armies. I mean, this is clearly something that human beings have a hand in manipulating and changing, and they do it for the benefit of the structure itself. They're not doing it for the benefit of the human beings that are a part of it. They're doing it for the benefit of the structure itself. Oh, that I don't agree. What's in what case? Like the money and the amount of power? I'm not saying you don't have corruption in all of these structures. You do. But I am saying that there is a, I mean, this is exactly parallel to what we were talking about before. There is the predatory version, which I would call a cult.

Right. earnest version, which I would not call a cult. Now, I'm very uncomfortable with any of these things governing policy in the present because none of them have a literal relationship with reality that allows them to deal with the fact that we've got all these new problems for which there's no religious wisdom. Maybe there's a problem in the word cult. Maybe we should just say a structure created by human beings, which is basically all structures, all structures, all models of behavior where you have to adhere to certain things.

But the problem with religion and even with a lot of cults is the supposed grave consequences for deviating, right? Well, so, all right, let's pick up Catholicism because it's easy, because so much of the structure is visible to us. Yeah. I would argue that Catholicism, this is going to be true of all of Christianity,

it's going to be true of Judaism, but Catholicism is, it is easy to see how it would facilitate collaboration that effectively it would recreate in some sense the insight that you're talking about from DMT and that it would instantiate it in the population in a useful way that would facilitate collaboration and disrupt processes that cause infighting. Yeah, like what I was speaking before, it might be a structure. It's the scaffolding for human behavior and ethics. Right. But imagine, I mean, we can see it in Catholicism. Sure. We know where it is.

So every week you have to go and confess the shit you're doing wrong to the dude in the box. Okay? That's how they used to spy on you. I mean, that's what that was for well but why are they spying on you i mean no because they want to make sure that they don't get overthrown well i don't i think i think you're too cynical really yeah because what do you think they're doing well so first of all i'm a biologist okay how are these priests who don't marry passing on their genes they're not oh they are, they are. Oh, what are they doing? They're sneaky?

No, they're facilitating the stability of the lineage that they are in charge of. So the point is they don't pass on their genes directly. They're passing on their genes indirectly through the population. Their interests are synonymized with the population that they are preaching to. And so you tell the dude in the box what you've been doing wrong. Imagine it's adultery. Okay. Oh, God. If I die before next week and I haven't confessed my adultery.

You go to hell. I'm going to go to hell. That's bad. Hell is a very unpleasant place. Tell that guy who doesn't get to have sex. I'm going to tell him. So now the person I've been committing adultery with is thinking, oh, shit. Well, I was going to keep this a secret.

But now the priest is going to know that I've been committing adultery with is thinking, oh shit, well, I was going to keep this a secret. But now the priest is going to know that I've been committing adultery because he's going to hear from the other person. And so I better confess too. So now the priest has a sense of like, oh, there's an adultery problem in the congregation. And the priest is, you know, flipping through the book and thinking, oh, this week, what should we talk about? And so, you know, the priest then gets up at the pulpit and, you know, turn your book to Psalm, whatever, and starts going on about adultery. And the people in the congregation who are engaged in adultery are thinking, oh, shit, this is God talking to me directly. God knows what I've been up to. And he's not happy. And that's why we're reading this psalm. I better cut it the fuck out, right? So my point is the dude in the box, he's taken a vow of poverty.

He's living in the church. He does well when the town does well. He's not having babies of his own. So he can't really get ahead by himself. He gets ahead, genetically speaking, when the town does well. And he's in a position to spot what's going wrong in the town. And he doesn't have a dog in that fight because he's not involved in business. He's not involved in mating and dating. You know, this is all relatively recent when it comes to the Catholic Church in the last

couple of hundred years. Yes. And I would argue if you look back at any of these traditions, any of the ones that worked will successfully have addressed the question of how you prevent corruption from emerging. Well, apparently it was sexual corruption. These guys were rock stars. Like the priests were essentially the guys who had the direct line to God. And just like professors have been known to do, not you, but you know some have sex with their students you know and because their students like look at them like oh my god i can't believe the professor's sitting down here with my work and i mean this is

like that's a very minor connection in comparison to the connection to god anybody who's gonna have anybody who's gonna have power is in danger of abusing it sure i would say it's interesting that in the catholic church and in other traditions where marriage and making money are impossible, that these appear to be evolved. What's the word? It's like error correction or protection from a virus. So an outbreak of corruption in the church is a bad thing from the point of view of the wellbeing of the congregation. And something that says, well, if you're a priest and you're spending money in town, people are going to look at you funny

because you're not supposed to have money. And if you're hanging around with cute girls, people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to be having sex. girls, people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to be having sex. So this limits their ability to get away with stuff. I'm not saying it's zero. Obviously, it's not. But the idea that there will be protections in each tradition for this, that religions that don't successfully protect against abuses of power will succumb in competition to religions that do it effectively.

