TRIGGERnometry - Bret Weinstein - We Can Stop a Civil War

Episode Date: July 26, 2020

Bret Weinstein is a biologist, evolutionary theorist and host of The Dark Horse Podcast available on podcasts and YouTube. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVVAN. vanish. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Boster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you. You want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is a visiting fellow the James Madison program at Princeton University. He's the man behind the Unity Project to

Retake the White House, which is something we're going to talk about. And he, of course, has the distinct honor of being someone who got canceled before. It was cool. Brett Weinstein, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It is great to have you here. Well, let's just for anyone who isn't familiar with the story, which is not many people, of course, I mentioned you being chased out of Evergreen College with your wife Heather, who we've met as well. Just remind everybody what happened there, because it's such an important piece of what is happening now and where you're coming at the current cultural moment from. Well, I have to tell you, this is my least favorite question in the universe, because what happened cannot be summarized simply.

But fate has delivered me some good fortune, which is that now Evergreen is happening everywhere. And so people are more familiar with the story because it's now happening to them. So for those who don't know it, I would recommend A, that they check out Mike Naina's documentary on the Evergreen story. They could check out Benjamin Boyce's 20-part series on the catastrophe. And they could check out Heather and my article in the Washington Examiner. But the short version is Evergreen was three years early. There was a new president who impaneled a group to fix a largely imaginary racial problem at Evergreen. And they created a proposal that would have been fatal to the institution.

As that proposal was unveiled, I opposed it, which made me public enemy number one. And at some point, a protest was formulated. and sent to my classroom where 50 students I had never met demanded my resignation or my firing. Protests erupted across the campus. They quickly turned into riots. The president, in his infinite wisdom, pulled the police out and told them not to enforce the law, leaving the campus to literal anarchy. And I was pursued by people who were wielding weapons looking for me specifically.

it was a taste of autonomous zones and other of these phenomena a bit ahead of the curve. Wow. So you saw this happen three years ago. Did you think it was going to spread in quite the way it has done? Or did you think it was going to be an isolated incident of madness? I thought it was going to spread exactly the way it has spread. The one thing I didn't see was the speed. It happened quicker than I expected. It was like it was a built-up kind of pressure. in the system that hit a phase transition point, and suddenly it was everywhere, where I thought it was going to spread slowly, and, you know, it would take five, six, seven years, but it was really like it died down a little bit on college campuses over the course of three years, and then,

boom, the George Floyd protest caused it to take over every institution simultaneously, at least here in the U.S. And do you think that's partly to do with what in our country is certainly lockdowns and people being stuck at home and loss of work and loss of kind of sense of the future, people seem to have reacted in that way. Do you think this was always going to happen? Well, you know, I told the Congress it was going to happen when they had me testify. You can see in Mike Naina's documentary that I spell out how this was, what I said there was that I'm frequently asked about the free speech crisis on college campuses. And every time I'm asked, I tell them the same thing, which is this is not

about free speech and it's only tangentially about college campuses, it will eventually spill out everywhere. There's no question that the lockdown and the chaos of 2020 set this in motion differently than it would have occurred otherwise. But the real issue is that there's a kind of game theory that causes this thing to spread. And I want to be very careful about using the language of contagion because very often that language is used to break empathy with people. And I do think that these protests are motivated by a correct understanding that the system is rigged against average people. So the energy that is built up in the system is about something very real and I don't want to discount that. But the belief structure of the movement and the proposals for solutions are absolutely.

absolutely insane. They are civilization destroying ideas and they are spreading by virtue of a discontinuity between what's in the interest of the individual on short time scales and what's in our collective interest on long time scales So in effect people are solving a personal problem by embracing this ideology which causes the mob to temporarily leave you alone, but it empowers the mob to go after the next level and And yeah, I guess the short answer to your question is it unfolded a bit differently. It probably unfolded a lot faster, but the trajectory was clear from the beginning because, you know, I don't know why this was a surprise to anyone, but colleges educate people who then move into the rest of the world. And as they do, they carry whatever they learned in their classes with them. So if they learned good things, that's great for us.

And if they learned absolute nonsense about why things aren't working, and they were told that there was a simple solution that involved them tearing everything down and utopia arising in its wake, then they'll tear it down. But Brett, those people who's going to be listening to our podcast, who may have sort of dimly aware of what's happening in America and all the rest of it and the Black Lives Matter movement, why do you think, and to use the word civilization ending for these ideas? Isn't that just quite a doomsday prediction?

Well, yes, but when you're headed towards doomsday, you want to make a doomsday prediction. That's something. I've got some calculations I can show you later about why that's true. But no, it's actually pretty simple. So what we have is a horizontal revolution taking place in the U.S. And, you know, it's not just the U.S. You can see it across the English-speaking world and in some ways across Western civilization. But this horizontal revolution is basically infused into everything by virtue of largely millennials who have learned critical theory and its downstream consequences in college and elsewhere. They've carried it quietly with them when they were low down on the ladder inside of these institutions.