And so you're absolutely correct that all of the changes in religious texts that people believe in, that's all human beings making decisions about what to keep and what to throw out. I'm not arguing anything else. But what I am arguing is those that have been insightful about what to keep from the point of view of the particular problems faced by the population that they are in will have a competitive advantage because they will function more cohesively than a population of atheists who doesn't have somebody

looking out to prevent outbreaks of competition inside the lineage or outbreaks of infighting. So if you were looking at it in an objective way, like say if you were an alien from another planet that didn't understand the language and you're just observing the structure, you would see this error correction in the structure. It would say, oh, they realized there was an issue here with power, and so they error corrected by making these priests be celibate, and then they figured out a way to keep them from having money and that will keep them from being invested in – OK. Yeah. That's what you're saying. And I think it's very misleading to people who analyze things the way you and I would because there's so much hocus pocus associated with these structures that it's like constantly putting a finger in the eye of an analytical person.

Of course. I mean, just the way they dress, right? I mean, just wearing the wizard costume and holding the staff and sitting on the golden throne and all of it. I mean, all the pageantry to it. It's all preposterous. I mean, I agree. Looking at it as a modern person, it looks preposterous to me. On the other hand, there is no way. I'm telling you. looks preposterous to me. On the other hand, there is no way, I'm telling you, I mean, most of my colleagues I'm sure would disagree with this, but I hope to show them to be wrong on this front. There is no way that the huge amount of effort and resource that is invested in these structures was an error. It cannot have been an evolutionary error because if it was,

the huge investment that populations put into these structures is an opportunity for some population that behaves in exactly the same way, except it doesn't make that error to win. Right. But when you get power and then you have the momentum of that power overcoming the population, and then you have positions where the behavior patterns are extremely restrictive and you have to behave inside these behavior patterns or there's grave consequences. I mean, you could conceivably run that for a thousand years without any error correction. And that's what you've got with Islam, right? You've got a very ancient form of religion that Michael Shermer wrote a piece about it that's pretty interesting, where he was talking about how it's the only religion that didn't go through the enlightenment. And he makes these comparisons to like the corrections that have

been had with other religions as time has gone on that haven't happened there. And you could equate it to resource management. You could equate it to the part of the world in which they live. You could equate it. There's a lot of different ways that you could try to figure out why this happened. But the reality is that that thing has not changed. That structure has not changed for a long time. I think you've hit on exactly the right point. the right point.

Islam's mechanism for preventing outbreaks of parasitism was to hard code the thing. And this is a tragedy because what it means is that where Islam needs to update, it doesn't have the mechanism

for doing it. But also as a built-in way to keep people aboard. Like if you become an apostate, you're allowed to kill them. You can kill apostates, which is, there's no other religion that we have right now that operates like that. It has draconian punishments. Imagine if Scientology did that. Right.

Well, I mean, Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving. But how is that not a cult? Since it was created by a science fiction writer, literally out of nowhere. I'm going to be horrified if I said it wasn't a cult. Right. But you said it's too early to tell. Right. So how is that possible? Okay. So there could be some benefits in the future if Scientology continues to evolve and self-correct. It could get to the point where it's a behavior pattern that could be complementary and perhaps even beneficial to people.

I do not believe that this is where it is headed. But if a thousand years from now it had flourished and the population that believed these things was successfully growing, you'd have to say, well, there's something in that set of beliefs that's working for these folks. So anyway, I'm not arguing that it isn't a cult. It has lots of hallmarks that make me think I'm troubled by it. Including much like Mormonism, you know the guy who made it. But this, and unlike Mormonism, like mormonism you know the guy who made it but this and unlike mormonism which was in 1820 we have video we see l ron hubbard's bad teeth and his fucking captain's outfit on with the medals that he gave himself you're like hey what is this right oh right oh you get a planet when you die or something like that it sounds like a cult to me on the other hand you know i mean we've got uh

the mormons get a planet when you die. Sorry. I'm confused. Scientologists don't get a planet? No, no. The Mormons do. And it was in one of the Osmond Brothers albums. They all went to these planets, like in the album. I forget what the album is. It's a hilarious album. But if you open

it up, it's all planets. And the album, the name of the album is this concept that you get a planet when you die. It's something that the Mormons believed in. This seems stingy to me because the universe is so big. We can each afford to get a planet. There it is, the plan.

That's it. See, that is some Joseph Smith shit. By the way, it's a wonderful book. If you read the actual origins of Mormonism, people that are listening go, wait a minute, what do they believe? Wow, do they believe some wacky stuff. But he had a golden or a seer stone rather that allowed him to read the golden tablets. The seer stone was a special magic rock that allowed him to read these golden tablets that contain the lost work of Jesus.

Was that the inside of the album with all the planets? So I believe he was actually illiterate. Yeah. And that he- He was a con man. He was murdered. He put a sheet over his head and dictated what he was supposedly reading to somebody else. That's my understanding of it.