And then suddenly they get the sense that they are demographically empowered to bring about this utopian change. change. And so they've each gone after the power structures inside their institutions. That means, at least in the U.S. at the moment, we have a problem everywhere simultaneously, right? We're seeing evidence of this in the federal government. We're seeing evidence of this in every single tech company. We're seeing evidence of it in every college. And the fact that I'm saying every should tell you something, right? If this were simply very popular, if it were 70% of institutions, well, that would leave us some sort of foothold because that would mean that the 30% of institutions

that weren't affected would have some hope of rebooting the structure. But because it's every college and every company, we don't have anything with which to retain our sanity or our capacity to navigate. Now, that could simply be a threat to the U.S. And it could be that the U.S. was going to hobble itself by embracing this nonsense.

And, you know, if your engineering school embraces the idea that, you know, logic is a European kind of oppression that has been imposed on the rest of the world, which is literally something that is being suggested here. If our engineering schools do that, they will empower the engineering schools elsewhere in the world to take over because, of course, the bridge is built by people who don't think such things will be stronger and last longer. but think now if the U.S. does this, if we hobble ourselves, that leaves an incredible power vacuum internationally. Who is likely to fill it? Yeah. All right. So my point is how is this a threat to Western civilization very simply, right? You've got a effectively monopolar world and the thing that constitutes the organizing structure of that world, you know, corrupt and broken as it is, but nonetheless, organizing structure that holds liberty as a high value, that thing is now engaged in some kind of ritual suicide. Right. And I've tried to make this point to people for some time now when people

criticize the U.S. and they're right to. The U.S. isn't perfect. Of course it's not. But, you know, the vacuum that can be created by undermining the United States is going to be filled by someone, either the Chinese or the Russians or someone who comes from one of those countries. I can tell you, that's not going to be a pretty place. But are you perhaps reassured by the events of recent days, Brett, with resignation of Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan from the New York Times? It seems that people are prepared now to call out some of the stuff, to go against the Harper's letter, for example.

Are these steps that are likely to make a significant impact, or is it just the protestations of the doomed few? Wow. It's hard for me to imagine why Barry Weiss is resuscary. resignation and the Harper's letter would represent reason for hope. I mean, I do think there's reason for hope, but it's going to be a needle that we're going to have to thread. In effect, what we have is evidence that the battle that has gone on at the New York Times has been lost. And I have to say, as much as I don't want to challenge the Harper's letter, I have lots of friends who signed it,

I think it was more or less a disaster and not because of the backlash that it got, but because of what it represented. So I saw that letter as an attempt by people who suddenly became aware of the hazard that we face to carve out a deal. They effectively had a kind of immunity and they've lost it and they seem to have attempted to resurrect it. But in so doing, many of our most important voices, people who have been very careful and courageous in challenging this ideology, were dragged into a letter that fused them together with people who actually hadn't seen it and had been part of the problem. And then a lot of other people were excluded from the letter by design, which means that the letter divided the small but cogent coalition that has been fighting

against this all along. The letter to great pains, for example, to portray the censorious instinct as a feature of the right that we are just beginning to see on the left, which that's not the way recent history looks here, right? Many of our best defenders have actually come from the right, and I can say that personally because I was somebody who received that defense. Many of the people who showed up on my behalf were from the right. And, you know, to portray the right as the problem is just simply misunderstanding where we are. Yeah, there did seem to be a lot of this sort of, well, Trump's evil, but here's my opinion about other stuff in that letter. Go ahead, Francis. No, I was just going to say how refreshing it is to have you asking a silly question instead of me.

I'm absolutely delighted. That is very unusual. I agree with you. But here's the thing, Brett, I remember talking to you, and we sort of both identified really as disaffected lefties and Heather in particular, your college professors, I'm a former teacher. Isn't this the fault of capitalism in that it has presented young people with this economic system which no longer works for them? Capitalism does not work for millennials and it does not work for the generation that came after them. So can we blame young people for going, you know what? We need a new system because I'm excluded from it. Yeah, we can't blame young people for registering that the system is rigged against them and demanding that that be fixed.

and I don't, you know, I really don't think most of the people involved in this protest have any idea what they're signing up for. They are reacting predictably to a system that has frozen them out of the well-being that they helped to create or could create if only there was a place for them in society that made sense. So I don't, the anger is generated by something very real. I'm hesitant to say it's capitalism because it's very hard to say what that means. I think there are things that markets do, that no other structure can do better, and that for those things, we need to use markets. And there are other things that markets shouldn't be allowed to touch. And we have now reflexively just thrown markets at everything as the solution to every problem. And it has caused a kind of amplifier of inequality that couldn't possibly have led anywhere else.