But- Well, he was a charismatic person like many people who've created cults. He was. I think what they did right, Mormons are some of the nicest people I've ever met. They have an amazing sense of community. They're super nice. And I've always said that if I was going to join a cult, I think I'd join the Mormons. But where they fucked up is regulations came in.

They started restricting the market. The regulators came in and stopped these people from having nine wives. And then they're not going to be so nice anymore. The reason why they were so nice is because they had these crazy relationships. They were having orgies every night. They had nine people living in the house that they were allowed to have sex with. There's a problem with your they because for everybody who had nine wives, there were eight dudes who had none.

Those guys got to get their shit together and start their own cult. I guess. Where, you know, well, maybe they're gay. I don't know. What about the women, too, right? How about a woman who has ten husbands, you know? This is bullshit for her. That doesn't happen.

Yeah, it should, right? No. It should be possible. No, no. See, there's a very good biological reason. Oh, I understand biologically. It doesn't make any sense, but. See, there's a very good biological reason. Oh, I understand biologically. It doesn't make any sense. You were ready to dig deep into your biological.

Oh, man, don't go polyandrous on me. We went way far away from our original point, which was that you could figure out a way to restructure with this, I don't want to call it plan B because that's the abortion plan. Game B. Game B, yeah. Game B. Well, I don't want to say there plan B because that's the abortion game B game B game B. Well, I don't want to say it. There is no game B at the moment. What there is is a conversation that emerged from this. And the basic point is that one can for the very same reason that people are buying Bitcoin, for the same reason that people have decided to get smartphones, for the same reason people have signed up for Facebook.

Those are, with the exception of Bitcoin, those are game A examples and they are predatory. But you could provide a version that was not predatory, that would function in a superior way with respect to how it enhanced your ability to function in the world and rational people. I mean, you know, you make a good point. It's not that we have billions of people who are sophisticated enough to know that they should be looking for that alternative and who will jump on it. But to the extent that you have people that are sophisticated, are aware that their lives are being disrupted by forces that they are incapable of managing,

like these dopamine traps and the like, who will embrace these technologies because they themselves are looking for a mechanism to insulate from the predatory things that have emerged in the market, what you be adopted, the number of things that we have already adopted because we got something for it, cell phone being the perfect example. We didn't have to tell people to get a cell phone. People got a cell phone because of all the things that they could see that it did for them. And that same drive to pick up some new technology or agreement because it enhances your life, it solves some problem for you in some way that's good, that causes the thing to be adopted out of self-interest. And that is what the mechanism for change is going to have to look like, is self-interest causing people to embrace a shift in the opportunities and obligations that they are signed up for.

Now, I think one of the problems that I have with this is that I always assume that this is going to be like on January the 1st, we're switching over to the new system, but it's not, right? Can't be. Can't be. It's got to be almost like a natural chain of events. It has to be like water flowing downhill. So I can speak scientifically about my own field because, you know, I did enough training that I know where the bodies are buried. are buried. When you're in a field and that field is stuck, it is impossible to move the field. You can't get a hearing that will allow you to change the way the field thinks. But you can step outside the field. You can leave the reservation as it were, and you can proceed

by other means. And what happens is the same thing that, you know, Lars Anderson discovered with archery, is that once you're no longer signed up for what good form looks like, there are all kinds of ways to accomplish things that are not documented. And so finding those alternatives, game A is not serving people's needs. We are all unhealthy. You know, even if we find a way to be physically healthy, we are all overwhelmed by so much social noise and so much choice that is meaningless that we end up wasting a huge fraction of our time, spending a tremendous amount of our mental effort on puzzles that aren't interesting or worthwhile or productive. And so we are all, each of us has a giant opportunity to upgrade our lives by simply removing a bunch of the noise,

by getting the systems that are supposed to function in our interest to do so more effectively. the systems that are supposed to function in our interest to do so more effectively. And therefore, we are, I hate to use the word consumers, but we would be willing consumers for a better alternative were it to show up for us. And presenting that alternative so that people find it, they experiment with it, and upon discovering that actually, you know what, I am better off when I participate in this way than that way, that that causes adoption. And it doesn't take very, you know, Bitcoin obviously started with, you know, an ambitious person who set the thing in motion. What's a currency with only one person using it. It's a currency. You've used it. I've used it. So anyway, it is possible to get adoption based on the fact that the thing solves problems that people are otherwise stuck with. Do you think that because things are moving so quickly today, it seems to

me that like new ideas are implemented so fast, new concepts are accepted so quickly that something like this where it might have taken several decades a few decades ago would only take a few years today. Well, there are. It would become a thing. There are two things. One, there is the possibility that things will change very rapidly. And then there is the fact that they must because the trajectory we're on, we are playing with such powerful technologies and being operated at such a high rate with such high throughput that those of us who have started, you know, I think

it's a mistake to look at the problems of the world as individual problems. It's much more effective to look at them as symptoms of problems that don't have names. as symptoms of problems that don't have names. So we have an economic system that generates technologies that create great benefits in the short term at some massive cost in the long term, and we have no mechanism. Once they've generated massive profits, there's no ability to shut them off.

That's a problem that has many, many symptoms that we could name. But we, in effect effect don't have much time, that the rate at which we are liquidating the well-being of the't said yet is nobody, including me, thinks that we're going to be able to spell out an answer in the present that is correct. But what we can do is navigate in the direction of the answer rules of the world and the embrace of them because you get benefits. It is prototyping what the new structure would be. what you didn't know about it that you needed to know and you correct those problems so that what you get is effectively evolution building an elegant solution rather than what progressives often accidentally invite which is good intentions that produce horrifying outcomes because you didn't know what they were actually going to do once you set them in motion right communism being a great example you think communism is going to do once you set them in motion, right? Communism being a great example. You think communism is going to solve the problems of the world.

In fact, it creates, you know, massive harm and kills millions because you didn't understand what it would do in motion. So we don't want to ever face that again. We don't want to be utopians because anytime you engage in utopianism, if you set it in motion, you're going to create a dystopia. It's virtually guaranteed. The way to avoid that is not to imagine that you know the answer. It's to define what objective you want the system to reach and then navigate towards it. How do you think this could be implemented? Well, it requires capital, frankly, and it requires capital and people who understand what the problems are. Most importantly,

it requires people who understand game theory, Because what we keep doing is setting systems in motion that have the characteristics that guarantee evolution. There are only four of them. And if you set a system in motion that has those four characteristics, you will get adaptive evolution. And what it will produce, you have no control over. It will produce whatever the niche space allows. So you need people who are aware of the game theoretic parameters of the space and who understand essentially, you know, game theory is a very important topic. It's less complicated than people think. There aren't as many games as you would imagine.

There are a few canonical ones and then there are a bunch of variations on a theme. But understanding those things so that you can use, so you can effectively harness the power of evolution to build a functional system rather than build a system and then suffer the consequences of evolution that you didn't anticipate. That's what we keep doing. We've built an economy and a political system that evolve out from under us and they create monstrous phenomena that we didn't anticipate because they weren't in the plan. Do you think that it's possible that, like, you see the radical change, the social change that's happened just over the last couple months, since the Harvey Weinstein thing.

Do you see what's happened? I mean, it literally has probably stopped sexual harassment dead in its tracks. Women who work in these workplaces that had to deal with the consequences of these guys, the amount of those sexual harassment episodes has probably been radically reduced like that. Yeah. Is it temporary though? I don't know. It's a good question. It's a good question. I think because my only concern is that with false accusations or overreactions or people that are just not

treating this like the incredibly powerful medium that it is, the medium for change, and then using it to their own benefit, people could get greedy and corrupt this, right? But I think- It's already happening. Sure. I'm sure. You know any examples? Yeah, a couple of them.

I mean, I don't want to, like every other man, I am hesitant to put my weight on the ice with anybody because who knows what you don't know. But I've seen several stories now that I find very disturbing. The first one, and I must say, you know, this was a topic of conversation with me and my friends as I'm guessing it would have been with you and your friends. And I feel weird saying this on your podcast, but here it comes. My friends and I have discussed this, had a kind of reaction, which was, you know, it turns out to have been a really good decision never to grope anybody who wasn't into it. Right? Right. That wasn't the reason that we didn't grope anybody who wasn't into it. Right? Right? Right. Of course.

That wasn't the reason that we didn't grope anybody. But nonetheless, it turns out to have been a benefit that we're not worried about what's going to emerge. Yes. So that's what I was saying. And then I saw this Garrison Keillor story. Yeah. And suddenly I didn't feel so safe anymore.

The Garrison Keillor one is the most disturbing one. It's not, actually, but it's bad. No. There's one more? There's a worse one. Tell everybody the Garrison Keillor story. The Garrison Keillor story. So, by the way, the only thing we have.

So he was fired from Minnesota Public Radio. His radio program was not only renamed, but the old ones were disappeared. And mind you, I don't give a damn about Garrison Keillor's radio program. But the only thing we have as an explanation is his own account, right? So is there another side of the story? I can't say, but I must say the account had the ring of truth to it because it would have been very devastating if some compelling counter-narrative had emerged. And the story he told was that he had been comforting a woman. I think she may have lost

somebody. He had been comforting a woman and he had leaned in, I guess, to hug her and put his hand on her back. And he said her shirt was open and he touched her back and he said his hand went up about six inches that she recoiled. He apologized in the moment. He then sent her an email apologizing. She said, don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. And he said that he and she were friendly until he got a contact from her lawyers. And how long after the event was this?