But the answer isn't simple. Were there a leadership structure in the movement, we could have that dialogue. And perhaps the movement could be brought to some kind of useful place where we could actually finally challenge the things that are so structurally broken about our system. But without leadership, basically every bad idea gets incorporated. It's like, you know, a brainstorming session in which there's no ability to say, no, that doesn't make sense. And that couldn't be a greater hazard, especially with the amount of power that the game theory provides this movement. And to your point about disaffected lefties and all, I still regard myself not only as a liberal and a progressive, but I regard myself as a radical. I haven't changed my political position because the reality of where we are hasn't been altered by this.

what has changed is the recognition of others who see themselves on the left of who their allies might be. So in some sense, when I listen to the mainstream left or even the radical left, I don't recognize anything they're saying as useful in the current context. So when I say I'm a radical, what I mean is I actually think we need radical change in order to survive, that we have run off the end of the tape and the processes that we were using to make sense. and to figure out how to navigate have now created an existential threat, or they've created a mode that generates new existential threats so regularly that we won't go on very long this way, therefore we have to fix that. But the solutions I hear coming out of the modern left,

at least here in the U.S., are all backwards looking, and none of them stand a chance of solving the problem. The thing that troubles me with it, Brett, and that worries me in the context of you saying this is civilization ending, is that it's what happens to the people who dissent against some of those very bad ideas that are being suggested. People talk about council culture, but I mean, it's not the first time this has happened in history, where people who objected to very bad ideas were punished for speaking their mind. And anyone who understands that history would kind of see where this is going. Does that, is that a big part of what troubles you? Oh, yeah. I think, well, first of all, I should say,

Because we tend to focus on what's active, we are seeing a picture in which the failure mode that we are headed for is this ever-expanding power of this mind-numbing, nominally left-wing movement. But that mind-numbing left-wing movement is going to back the right-wing into a corner. And the problem is the thing that these two entities are going to agree on is that the way to look at the problems of civilization is race versus race. And so my biggest concern is not that the left wins this and suddenly it's Maoist China. It's that we are in some battle between becoming Maoist China and some kind of return to a race-first view of America, which is frankly the uninvention of America. If we are one thing, it is a structure designed to neutralize these population against population dynamics so that we can prosper together. And the unenvention of that is really unthinkable. And why has the left been infected with these bad ideas?

Because everybody, drink please. My mother's from Venezuela. I've seen this happen in Venezuela. And, you know, Chavez get elected. Everybody goes, this is a brand new dawn. It goes, you know, everybody on the left. lots of people, prominent Germanists, thinkers, Bernie Sanders, said this is a future. It collapses, it implodes. It's now got a larger migrant population than Syria. And they don't seem to want to

admit that it's just a bad idea. Well, the problem is that there's, I think, a very simple answer to that question, but it takes a few hours of background work in order to see why it's clear, right? So in essence, some version of communism or socialism arises in the mind when you see runaway inequality that is generated by a system with markets in the wrong place. So the fact that people naturally land on this formulation that if only we could do X, then our problems would be solved, fails to understand why X is unstable, right? So, So X is unstable for reasons that inside of my discipline, evolutionary biology, we would call the group selection fallacy. The group selection fallacy says that the central concept of communism from each according to his ability to each according to his need will not work because we are wired not to do it, right?

Because anybody who opts out of that system outperforms anybody who opts in. So the short answer is if you institute that system, you will have to institute something authoritarian and draconian with it in order to make it work so that you can restructure people's incentives so that they do not respond to the fact that they would be better off opting out. So in essence, the economic formulation has to come with something unacceptable that descends into some dystopia or other by virtue of the underlying game theory. that doesn't mean that to somebody who knows little of game theory that it doesn't seem intuitively like the obvious answer and that is a battle we are going to keep fighting until we can figure out how to convey you can't solve this problem with that solution because it won't last right even if you could make it happen it will either evolve into something else or descend into madness and there's nothing you can do about that so you need a better answer Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

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All right, Brett. So before we get into your political solution, which we'll talk about, you describe yourself as a radical progressive, right? So what is the credible left-wing solution to the problem of runaway inequality that you talk about if it's not socialism, if it's not communism of the type that Francis was talking about? Well, you know, I think the American founders had a lot of it right. And the fact that we are now running into the contradictions that emerged in that constitutional context doesn't invalidate the correctness of the values that they spelled out and the basics of the mechanism. In other words, in the U.S. and in other parts of the world as well, the key issue is one of the corruption of a democratic structure. So our republic now functions predatorily with respect to the population.

Policy is either it is indifferent to the well-being of people. And what that generally means is that where the interests of large corporations, for example, diverge from the interests of the population, which isn't always, but when they diverge, the corporations always win. And so that has, A, given people the sense that the nature of governance is inherently malignant, so they have stopped participating in it in large numbers. But if you were to remove the corrupting elements, the things that have handed power all to one side, then actually democracy is not a bad way to deal with this issue, that people, to the extent that

they can understand what their interests are, will tend to support them. And it is the corruption that makes that dysfunctional. that said we do need to upgrade our structure we need to upgrade it because the people who wrote our founding documents didn't know anything about evolutionary dynamics they didn't know about game theory they'd never seen a chainsaw or a train or you know they couldn't have conceived of a nuclear reactor or of a process that could alter the chemistry of the atmosphere enough to change how much energy we trap from the sun so the structure has to be updated for modern realities. And that is absolutely doable, but not until you get the corruption out of the way. And because of this corruption that you're talking about, I presume, is what is crony capitalism,