He didn't say. But my feeling is, let's take the worst possible interpretation, the least generous to Keillor interpretation of this event. That he groped her a little bit. Yeah. Maybe he lost his place. Yeah. Maybe he just was like.

He leaned in. He leaned in. For a moment, he had a sexual thought or something. Touched her back. And then, you know, he did what he should have done, which is apologized. Right. She accepted the apology. He still felt bad about it.

He apologized again. Yeah. And so anyway. It's just a back. Right. It's just a back. So I'm not saying there's zero in the story, but the idea that the guy's entire career is being erased from the radio archives because of this one story if there's more there's more but if there ain't more that's really disturbing

and it this would not have happened if it wasn't for like harvey weinstein right harvey weinstein whose his actions were so disgusting and so egregious and so numerous so despicable that it went so far this way that anything even remotely gross got shifted into that category right like into the kevin spacey category kevin spacey's grabbing dicks and acting like a psychopath and the matt lauer story came out on the same day as the garrison keor story, and that one is truly disturbing, too. I mean, really, just, you know, rape, presumably legally, but even if it wasn't what is described. And again, you know, I'm a believer in due process. I thought he just had affairs.

No, no, no. There's really disturbing stuff, including him. I mean, I want to be a little cautious about this business, about him having a button under his. No, they all have buttons. That's a really common thing in NBC. It is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well.

Yeah, see, that's the problem with these. Problem with the story. And also, it's not something you really want to go into and start reading. You feel like you're gross. Right, it is gross. I will say there was one story, whether that button is a commonplace thing that's been misinterpreted, I don't know. But there is some story in which some woman came into his office. He had her bend over his desk.

He had sex with her. She fainted and he had his assistant take her to the hospital, which, you know, anyway. I'm uncomfortable now because I can't establish that any of this stuff is true. But I will say the Garrison Keillor story doesn't sound like the Lauer story. It doesn't sound like the Harvey Weinstein story or Kevin Spacey. The Al Franken one, one of the women said that he grabbed her waist. He squoze the fat around her waist. And she was disturbed because even her husband is not allowed to touch her like that in public.

Well, I want to come back to Al Franken separately. I believe we need a very separate category for Franken. But I was going to tell you what was worse than the Keillor story. Go ahead. So the Keillor story is disturbing. When I heard that one, suddenly my feeling of safety based on the fact that I haven't groped anybody who didn't want to be groped vanished because suddenly it was open season. But the story that disturbs me even more is the Matt Taibbi story. I don't know that one. You know who that is?

I know who Matt Taibbi is. So Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone reporter, who's been really excellent at confronting power, especially in the financial sector. And, you know, he's been very consistent on this. Apparently, as a young man, he was in Russia, and he was publishing a satirical magazine, I guess it was. And the satirical magazine, so there's the story that came out, which was that he had written all of these things about assaulting women and mocking them. It turned out he didn't do the writing. It was his partner. And that he and his partner were engaged in producing the satirical publication that was in fact mocking the culture of Americans who had gone over to Russia and were snorting tons of coke and living it up as they were corrupting the society that had recently been freed from communism. And so the point is, this was a case in which the evidence against Taibbi was ironic because it was really Taibbi critiquing this bad behavior amongst other men. And so the

reason that this, you know, I wouldn't know what to make of that story, except that the person, the journalist who started sorting this out, interviewed both Matt Taibbi's girlfriend who worked at the publication and other women in the office soliciting stories about what had happened in the office. And the women in the office universally reported these guys were honorable and they weren't behaving this way. And this was all about satire of these bad folks. And so anyway, there's a way in which this story creeps me out beyond any other because the danger of losing, you know, Matt Taibbi, there isn't another one. Right.

What he's doing is important. He's amazing. He's a brilliant writer. Right. And so, you know, I was going to be pretty surprised if he was behaving this way. But, OK, I've been surprised by a few of these. And it wasn't even necessarily behaving. It was writing.

It was writing. It was writing. But the fact that there's no there there when you pursue the story, the women who were in a position to say, yeah, actually, he was kind of a dick said, oh, the opposite.

And he didn't even actually write it. Right. He didn't write it. It was designed to lampoon people who were behaving badly in this context

in exactly the way that the Me Too movement should applaud. You retweeted and quoted a woman who wrote something and I retweeted it as well when you did it, which she said, here's an unpopular opinion. I'm actually not at all concerned about men who are falsely accused of sexual assault slash harassment. and you said rethink this. There's the idea that honorable men who are on your side could get caught up in this, and you're not even remotely concerned. I don't know if you followed the thread before she turned her page to private,

but one of the more hilarious things is they turned it on her saying, what about men of color who are falsely accused? No, not men of color. She felt the racism coming her way and immediately acquiesced. It was fascinating because I'm watching this social dance, this weird peacocking of morals. And it's just it's so odd. But I think that it's like we're talking about with other things. Systems correct themselves. You find this one terrible example and then everything sort of like gets washed out because of this one terrible example.