essentially, whereby, you know, corruption between lobbyists and government and essentially people's best interest not being represented, which makes people disengaged from the system. Well, you know, we can focus on the details, and there are a dozen mechanisms through which the water gets through the cracks. But the larger issue is if you don't understand how evolution works, and then you don't understand, therefore, that when you're setting up a system, you're really setting up an ecosystem in which corruption will evolve, right? No matter what system you set up, to the extent that there's some loophole that allows some entity to get in to shift, policy in its direction in order to enrich and empower itself, that loophole will be enlarged and ultimately it will be the system. And that's where we are. It's happened. And what it really takes is a system's kind of thinking that will allow us to frustrate the very process that causes

corruption to evolve and spread and discover new opportunities. Well, Brett is masterfully setting up himself for the opportunity to talk about his political solution, Brett, you've done, you've made it impossible for us to break out of this paradigm. So just go ahead, hit us with it. Okay. So yes, this is the plan is called Unity 2020. And I don't know how familiar you are with what takes place narratively in our system every four years. But what we have is a system in which change, that is to say, meaningful change that might actually stand a chance of confronting the corruption is frustrated at the primaries. That is to say, sometimes we have candidates who actually would be interested in fixing the system. They are frozen out in the primaries. We are

delivered something either disappointing or false in the general election. And then we have a kind of incoherent conversation over it. But those of us who for decades have looked at the system and said, you know, none of these solutions, neither the red solution or the blue solution, actually is going to change anything going forward, we have to break out of it. We are immediately confronted with the lesser evil paradox. If you vote for something other than the major party candidates, you are voting for something that will draw votes away from whichever of those major party candidates is closer to your own position and empower the one farther away. So your friends are constantly telling you, don't do that. If you vote for something outside of the duopoly,

you're going to empower the greater evil. And then this is going to be your fault. Now, there's always been something wrong with this logic. If, for example, Ralph Nader won a single vote and the Democrats lost by one vote, we would blame Ralph Nader for spoiling the election when in fact the answer is how come you didn't represent the people and therefore win in a landslide. That's the fault of the Democrats. That's not Ralph Nader's fault. But nonetheless, the social phenomenon of being told that the lesser evil is your moral imperative because empowering the greater evil is unthinkable. And if you can find your way out of that little trap, then you're told, well, yes, maybe in an ordinary year, but this time the Supreme Court has gotten critical.

And if you vote for the greater evil, you're going to ruin the country for decades to come by virtue of the fact that the Supreme Court is an appointment for life. Okay. So Unity 2020 is a structural plan to beat the lesser evil paradox. and the idea, it's not a political plan, it's an apolitical plan, it's a non-ideological plan. It is this, we draft two candidates, one from the left and one from the right, and these candidates need to have three characteristics. They need to be courageous, they need to be capable, and they need to be patriotic. We draft them together under an agreement that when elected, they will govern as a team.

That is to say, they will consult on everything. The president and vice president will have symmetrical power and only in the case where there's no time for consultation or if they really cannot reach agreement on what's in the interests of the public, does the president's decision rise above that of the vice president? And then after four years, the positions would reverse. I think I forgot to mention that the team would have its positions on the ticket chosen by coin flip in the first round. So what this does is it creates a ticket that is a obligated to the interests of the American public first. We are picking people who are above politics. And it tends to drain support away from both the major party candidates, thereby structurally avoiding empowering whatever you think the greater evil might be. And then we've built in a failsafe, which is as the election approaches, if the ticket cannot win, we pull the plug.

and the election reverts to its prior state, and we go forward that way. So in this way, those who will come at anything like this, and they will say, we've heard this before, it's a third party run. It empowers the greater evil. No, thank you. We can say, no, no, no, no. It's not a third party, and it doesn't empower the greater evil, and we've built in a failsafe. So that means you can afford to entertain this, and socially, you might even survive doing so.

Go ahead. I mean, it's a great idea, and already I'm on board. How do we... You don't have a vote in America, may say you're not helping Brett at all. I heard him say he's on board, which I assume means that you will get citizenship in time for the election, if possible. Yeah, using my Venezuelan nationality, because we're very popular over there. Oh, yes. But how are you going to implement this idea?

Well, you know, it's very simple, actually. We have things catch on all the time, right? We've seen civilization revolutionized multiple times in recent decades by various things. And it reveals that actually, especially in the age of the internet, ideas can simply catch on and spread like wildfire. And frankly, if you look at the demographics of the electorate, our system isn't popular with anybody. There's nobody who wants to elect Joe Biden. I don't even think Joe Biden wants to elect Joe Biden, right? And, you know, similarly with Donald Trump,

everybody who's thinking about these issues knows that something disastrous has happened that has left us with no viable choice at a moment when we've never needed leadership more. I mean, in the current era, just look at what has happened with COVID-19 in the U.S. We've absolutely botched the lockdown. Why do we botch it? Well, in large measure, because it was politicized. So you need to have leadership at this moment. The parties have announced that they are not interested in leadership.