And then I feel like it will settle. I don't know. I'm just guessing. You're the biologist. I do – I'm disturbed. That particular tweet you're talking about, I don't care if some innocent men go down is based on one relatively easy to understand conclusion, but it misses the more important one. So what she's effectively saying is there's been a ton of carnage. Lots of women have suffered awful stuff at the hands of men who weren't

accountable. And so a few men who suffer some bad stuff is tiny in comparison. We all get that. But that's a terrible idea because it's a team thing then. It's the worst idea. It's us versus them. It's the worst idea because what you want is a system in which men are honorable. And if you allow men who are honorable to be skewered simply because some person, often cynical, decides to go after them, A, you're going to eliminate all of the courageous men from the system because all those people have enemies. And so the point is, anybody with an enemy

suddenly has to fear an accusation that has no truth in it that's going to be reflexively believed. So if you want the system to work, the last thing you want to do is just decide it's fine for innocent people to go down with the ship. Yeah, and to not have any respect for due process

is just crazy. I mean, you're going to go back to the McCarthy era. You're going to go to the Salem witch trials. It is that. It is that. It is that. Yeah. I just hope it keeps our daughters and wives and girlfriends and moms

from being groped at work, right? I mean, it might. It might. Look, I've always said this. The environment of an office is so fucking entirely unnatural that it takes incredible restraint just to keep people

from behaving in the way that they would if they were surrounded by these people on a regular basis. And like we were talking about before with professors, the relationship that a professor has with a student, but it's even more so with a boss and an employee, right? A secretary, someone who makes a fraction of what you make, or someone who's below you in the office

food chain, and you kind of can dictate whether or not they do well in life, whether or not they advance. Your input can change the course of their career, how much money they make, whether they'll be able to go on vacations, whether they can live comfortably, pursue their dreams. I mean, it's a crazy environment. The office environment is a very bizarre environment. It's super dangerous. And what I keep waiting for, maybe somebody has written it and I haven't read it yet, but the deep question.

So we have to deal with the issue of men behaving this way. Obviously, it's completely unacceptable. And, you know, we have two dangers. We've got people cynically wielding these accusations. And we also have. Predatory behavior. We have crucifying people for infractions that don't amount to, you know, the same tragedy, right? So anyway, so those issues are important. But what I want to see is that what happened is actually a consequence of an unhealthy truth of our system. It actually goes back to the conversation we were

having before, where the power of men like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer comes from a very unnatural concentration of opportunity. So women have been compromised because if you're in the news biz at, was it NBC? And Matt Lauer tells you to open your blouse, and Matt Lauer tells you to open your blouse, suddenly you're staring at a major career decision, right? Do you say no or do you say yes? And one person is not supposed to have that much power. You should be able to walk out of NBC and say, I'm not working there anymore because Matt Lauer's an ass and go somewhere else. But if Matt Lauer is not only has the power to make a, or well, to make your career, but he also has the power to break you because you can't, you can't endure having said no to him. Right. Then that's a tragedy. And in

fact, did you read Selma Hayek's story on Harvey Weinstein? Terrifying. Terrifying. And I thought, I mean, A, I thought it was very courageous of her to write it, that she didn't need to because Weinstein was already understood to be the monster that he was. And I actually thought she did a good job. I mean, he is a monster, but she went, she, even though he was her monster in her words, she said that there were two Harvey Weinsteins and you didn't know which one you were going to get. So she actually, she dealt with the part of him that wasn't this way, apparently,

honorably enough to say that when nobody else was talking about it. So I don't wish to resurrect anything Harvey Weinstein here. I think the guy is getting what he deserves. And even though due process is super important, in this case, there's so many stories that it's impossible to imagine. Well, it's not just stories.

It's actually written into his contract. Yeah, and the settlements. But the sexual harassment clauses in his contract were the craziest fucking things I've ever seen in my life. Like they literally said, if you have one infraction, it's this amount of money. Two infractions, it's half a million dollars. Three infractions, it's a million.

He just monetized. It's insane. And the point is, well, there's something unhealthy about a system that creates somebody so powerful that they are capable of just treating their own sexual assault of other people as a cost of doing business by writing it into the contract. So we have to fix. Not only do we have to fix that if you're a man and you behave this way, you're not safe. We also have to fix the system that let this go on so long by concentrating opportunity so that any person who decided to say, hey, actually things are not healthy here would have been, A, not listened to because everybody else had stuff to lose if Harvey Weinstein didn't like you. had stuff to lose if Harvey Weinstein didn't like you. And so anyway, curing the concentration of opportunity problem is part and parcel of solving the sexual assault problem.

Yeah. And it's also this giant enterprise, right? And when you have one person who's the king, which is essentially what he was, they behave like kings have classically. I mean, that's what kings do. They want everyone they want. You know, I mean, you hear horrible stories throughout history of things that men do when they have ultimate power. The old phrase, ultimate power corrupts, you know, or absolute power corrupts. ultimate power corrupts you know or absolute power corrupts absolutely yeah it's just there's no way around it it seems like unless there's full disclosure unless i i firmly believe that all of this is there's two things going going on right now that we are in sort of an adolescent stage of human evolution in terms of our culture and that we're working

out how we interact and behave with each other, that information and the ability to exchange information is highlighting all these flaws in these natural systems that we have, these alpha chimps that are running these giant groups. But then I think this technology that it's exposing us is going to give way to something that's even scarier. And my my number one fear over the last year has been artificial intelligence. Oh, I'm tremendously troubled by it. I'm more scared of it every day.

Every day I wake up thinking, are we just sleeping while this thing is about to go live? And we literally are in a fucking Terminator movie. I think it's both better and worse than that. It's happening already. And because it's not robots, we don't see it. Right, it's happening in your phone. There's AI that operates. It's your phone.

And the thing is, it's AI. It's not a GI. Right. A G being? General. Okay. So the fear, the one that we have. Sentient.

Yeah, that the thing is smart enough to start thinking on its own and that it might come up with its own objectives. It might actually be creative. It might be creative and either misunderstand. You know, the paperclip problem is you tell it to make as many paperclips as possible and it sees your attempt to turn it off or reprogram it as an obstacle to making paperclips and it just starts liquidating the universe. So that's not a malevolent AI. That's a confused AI. Malevolent AI is also possible, but what we've got is a baby version. The algorithms causing us to become addicted to our phones and to do damage to our lives is AI. These are algorithms that are developing.

And frankly, it doesn't even matter whether people are reprogramming them or whether they are reprogramming themselves. And it is undoubtedly a mixture. What we have is a evolutionary system that the winner will be the site that manages to capture your attention in the face of competitors who are trying to do the same thing. And they will build anything and everything into that algorithm to get you to do it, which means there's nothing in your life that's sacred, right? Your life can be liquidated to get you addicted to that site on the phone. What we have now is a case where the algorithms aren't so good that we can't have this conversation, recognize that this is a case where the algorithms aren't so good that we can't have this conversation, recognize that this is a danger we've created for ourselves, and address it. We could address it now. But if we don't realize that the phone algorithm addiction problem is, this is the warning shot.

This is the place where we get a chance to recognize where we're headed and deal with it before it's AGI. If we don't do that, I don't, everybody who's serious and has thought about this question has had the same, oh shit, rational or conclusion is that we, there's no stopping this. There's a, we can rationally debate how far off it is, but once it gets going, there's essentially no good way out. And there's no one that's going to agree to stop right now. Right. There's just too much competition involved in terms of the... There's so many resources that are on the line. There's so much resources. There's so much power. There's so much money on the line to see who can come up with the best version of

this and do it the quickest. And it's this mad race towards the edge of a cliff. And no one exactly knows whether or not we're going to be able to use the brakes. Right. And so in some ways, I think this is the ultimate demonstration of where we are and what we must contemplate in order to save ourselves. Because if we can agree that the AI problem has the potential to destroy us, and that given time, it will have the power to destroy us, and that we are vague at best on what mechanisms might prevent it from doing so, but then we've got this loophole, which is, well, suppose you took 99% of the AI projects and managed to correctly build in some algorithm that prevented them from going rogue in one way or the other, but somebody else decides not to. So we have to confront this at the level of

what is allowed, right? I don't like hearing myself say that because i hear people turning off on the other end when they hear oh he doesn't want to allow us to innovate but for the survival of the species i think it's imperative you have to think about it we have no choice i'm so scared that we're caught up in all this other nonsense and we're thinking about so much stupid shit in our life like you know whether or not kim and kanye stay together and in the middle of all this there's a lab right now and they're connecting these wires and connecting these dots and reprogramming and accelerating the evolution of this thing and it's not going to turn off and that life as we know it we we only have a few years left of this i really feel like we're in a fucking science fiction movie and we're at the beginning of the movie where everything's great.

We've got problems. We've got a lot of dudes out there pinching butts and some dudes are pretty rapey. Kevin Spacey got taken out of that movie. We're doing pretty good. In the meanwhile, there's fucking robots that are being built by Boss Dynamic that does backflips

and they're going to be able to think for themselves and they're going to have machine guns for hands and their body is going to be able to think for themselves and they're going to have machine guns for hands. Right. And their body's going to be filled with bullets. What could go wrong? It's fucking crazy because it's happening at such an accelerated rate that it's literally what I'm, I'll be sitting around, I'll be playing with my kids, I'll be hanging out and I'll be like, fuck, are they making robots right now?

Is that, is, are we, are we like a year away from this being a real problem? Well, this is kind of what I'm getting at, is that the AI problem, in some ways, maybe it's good because it's causing us to be able to focus on one of these hazards to us that you can't, once you've seen why this is a risk, once you've really made eye contact with it, you can't talk yourself into why it's safe, right? Because it can't possibly be. Even if 99% of them are safe, 1% is enough to create the problem. So once you've got that information, you can then begin to extrapolate to all of the other problems that don't have the same intrigue around them.

have the same intrigue around them. There's something, Sam Harris makes the point that as you talk about the AI apocalypse, it is simultaneously horrifying, but kind of fun to get into because it is sort of sci-fi-ish and all. But the whole landscape that we have built, right? Our sociopolitical landscape was built by people who had never heard of Darwinism. There was no Darwinism. They didn't know. And so they built a bunch of ecosystems, which is if you build a habitat and you install into it those features which cause evolution to occur, it will occur. And what it will create is entirely a question of what the niches look like that you have left open. So we

are living that. We are suffering the consequence of an economic environment that is evolutionary, that creates giant rent-seeking monsters who are liquidating our well-being and putting it into their bank accounts. We've created a political apparatus that has the same characteristics. And now we're facing a robot version that actually has the potential to very rapidly push us over the cliff. My real issue with this, and this is something that I've been battling again with for a couple years now, is that this is what we do. And it's one of the reasons why we're so fascinated with technological innovation. I mean, literally, we are the caterpillar that is becoming the electronic butterfly. And we don't realize it while we're doing it.

And we're so obsessed with the newest, latest, greatest phone that really doesn't change your life at all. Like, I got this new iPhone. It's pretty. It's great. I do the same shit I did on my old iPhone, but I was so pumped to get it, man. But you're, in some ways, facilitating the evolution of this technology

that will ultimately lead, if you follow it to an end point, it's going to lead to something very, very bizarre. I mean, if you're Ray Kurzweil, you think it's going to be wonderful and you're going to be able to download your brain into a computer. But if you're a lot of other people, you think it's an absolutely terrifying thing that's going to eventually lead to us being irrelevant. And this is unnecessary. So likely we won't have time to go very far into it, But we have an alternative. And I think it does look a little bit like Lars Anderson with his fancy archery, you know, which is, we are just on the cusp of understanding enough about what a human being is and how it functions for us to actually

take control of our structure and to turn it to our, to basically creating a stable, non-utopian, abundant system. In other words, the stuff that we are all pursuing, right? You got your first smartphone and it changed everything and it was marvelous. And then your second one didn't change that much and your third one was no big deal and your fourth one is barely a blip, right? That thing that we are pursuing, the well-being that we felt the burst of when we got our first smartphones, that thing can be made to, the system can be made such that we are constantly getting the signals of well-being and the liberty to do things that are of consequence. In other words, it is not beyond our current understanding to build a system that instead of getting you to innovate something,

having a huge burst of dopamine and then it wears out and you're constantly looking for the next one, constantly looking for the next one. It is possible to build a system that is structured such that your intuitive interaction with it is healthy so that you are feeling about that is something I want to engage with. That is something I don't feel like engaging with actually leads you correctly through it. And that would free your mind to think about interesting things rather than thinking about, you know, which news magazine is the least fake, right? So, um, architecting a system that is,

that understands what a human being is, that understands we are not built to be happy and therefore pursuing happiness as if we were built to be happy is a hazard. We should be pursuing something else and we should recognize that happiness is a carrot on a stick that evolution built into us in order to get us to pursue objectives which were not stable well-being. They were actually the spread of our genomes. Which you can attach to technology. This pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of material possessions. And we facilitate that with these advertisements that make every new thing look like, this is the one that's going to take me over the top. I'm going to finally reach the promised land. Well, technology is one thing. Really, we are built to pursue something that economists call growth.

But I would say human beings, like all creatures, are built to detect opportunities that they can capitalize on. And those opportunities can look like various different things. It can look like a bunch of, you know, for some creature foraging, it can be some food that it happens onto. For a population of humans, it can be a new continent. That's a huge opportunity. For human beings, it can also be a new technology that takes whatever opportunity you have and allows you to do more with it.

But we are wired to search for those things. And the pursuit of those things has produced a great many marvelous innovations and discoveries. But the fact that we do not understand that we are mindlessly pursuing these things, even when they are not available, causes us to do all sorts of harm to ourselves. So understanding these things, as we finally are beginning to, we could build a civilization that did not leave us on the hedonic treadmill pursuing happiness, which cannot possibly be reached, but would allow us to be fulfilled and to utilize the amazing brain capacity that evolution has given us for something that's actually worthy of it.

Brett Weinstein, on that note, let's wrap this bitch up. All right. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. I hope someone can actually do this. I hope it can be done.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you, Joe. Brett Weinstein on Twitter. And you don't have those other things. You don't use those other terrible technologies.

I'm not. All right.