The Democratic Party is flirting with cynically embracing this movement in our streets in order to retain or to gain power. And in so doing, it's going to create a racial nightmare in the U.S., one that we were rapidly moving away from since the civil rights movement. So there's no other answer to the extent that everybody who can sit calmly for, five minutes and think about the fact that there's no good solution that comes out of voting for either of the major party candidates, what other opportunity is there? Now, the hope is that if people can escape this mind-numbing logic that tells them you can't entertain anything that hasn't been presented to you by the major parties, if we can get people to see past that thing, then this idea is intuitive, it's constitutional, and hopefully it spreads to the point that it can simply function.

Isn't part of the problem with politics, Brett, tribalism, in that you get people, like in this country who vote conservatives, always vote conservative. It doesn't matter how terrible the candidate is. Same with labor and same with Democrat and Republican. Well, okay. Yes, tribalism is infused into our system. And I'm not even going to say it's inherently bad. The tribalism that we have is terrible and it's going to destroy us. But there's a kind of tribalism that can function well. And I would just simply say, look, if you're focused on the U.S. and how power is distributed in the U.S., but you're ignoring the fact that a race war in the U.S. would result in potentially China having the top spot in the global power dynamic, then you're missing the point. I mean, for one thing, we have a situation in China in which we have something that, I mean, really the closest parallel is something like, Nazi Germany where the Communist Party has imprisoned apparently millions of people belonging to

a couple of ethnic minorities. They are harvesting organs. I mean, this is insane. You want to create a power vacuum where that entity is suddenly without challenge on the international stage. That's ludicrous. That's not a blow against racism. That's a blow for racism. So I don't, I, I, you know, look, if there was a good answer and it didn't involve me working 18 hours a day trying to capture people's imagination so that they can free themselves from this idiotic system that we've set up, I would embrace it. I would love to sign on to something else and say Unity 2020 was a cool plan. Here's a better one. Let's go. But I haven't heard the better plan. I really haven't. So I don't know what else there is to do except say, well, it's safe. why not see if we can go the distance and join up and talk to some other people. Brett, I don't want to skip over something because you've used, you know, in terms like civil war, race war, kind of almost as a matter of fact in the course of this conversation. I mean, are you saying that that's where this is headed?

You know, when I hear myself say something like that, I wonder, is this a dream? Am I having a nightmare? Is that what's going on? But no, I mean, this is just, it's, it's factual, right? We have every institution in the country, and it's really every institution broadcasting the same crazy message. And the message is so wrong, it doesn't even add up superficially, right? Communism adds up superficially. It doesn't work because of group selection problems, but it's at least a sensible idea at one level. The idea that white supremacy is simultaneously incurable, it has to be incurable, because if it wasn't incurable, we'd have to ask who has it and who doesn't, right? So the only way we can say, hey, all white people have white supremacy built into them is to say it's incurable. But then to say, well,

because it's incurable, it's everywhere, and that means that we have to fight it. Well, you've just told us it can't be fought. So, you know, one step into the logic here, we discover there is no logic here. But at the same time, time, the underlying logic, the game theory, says, well, here's how we're going to battle this out. We're going to figure out how many intersectional points you have, and that's going to dictate how much of the redistribution of well-being and power is going to go in your direction. That means that everybody who's on the losing side of that can calculate that they are. How are they not going to align, right? We have something like 70% of Americans are white, and they're being

told that they have a defect that cannot be cured, there's nothing that they can say or do that actually makes them okay. How is that not going to create a coalition that sees race as the issue and that fights back? So we can say, are you catastrophizing by saying that this is going to end in some kind of a civil war? I just don't understand what people think the alternative is. There's no way that you can set that dynamic in motion and have it march this rapidly. towards a group that large and not cause them to coalesce in self-defense. We have to stop that. It's kind of like, I feel like like night follows day and BLM follows Evergreen.

This is what you're talking about. This is the next step. And I agree with you. I mean, I think if this continues and if we don't challenge, I mean, obviously you've come up with a political solution. I think there's got to be something at the level of culture that can be reversed as well. And what that is, I don't know, do you? Well, I mean, that's the irony, is that the solution at the cultural level is, at least the direction in which it lies, is straightforward.

Because we have lots of people who do think very carefully about these issues. We have lots of people who are not signing up for this woke ideology, who are aware that we have a massive disparity problem with respect to things like well-being and power. And they're concerned about it. But something about the modern era has relegated those people to the role of influencer rather than leader. And I think this is one of the critical problems. I mean, myself included, right? What I am now doing with Dark Horse podcast is a matter of trying to get people to listen rather than there being some structure in which the people who know what's going on can navigate on all of our behalf. So, yeah, it's a tough puzzle.

but I think the solution involves taking the elements of a prior system that worked and pointing them at the problems that we never solved. That's really the solution. And we talk a lot about, you know, the gap between rich and poor and all the rest of it and all the rest of it. And then we have the problem of automation and how many people are going to be left without a job? And also as well, what is going to happen to those people who don't have employment and the anger that's going to emanate because of it? I absolutely agree. It ought to be a top priority. This is the reason that Andrew Yang's candidacy took off. And it's also the reason that so many obstacles were put in his way, because he actually was interested in solving that problem. And the duopoly doesn't want the

problem solved because it's not suffering in the same way. And in some sense, it's a feature, not a bug. So, yeah, we have to, we have to confront that. We don't have a choice. We don't have a choice but to solve the problem and this time we could solve it. I don't want to say completely because there will always be noise in the system. There will always be bad luck. But the bad luck needs to be randomly distributed with respect to things like race and sex, right? To the extent that the bad luck is predictably distributed to some populations and not others, it's not luck. Brett, I was going to ask you something that we often get us. And as someone who do recognize you're very careful, very intelligent and very sensible. And, you know, knowing, having met you and

heard you speak, I know that you're someone, I would kind of describe you as a healer as a kind of entity, right? And we get a lot of people saying to us, well, you know, you guys are interviewing people, you are speaking out, you're being influencers, which is, you know, not the ideal. I hear you, but nonetheless, what do I do as an ordinary person? Because if I speak out at work, I'm going to be fired tomorrow. If I challenge some aspect of this ideology, or I teach my kids not to buy into it, they're going to get, you know, problems at school. What do ordinary people do about this? Because I see so much of that, people just not knowing how to respond. And I don't know what to tell them either. So this is a great question. It is one with a, it doesn't have a wonderful

answer. It has an answer that I think is compelling, but it involves, swallowing a bitter pill. The game theory underneath what we are facing, and I don't just mean the movement, but the larger game theory surrounding the way governance works, the way sense making works, all of these things, has created chaos. We are basically decohering. The incoherence of the system is eventually going to result in a catastrophic mistake. And we've seen hints of that many, many times now, but we haven't seen anything that is catastrophic at the level of civilization itself. The solution involves recognizing that your individual well-being is what you are wired to be focused on, but that your individual well-being is actually subordinate in a logical way

to the persistence of the structures on which you depend. So if we keep pursuing, how do I get through next week at the expense of how do we get through next year or next decade. We will not get through next year or next decade. There has to be a willingness to frankly place that puzzle in front of people so that they understand that ultimately we have to keep an eye on this longer term larger scale thing or it's going to erase any protection you manage to arrange for yourself. So, you know, I don't know how useful my story is. My wife and I lost tenured jobs. We have no job security, but we're doing all right. So the point is that was a trade. And what we got in exchange for that trade was the ability to speak plainly about what's taking place and to bring the expertise that

we have from evolutionary biology to venues where actually that's the important set of questions in terms of how you build a system that doesn't suffer these flaws. So was it worth it? Yeah, I think it was worth it. I think that even though, you know, one bad tweet and I could be unable to figure out how I'm going to provide health care for my kids five years from now, but the ability to speak plainly about what is taking place is essential. And I think you guys are doing this. you are being courageous and it's unfortunate that we're stuck in the influencer role, but

maybe the model is this. I'm an influencer, but Unity 2020 is actually not an influencer plan. It's actually a structural plan. So the question is, what can you do to step out of the influencer layer where you're simply, you know, a talking head trying to capture the attention of people, honorably, but nonetheless to capture their attention to actually doing something. that meaningfully alters the way the system functions. All right, but let me just challenge you on that somewhat, Brett. Are you not being kind of communistic about it in that you're denying human biology and psychology and demand, not demand, you're not demanding, but in saying to people put your interests behind the interest of the whole,

because 10 years down the line, those interests will be your interest. Are you not denying it? I deny your accusation, but I love the question. because it's the right question. Here's the difference. First of all, let me just make a weird point. A body, like a human body, is communist. It functions exactly as the communist plan would have it.

Your liver and your heart agree on the distribution of resources, irrespective of which one is in the losing position and which one is generating. So the point is there's something about certain structures in which something like communism can work, and other structures where it cannot. Now, what I am advocating is not that you become altruistic and thereby sacrifice in favor of others.

What I'm advocating is that you recognize that you are a long-term interest, and by you, I don't necessarily mean you the individual, but I mean you and all of your descendants, which is, after all, what you're built to care about, that that depends on a certain amount of personal sacrifice now. that is not a contradiction. That biologically makes a great deal of sense.

We see creatures do this all the time. So in essence, the point, I mean, you've landed on it exactly. You have to be able to tell the difference between a claim that does not add up and is not supported by the game theory and a very similar sounding claim that does because the underlying dynamics are different. And that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that altruism doesn't work, but ultra-enlightened self-interest does. And this is ultra-inlightened self-interest. We are about to destroy the ship on which our life depends. And Brett, what would you say to a young person, you know, who wants to change the world

and believes in this ideology? And it's like, look, racism exists. You know, there's lots of stats that can be used to, you know, to back up this fact. Or the fact, you know, the gap between rich and poor is getting ever wider. We need drastic action now. Social justice is what's needed. I would say I agree with them, but the problem is that you smuggle something in under the label of social justice that isn't social justice. It's injustice. And so, in essence, I would say, slow down, figure out what parts of what you're saying are dead certain and which parts are a black box that you don't know the contents of. and figure out what it is that you can say going forward that doesn't contain the possibility for,

let's say, a Trojan horse. Once you understand, there is something structurally wrong. It does result in massive inequity, and that inequity has to be solved or else we're constantly going to be facing a looming French revolution. So, all right, the problem has to be addressed, but how do you address it? Well, you would want to understand what its nature was, how we got here, where the failures of our current structure are. And you would want to figure out how to patch those things or to update the structure so that it doesn't fail in the same way. And, you know, if you do that, you will, frankly, discover what the next failure mode is.

But as with all prototyping, those failures should get smaller and smaller with each iteration. ultimately you'll have a structure in which you can tolerate the noise in the system. And basically, you're not going to get 100% justice. You're not going to get 100% safety, but you might be able to get 80% of everything. And if you had a system that delivered 80% on every value that you held dear, that'd be pretty darn good. And that brings me very neatly to the question that I wanted to ask you, Brett. Do you think with social media the way that it is and with our brains the way that they are, We are actually capable now of ingesting that message that you've just elaborated, which is you're not going to get everything that you want?

Yes. I know that we can get there. Now, you've asked again an excellent question, which is, are the forces that allow us to see things like this capable of overwhelming the forces that try to disrupt our seeing things like this? And, you know, we don't all have to see it. Enough of us have to see it that we can actually navigate. That's the question, right? It's not like every kid on TikTok has to become a theoretician. But the fact is we are told that people are foolish. We are told that they have short attention spans. We're told that they are tribal. However, we have lots of evidence that when they are delivered high quality choices, when they are delivered content that allows us to test those ideas, They don't turn out to be that way, right? Short attention spans did not match with the fact that Joe Rogan several times a week delivers us a three-hour podcast with people across the analytical spectrum, the political spectrum, and people follow these things and they talk about them.

So long-form podcasting tells us that the public isn't what we thought it was. the series that we see generated on television now on Netflix and HBO and all these very complex narrative arcs. These are things that people actually invest in, right? That's inconsistent with what I was told about the fact that people needed to see, you know, a 30-minute sitcom and, you know, they couldn't handle anything more complex than that. So we see that. We also see, you know, IDW-style conversations creating. incredible interest, watching 3,000 people for two consecutive nights, watch Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson fight over the nature of truth as if they were watching the coolest rock band

ever. I mean, that tells you there's a great hunger for anybody who can figure out how to make sense in this era. People are rooting for this stuff. They want it. So I think I would just trust in the fact that if you deliver them high-quality stuff, they will level up. And in fact, you know, your podcast too, right? You're doing this right here. We'd like to think so, but my point it was more about social media, Brett, in the sand, you know, our mutual friend James Lindsay was talking about this recently about how the nature of particularly Twitter, but anything like that, really, where yes, people will watch a trigonometry with Brett Weinstein, but way more people will see a two-second clip of Brett Weinstein being called racist and not,

analyze it critically and operate on that basis too. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything. Stream with added privacy. Browse securely.

Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IP vanish. It's a great question, but here's the thing. At the beginning, that's what I saw, right? I saw that. Over time, the allegations have dropped away. People tired. They stopped playing those cards, and they even started paying attention to the fact that what brought me to their attention actually didn't have a lot to do with the important part of the message that I have to deliver.

So in essence, the stuff that I was teaching in my classes that my students were benefiting from and that made them fiercely loyal and want to study more of it, those things are now spreading into the world by virtue of the fact that there was some process that overwhelmed the reflexive process you're describing. So I'm not saying it isn't there, but I'm saying that if you empower other dynamics, they overwhelm that dynamic. And, you know, look, I think sensemaking is on the road, but it's not dead. And there are certainly places where we see it winning. So greater, better sense making is the thing that we need to amplify and that results in the positive change that that we need. But don't social media companies also have to take responsibility for amplifying

voices that are divisive, destructive, and all the rest of it? Because they're the tweets or the, or the post, whatever, they get the most engagement? Well, in effect, they do this to themselves. By deciding that they are going to edit, they then set the impossible problem of what are they going to edit for? And so, for example, at the point that they come up with the insane idea, that they're going to tell us which factual claims are accurate, which politicians are lying,

they sow the seeds of their own undue. doing because how do you tell the difference between something that is backwards and wrong and something that is so novel and ahead of its time that it sounds backwards and wrong, right? You can't tell that. So either we're going to frustrate the process of progress by deciding that anything that's really far ahead of its time is going to be just relegated to the same realm as all the crackpot stuff, or we're going to recognize nobody has the formula for spotting the great thing hidden amongst the cooks, right? That's the question. So these platforms have to get over themselves. They have to recognize they can't do the job that they

ideally think they want to. It looks good on a whiteboard, but it doesn't work in practice. It results in all kinds of injustice and insanity. And, you know, look, there's a reason that free speech has the role that it does in the public imagination. And it's because although most of what free speech allows, most of the stuff that actually needs to be defended under that banner is noxious. It is the banner that protects the really important ideas that need to be protected in order that we ultimately get to hear them. Right. So if Galileo comes back, he shouldn't get banned off Twitter, which likely would happen at this point. Well said.

Right. Listen, Brett, we're starting to come to the end of the interview. As you know, at the end, we always ask our guest, what's the one thing we're not talking? about that we ought to be. I think in your case, why don't we go for a couple? Okay. There are two things that I think haunt many of our discussions, but they rarely show up formally there. One of them is evolutionary dynamics, that in effect, we know from Darwin that there are only four characteristics necessary in order to get adaptive evolution, right? If you have reproduction, variation, differential success in an environment of limiting reasons,

You're going to get adaptive evolution. When we set up an economic system or a political system, it evolves. Things evolve within it. And if we don't anticipate that what we write down in our documents about what we're trying to accomplish does not have the capacity to overwhelm whatever niche we have set up and that we will ultimately see the creatures that are supported by the environment that we created, then we will never get this right because we will always be fooled by our own intentions. and we will create structures that produce predators of an arbitrary kind. So we need to start thinking evolutionarily because that's the mechanism for shaping society into something of a desirable type rather than a monstrous type. Right. So just break that down a little bit. I'd like to think I'm pretty smart. I'm not sure I got all of that. So you're talking about we've got to shape the environment the right way.

Otherwise our intentions aren't going to materialize no matter what we do. So let's say we're talking about a political structure and we know that we don't like corruption and we're going to set a penalty for attempting to corrupt the system. Okay. Now what you've done is you've built a structure in which evolution is going to explore the question what kind of corruptions are invisible and what kinds of penalties are tolerable from the point of view of discovering how. to alter policy in the direction of some private interest. Once you've set that up, if you let it run, evolutionarily, it will create a genius corruptor, right? It will generate something that is capable of altering the functioning of the system without being spotted and with being only slightly penalized. And then you'll have no hope of confronting it because it's going to be better at shifting policy than you will be at shifting it back. So what you have to do is you have to build a

system in which there is no selection that allows for this process to explore mechanisms for corrupting the system, right? You may have to turn the penalties up much higher than you would think so that any attempt to corrupt the system is ruinous to the thing that attempts it. So the thing never evolves to the next stage because it keeps going extinct, right? That's a system that is resistant to the evolution of corruption. But you have to understand that it's an evolutionary puzzle in the first place in order to accomplish that goal. What was the other thing you wanted to talk about? Yeah, the other thing I find missing from all of the conversations where it's central is human

development. So we are having a very dumb conversation about the nature of being human, you know, at the sex and gender level, at the population difference level. And the problem is that we have a very strong tendency to look at adults. and to say, well, what is the difference between these two populations, right? What we don't understand is that the magic of humans is that so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer. That is to say, to learning and to culture. And that means that our nature is radically altered by developmental environments in ways that may show up in adulthood as differences that we will then attribute to genes because we're,

we've been told that genes are very powerful when, in fact, they are not housed in the genetic layer. And the second part of that puzzle is things that we find in the cultural layer, though they are not transmitted in the genome, are often, in fact, if they are longstanding, they are virtually always going to be adaptive, that is to say, evolutionary products that serve the interests, at least of our ancestors, if not us. So until we recognize the interplay of our genetic nature and our cultural software layer, we will continue to mess up the question of what can be done about undesirable patterns in civilization and what can't be because we, you know, we sort of have this idea that we inherited from, you know, the wisdom of the 50s that, you know, genes are these powerful things lurking. inside of us that shift all kinds of stuff that we can't imagine they would have control over. And there's some truth in it. But the larger truth is that so much of what we are is built into the software layer. And the software layer is there because it is rapidly changeable. That's why evolution shifted things in that direction within humans. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to be responsible for altering things carefully in the software layer intentionally in

order to solve problems and to basically liberate people and make life better for as many people as possible, rather than basically throw up our hands because we are going to claim that these things live in the genetic layer and therefore what can we do? That's absolutely fascinating, Brett. Thank you so, so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you on social media, where do they go? At Brett Weinstein on Twitter is probably the best place. They can check out Unity 2020 at Articles of Unity. We've just put out a new animation.

People might be excited to see. So come find us. Yeah, and also check out Brett, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hayings, YouTube channel. You do live streams very frequently, which I follow quite a lot. Twice a week. Twice a week, yeah. Twice a week, the Dark Horse podcast.

Yeah. Absolutely fantastic, Brett. Thank you once again for coming on. And thank you all for watching. Thanks, guys. Oh, sorry, Brett. There you go. And thank you very much. And we will see you soon for another fantastic episode or live stream. Take care and see you soon, guys. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi.

And with no device limits, one account covers everything. Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVanish.