Bret Weinstein

00:08boom and we're live how are you man doing are out a lot of stuff is going on a lot of stuff a lot of since your settlement Jamie and I were hoping that you would come in with one of those Paul Wall grills like diamonds on it and maybe some furs yeah up in a Cadillac well unfortunately it's enough money to make a difference but it's not enough money to to no longer have to think about such things yeah you could temporarily ball though if you were irresponsible you didn't have a family if I didn't have a family you get crazy for a couple months yeah now as it happens it gives us a room to think about how to replace our incomes we have about two years at our current rate of burning to keep the family yeah so this is a stand-alone podcast so people can kind of what you need to do if you're really interested in this it really interested is google brett weinstein and

01:02you 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 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 so and then the woman who was kind of at the head of it she got a nice little chunk of change to 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

01:59mystery 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 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 chalking them and using hand gestures and they like put your hands down you're threatening us with microaggressions it puts his hands down they all started laughing which just tells you everything about what their intent was what was really going on there and but after I saw that oh my god she could have been the president they should have just had her be president the whole thing it was a kangaroo court was mockery the whole thing was absurd I will say I've it's very hard to get the story right in any sort of short synopsis and so for

02:47anybody 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 it's 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 like why has this movement become so aggressive and so not just aggressive but absurd it's not they're not 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

03:50confusing 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 like what is their or their 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 our 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

04:43entitled to 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 as sort of you know it's the equivalent of wolves baring 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 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 who are having

05:45power 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 like it's it's akin to being deemed a rapist even if it's a false charge like boy most people are gonna hear the first statement before they ever look into the possibility you've been exonerated it's you 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 it's really important for people don't know you

06:44you're a very progressive guy you're 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

07:43with your background though unlined if people don't know your background what was it at Yale that you had pen pen yeah to tell that story because sure I'll do the the quick and dirty version cliffnotes 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

08:45local neighborhood to engage in what started out to be a striptease 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 left the event but when my friend and other 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 amok 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

09:46I ended up writing an editorial for the for the paper and all hell broke loose there was you know 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 um 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 the witness room with the other witnesses people who had rushed the fraternity but had not pledged at 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 this University panel anyway ultimately the the University was the University through the the frat off campus for a

10:40year 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 four women who needed to be defended or something like that you you said you've made the biggest mistake one of the biggest mistakes your life by leaving I mean 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 right event that sometime I think you know journalists know this I was you know 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

11:35occur 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 I mean 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 and how could you have known even if you were 30 how could you've know what was going to happen it looked like prostitutes you like that I want to be here right see yeah exactly you didn't know there was gonna 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

12:23develop yet I mean they're 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 it's so bananas that that is few incidents happen as they do 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 flak 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

13:12fraternity 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 solana they're not but but it does seem like a wasted opportunity that that kind of energy that goes into a 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 you're actually living in a house together but just man you should probably have some adults in that room something like that it seems like it just seems like you know just to

14:00limit your liability yep right 35 year olds running around going hey what are you doing out don't like that one on fire yeah just I don't know it's 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 yeah 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

15:01stood a better chance of making it worse and was unnecessary and so that that would 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 closeted 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 faced that myself that people say uh you know you're you're gonna turn more conservative with all this no I'm just more resentful of these this fake progressive movement that like you said has ulterior motives there's there's more to it there's it's and it's not it's not accurate like the the portrayals of humans in in these

15:56movements are not accurate it's not so I don't think it's healthy I don't think it's normal and I think there's a lot of there look the kit 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 the the answer is Marxism seems to me to be just as just as poorly thought-out no it it's it it's at least as poorly bounced 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 into some 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 wind goes to the person who figures out how not to row and gets the

16:51benefit 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 it's something I think things that are hard to do or good for you competing is good for you because it teaches you about focus and discipline and understanding that there's you can reap the rewards of

17:38hardwork and you know obviously this can get distorted and you can get these you 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 mutants that are all inbred and they're all in the same bloodline I mean that's 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 and try to better themselves with some endeavor and summit but whenever I hear equality of outcome that's when I put my foot down I'm like that doesn't it 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 quality is I have

18:33friends that are brilliant that are fantastic human beings but they're essentially beach bums you know they did slight 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 you know world martial arts champions and that's you know you have two different kinds of lives two different things 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 the back and forth well you've said a bunch of things we could spend three hours at unpacking what you just said let's say a number of things one the quality of opportunity is something I have yet to find the reasonable person

19:26that 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 the quality 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 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 there's competition against others and the thing that unites those two things is that the what you are trying to accomplish is

20:18real 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 know you are confronting something real enough to

21:14tell 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 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 if you think that capitalism and competition and all these things you just talked about are good and that really the the best thing is to force people to become some sort of utopian creature that works together in unison and and everybody is egalitarian and there's no need for feminism and men's rights activists because everybody looks at everyone isn't 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

22:06other 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 forum there's always going to be bad luck that's going to reduce somebody's opportunity what you don't want is any systemic 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 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 we have now right so there is there is something to pursue here but we're so busy on this other pointless conversation about equality of outcome that we can't we can't get back to the thing that we all agree on that's

22:57actually the right goal and there's also some background chatter that you get from the less less thought out where the 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 this it has changed my understanding of the world substantially because I used to I knew there were black conservatives and I always thought are they confused are they not understanding which side

23:54they should be on and that is not that is not what's going on what is going on is that there's 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 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 you're 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 it's not in the range of somebody an individual who discovers that the cards are unfairly dealt can't

24:49do 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 amongst some of these black conservatives and this is what 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 it was quite fascinating and you know I'm

25:44I'm heartened that that they were willing to invite me into that conversation so I could hear it and finally figure out what was what was going on so they advocate towards discipline and personal responsibility as being core tenants 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 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 he motivates 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 you know if you can make progress

26:32and 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 do you thoughts on affirmative action I've changed my tune I used to be for affirmative action because it is justified but now the 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 are advocating and I don't think the substitute for it is something that

27:30anybody has properly spelled out but but let's just say I would be much more inclined to see a substantial investment in community that makes sense rather than it applied at the 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 hmm 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

28:31that 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 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 Burton Lee 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 and questions in

29:25the case of black people in the new world that is the America's most black folks in the new world are here via the route of slavery and the thing is slavery was so brutal in destroying the cultures that these people had access to where they came from and then putting them together in a synthetic culture that was built to serve the masters right in other words the denying black folks the ability to learn to read obviously limits access to the huge library of insights that happened to be housed with the population that transported these folks from 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 it'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

30:38have a computer on our shoulders that run 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 people from different parts of Africa and pooling them in one population based on effectively skin color alone and then at the point that they were freed it there was no there was no there was no understanding because our understanding of biology and culture wasn't sophisticated yet it still isn't and so I think I think we do at some point have to to do an honest accounting of how much damage happened

31:41in 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 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 that there's there's there's a lot of like

32:38what you were talking about before like with that woman bringing up ridiculous things and beatings 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 you know the United States or just this mass of humans I think of us as a superorganism and I think if you had an organism that had a broken knee you would go well I got to fix that knee you know I can't just give that any 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 need to get by what you want to do is like strengthen it so my thought and I've said this is 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

33:29these 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 where they're at and transform that with a fraction of the money that we spend trying to rebuild nations and an 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 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 as he sort of explained all the the different issues that happened in Baltimore particularly where there was areas where they literally weren't selling homes to black people they would

34:28not sell homes like this is a like a white only area like they had systemic racism built into the system for a long time in 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 the people that wanted to help give them activities give them skills and trades and show them ways out give them like does that's not nearly as impossible as trying to rebuild Afghanistan our 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 that we don't even know what the they were doing over there right if we could have a fraction of that money and

35:23invested into inner cities you could literally change entire generations of human beings that are coming out of there a couple things one by the way I love the analogy of the 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 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

36:22just spent huge amounts of of treasure on projects that didn't work all right so we could do that the reason that that doesn't happen I don't think has anything to do with it being in obvious 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 socio-political system we have to confront that and actually I think we have to we have to come to agreement

37:22that actually it is in the long term wise to educate other people's kids even if in the short term it's economically frightening yeah the big conspiracy about children and schools and keeping them stupid and making sure that the school system is frustrating and I mean that's I've always felt like that conspiracy was really just there's no motivation 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 as disturbing you think of the 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 the what you've 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

38:24experiences 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 and comparatively really good because I went to a school before that and 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 it's 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 forgot through that year and then all of a sudden I was in this we called Fast Times at Hebrew high because it was like predominantly Jewish neighborhood yeah but it was even then

39:16there 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 kids school but I will say my experience in school was it was horrifying school did not work for me and maybe you know every five teachers I hit one yeah invested and cared and took the time to scratch their head about why I wasn't succeeding and that must have like had an impact on

40:19you 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 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

41:15associated with school but once I got to 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 so you could teach whatever you wanted and the key was you could teach in whatever way you wanted so that's so crazy well it was 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

42:09bad 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 you know 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 yeah anyway it was it was an interesting experience and my wife actually is it was a tremendous student she loved school and we would actually often teach the same students either together or we would they would take my program and then they would bounce over to her program next and so they would get these kind of two

42:57different views and 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 to 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 I I was 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 teach Taekwondo and I taught accredited course it was

43:56pass/fail a but it actually counted tortured 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 or it's not it's not fair you know there's people that are just extreme endomorphs and their body holds on to too much fat they're not 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 there's 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 just learning it for the first time it doesn't didn't seem fair to me so to judge them in terms of like 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

44:50no I was i 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 gonna get full credit and you'll get a nice evaluation we wrote written evaluations to them but if you want an evaluation that raves about you that talks about you know your your extraordinary capacity you're gonna have to strive yeah 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 mmm that's a very hard job in some disciplines in

45:45mine 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 us how much they've actually learned so I 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've done really well if they'd you know 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 there's it was a totally artificial moment to judge how much they had picked up yeah

46:36no need to run them down you know and again everybody's starting off at a different position it's not like everybody's on the same line and the 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's some 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 people that are really gifted in one ass and one martial art like say like someone who's gifted as a striker will they'll enter into mixed martial arts and find

47:34that 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 tried to find workarounds and they're almost always defeated by grapplers it's like they've 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 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

48:28following me and I was seeing their their tweets and things but this guy I think his name is John kirbo posted an article that he had written about Bruce Lee and his argument did you see this article and the argument was why Bruce Lee and mixed martial arts points the direction to how to fix our political dialogue something huh 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 on the other side to be practicing the same martial art and that there is a kind of model in that for other disciplines than any any time if your 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

49:32formalism 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 I think a number of things linked 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 Andersen the archer again this is a place where you're an expert but what do you think of laura's Andersen 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

50:34a method of holding arrows in your fingers so that you could with practice repeat here Jamie's got video this character that you could release a bunch of arrows in a row and he 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 him here he's gonna throw the bottle cap in the air and he hits it with an arrow that's so 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 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 the sfrom people who were in

51:32the archery world who didn't like the way he violated all of the rules about what good archery form looks like hmm and so he made a response video English isn't his first language so it's a little hard to follow but 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 you know a master who had good form you'd never discover it and I guess there might as well put the other examples on the table let's see there's Danny MacAskill the bicyclists are you aware of this guy I feel like I've heard that name for Scottish kid he's very young I think at some point

52:25unfortunately he became a surprise sensation on YouTube and Red Bull figured out that he was a money maker 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 this guy yeah there's this did you see that that one at one of these guys these daredevil YouTube guys just died a guy in China oh god yeah this gets out of his knee he's out of his mind but let me check that 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 it's pretty rough it's pretty rough but you know and it's fallen and hurt himself that's not a BMX bike either no it's

53:28like a regular bike it's it's I think it's it's not quite standard but it's it's more mountain bike proportions but anyway just probably has to be to be so rugged right oh yeah it's best soup tup in particular ways so that it you know it can endure the kind of forces that he's 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 from observed trials which was a very regimented kind of competition for the four mountain bikers but but anyway he's discovered a landscape of possibilities on a bicycle not unlike the landscape of possibilities that Lars Anderson has discovered in an archery parkour is another place where you know growing up I didn't know that all that was possible and I thought you know frankly I thought

54:22that Olympic gymnastics was pretty interesting and you know now I look at Olympic gymnastics and I think that's a I mean I get his name it's tame and the thing is it has one advantage which is that everything is so standardized that you can compare two competitors if you want to award a medal maybe it has to look like Olympic gymnastics but 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 you you know 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 park who are probably somebody does buy Russians could be those Russian kids you ever seen those videos of them hanging off of the side of buildings I really think

55:15that they were the innovators of this that was the first stuff that we ever saw maybe and you know French word right what's our core 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 we decided we would talk a little bit about what to do about planet Earth because I had mentioned the first is on your show that that was a and then Kevin Park or well but my feeling is actually this is this 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 something going wrong and so the question is it's very hard to imagine how you use normal tools you

56:16know are you gonna 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 park or 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 so what do you think those things are well I assume there's more than one

57:14right there's more than one I would say the conversation doesn't sound familiar and I don't think anybody has the answer to that question III 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 it can be an idle discussion in which case there's no 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

58:19contemplate that they might know or might be tuned in to 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 I need to turn off my own sensitivity to hearing that little warning bell in my own head and you know if if the conversation is preposterous fine that's 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 were 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

59:16of changing the way the place functions or my kids 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 that makes sense yes why would why would I I get it I lack those self protective instincts I just bought off alright fair enough but go ahead okay so there are a lot of so I should say where 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's great people were really jazzed about brilliant Brooke you have a brilliant brother I have all noticed that he is absolutely amazing and there's no place to hide from him because he is so good across you know all levels of analysis

60:19so you know 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 but anyway yeah he's a 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 an 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 in Canada and so I went I attended this conference and it was it was the first place I encountered an intentional conversation about changing a large enough piece of the puzzle to actually fix the way the world works to prevent

61:27another financial collapse like the one that happened in in 2008 and I also met people at that conference 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 them I ended up being very disappointed and frustrated by the quality of the conversation inside of of Occupy Wall Street but anyway it revealed some things to me and then after that there was a a group of people who gathered in is something that ultimately was called game B and game B is really where the thinking that I 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

62:32I mean we really had a lot of different people who were United basically by an understanding that that they had each arrived at that the trajectory we were on was so dangerous that it required us to to take action and we tried out various different ideas about what might what might be sufficient to to avert the danger we were heading towards and give humanity more time to 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 into what we might do in the present game B was basically preceded 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 is 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 some

63:35without 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 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 it doesn't mean that that's the average thing that's what things are you referring to well I mean you know let's let's take the the ultimate example that will make it clear a warlord is not responsible for for building the road that they then stand by the side of and extort money from people who want to travel it a cable company may produce some benefit they obviously have infrastructure that allows you to get

64:31content 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 in 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 there 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

65:26the 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 were 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 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 want it 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

66:30we should be exposed to whatever the market discovers can be viable so what we want is ultimately to provide and 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 to you to your phone in a way that harms your social relationships harms your your parenting of your children harms all kinds of things that are really important brakes the ability of your children to have a 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

67:25that 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 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 so there aren't they detract of two people I mean that's one of the reasons why our phone is so addictive is

68:20because 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 well what can I do can i play a game on it who can I take a picture 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 all right 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 of thousands of people are going to be able to react to it I mean all sorts of marvelous things and

69:14then the point is well here's the downside okay you're gonna be hooked into mega corporations that are gonna study your psychology and they are going to compete in order to keep you paying attention to their site and they're gonna become so sophisticated that you're gonna 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 that's a pretty high cost what's more you are going to surveil yourself you're gonna 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 and so you're gonna be at the mercy of 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

70:10right I probably wouldn't you gonna be like yeah 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 even I can't even turn it upside down because there's a camera on both sides of the dam right right 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

71:07obviously in today's day and age with hashtag fake news you're gonna get a lot of facts in there as well but just the sheer access to information they be able ability to contact each other instantaneously there's a lot of pros to a huge number I'm believing I'm not underrating the value of I mean just you know you pointed it 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 you know 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

72:01have had the benefit of Wikipedia and instant communication and all of these things without the huge downside so the the privacy issue being cookies or cameras like which 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 at 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 mmm and the fact that it can listen in the conversations and basically track who's thinking what and there's so much power in that potentially that even 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 too 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 right game a is what we live right it's a market in which we decide how to

72:51behave and if we have insight maybe we come out ahead if we don't have correct insight maybe we lose but anyway that's that's game a it's it's it's the market as we find it game B was the idea that 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 the conclusion and you know 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

73:59B is the idea that one needs to create an entity that is capable of competing in the market it is capable of competing in game 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 MacAskill 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

75:11becomes 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 the goods to people at a low rate most people are dissatisfied they're unhealthy they are not well protected from things like bad luck and those are all problems that can be solved by a entity that is capable 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 there's a very good reason it isn't which is that the the strategy for winning in the delivery of insurance is perfectly obvious you want to insure people who need it very

76:22little and you want to uninsured 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 that's always looking to figure out how to do some to dis insure 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 gonna get a brain tumor I'm gonna 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 right so that structure is one that you can build inside of this competitive market texture and what I'm 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

77:18function in a way that solves the problems that we all face without having to win some unimaginable electoral victory or to challenge these government's 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 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

78:27plausible to me that make any sense sort of but this is we're on a long road yeah is there a way to boil this down well let's try an example okay um how do you feel about Bitcoin I think 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 a fight for the Forgotten their 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 him it was very little at the time yeah but I I said I'll just give this to my friend Justin who builds wells in the Congo and so now it's worth wasn't with like 70 grand or something like that something like that 200 billion he's got to figure out when he wants to cash out it's up to him but so far they they've gotten at least

79:2510,000 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 the people are we're 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 mm-hmm they were upset like why didn't you just pay for it with Bitcoin but about I wanted to see as an experiment where the Bitcoin goes and 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 honor grant right so we don't like it okay I like it too and whether it's Bitcoin or not there's something clearly happening in the in the blockchain cryptocurrency yes so people the world is trying to figure out which which of these currencies is going

80:17to function at the moment its 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 a community I really I really like the idea behind it to me it 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's a pseudonym that we have we don't know whose identity it is 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 right what we know is that somebody without asking permission found a better model for a

81:18currency that addressed issues that we all face and we're not individually capable of addressing ourselves and it's pretty clear that a something in this realm 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 a an entity which exists in game a space right you can convert Bitcoin to dollars that's not hard Bitcoin functions inside of this realm it's not illegal it works it's reliable the problems have been solved by people because solving those problems made sense it enriched them for doing so they made their currency more functional so that entity is a solution that is superior to game a but it functions in gaming 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

82:19the crash will it come back are we gonna go through repeated bubbles and Bitcoin will still win out I don't know buddy 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 its superior it's perfect no but but it's a 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 the Academy I mean maybe part of why the Academy was so feeble at the point that this social justice

83:23madness started to challenge it had to do with the fact that without the Academy's permission information became free the fact that everybody 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 and for 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 these are examples of successful competitively successful innovative challenges to the model that pre-existed them in chess and the question is can that set of models be systematized so that it without having to to do the impossible simply replaces the system as it stands because

84:25it 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 ensuring 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 okay why are good teachers

85:29so few and far between well of course we pay at a level that we get exactly what we ordered and you know 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 you're 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 gonna be hobbled by bad administrators but you decided to take some period of time and invested in your community or somebody else's community

86:23using expertise that that you got that you'll be highly paid for later so it's almost like you you know have mandatory military service manager 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 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 would have scrooge mcduck has a kid and scrooge mcduck skid he pays for his kids educational they listen son you're not got to do any service what

87:24you're going to do is use those three years to get ahead and those little when they get out of that service they're gonna be working for you hahahahaha 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 right 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

88:24to achieve right right 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've 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 so there the problem is the elite is two different things and even worse 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 percent the result of rent-seeking rather than what you innovated but again for people just tuned in to us now rent-seeking meaning doing things to which you extract money from the system without any real benefit to the people that are

89:27around 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 how would you figure out a way to regulate the amount of profit that someone could like if you have a system right if you build something and then you get you know 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 constant collecting money from this thing how would you stop that or regulate that well it's an example of it what I just the way I just described it yeah it's a pretty it's a pretty good example you know we do want so it's a very tough conversation because one has to be very careful that you don't remove an incentive to do something valuable even though the value of it may be very subtle so okay the example

90:19you know investment like playing the stock market might look 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 it 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 right if 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

91:12that you solve the problem of that waste you just caused cancers in random homes that won't be able to trace their their misfortune to your action that's not 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% of 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

92:14wise the BP oil spill BP oil spill the Aliso Canyon leak Mile Island Three Mile Island Fukushima the tenth degree so how do you I'm still confused as to what's different like what's going on here 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 okay 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 so buy a bunch of them you start you start balling get a pall wall grill there you go exactly 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 adapt people to their phone right then actually you're hurting people and we don't want you to do that now it's very hard okay

93:16are you gonna tell Facebook you know what it's allowed to study is 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 Digg 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's like I really think that we've done a terrible thing with Facebook and we've made people addicted to social media Facebook it 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 me I think I like Instagram because I just see pictures and they look pretty and I'm simple well yeah I mean each of

94:05these things has their their value I'm not on Instagram I'm on its Twitter I'm on Twitter - for what for me what's good about it is that you're being programmed former Facebook executive Warren's for me for my business it's very important to let people hey Bret Weinstein is going to be on today that's dying matters yes exactly I said it right earlier Brent Weinstein is going to be on today people tuned in and you know now there's people that are listening right now because of social media right and then you know comedy shows that I have coming up it's it works for me in a lot of those ways but as time has gone on I've pushed it away in most otherwise well and the thing the the the interview that you just referenced I saw it too and was quite blown away by I've been tuned into that because Tristan Harris is a friend of mine and Tristan Harris is sort of the

95:00the 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 his other area of expertise is magic and so he's very interested in oh 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 yeah but the how would you penalize them then let's say 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

96:03benefit 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 in 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 yeah they do that 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 those traps thirst traps yeah you don't know about that I don't kids you don't know about thirst trap I don't know that there's Jeff I'm gonna tell you all right thirst traps are you look for people that are thirsty they're like oh girl you look good damn you look good people who are like extra thirsty thirsty means

96:49I'm you're gettin it but never before known thirsty okay you're married you've been around intellectuals and trapped up in progressive Pacific Northwest you're not gonna embarrass their friend no no Warriors D is thirsty is people who are trying too hard like 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 and 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 did you would be super thirsty right that would be thirst oh I'm 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 them okay I had a bit about it in yeah my last special about there was a girl that I she all she does is take pictures of her butt

97:47and at the time she had like 7 million followers now that 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 their uber thirsty yeah it's a thirst trap ok well this may so that's the whole whole reason why these people use things like Instagram she'd that thirst trap had a thirst trap on Instagram with cardi B C uh-huh I'm talking about the kids today okay I'm beginning to think maybe we can't save the world but listen we can save the world but the problem is we have to be cognizant of normal human desires and like the traps traps okay so this is actually the perfect place to go then because one of the biggest obstacles to

98:51fixing 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 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 you can't even finish the word regulate and they're just like oh well sorry you know who watches the Watchers and the point the it's it's a bitter pill for just about everybody who's got some sacred thing that they're

99:49holding 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 yes 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 liberate it may have more regulation in it than the one we currently have but that regulation is liberating rather than a pressing and so anyway with libertarians getting them to

100:58imagine to wrap their minds around the possibility of regulation that they wouldn't hate there there so we are all so experienced now living in a world of malignant government we're government 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 many switch to flip phones themselves they have I mean this is this is Nature's Way of telling you that these algorithms have escaped our control the fact that

101:59the 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 ought to that ought to set off warning bells for us mmm 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 this is the only warning we're gonna 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 you know hear their little secret sacred thing being challenged what we really want to do is free markets to do what the brochure

102:50says 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 right it doesn't have to we can 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 the perspective that all of us if I would would do that let's say this is these are abstract idea right how would we how do we eliminate predators how would we eliminate predators you would eliminate predators by disincentive oh 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

103:54they 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 with if there was like a hundred 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 in the low hundreds of how am i able 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 yeah I mean in other words if you had I mean this is really the motivation for

104:50your question if you had a hundred and fifty people and somebody was a bad actor their reputation would precede them and you would 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 you know fifty to a couple hundred people and those are the amount of people that you can keep in your mind right so harddrive space essentially we do but we also human beings are very good at taking a technological solution and cluding or hacking a remedy for a problem like that so for example you onboard 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

105:48other hand reputation can accumulate in some way that you can check it through people who you know right so people whose reputations are directly known to you are capable of giving you a reference and in fact you you know that this works because interpersonally if somebody you trusted to a great extent gave you a recommendation of somebody else you would 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 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

106:50well sure I mean that's you know yes so you have to build a structure that is robust to challenge and right of all of the things that would have to be true for a replacement system for for planet Earth the 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

107:47first 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 it right dict you okay 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 like look at all the likes right but well but okay so there's something bored at work right and one check their likes yes but I mean likes my butt pic that's what it'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 yeah and you know it is possible to just look at the landscape

108:51and say well yeah only intellectuals are gonna 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 has talked about blockchain currency the same amount that it talked about the earth being flat hmm I don't think that's right but I bet it is but I would say I grant your point it's not a huge percentage of people who are talking about blockchain classy 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 mm-hm and it is penetrating it because people have to navigate lives in which economic fluctuation jeopardize us them and so there's an incentive if there's something over there blockchain is not it's not a joke

109:41anymore 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 you have to define yeah I think that's way off because I think there's like a billion Catholics well if you're gonna call Catholicism a good it's a call I grew up in it okay uh it's just a cult with a billion people well you got a guy who dresses like a wizard and sitting on a golden throne no boys right 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 gonna challenge you on that stacked them from predators and Facebook Likes I'm gonna challenge you on this please do Catholicism is not

110:42a cult what is the difference you know cult here's I had a bit for my act let me just okay a cult is and it's created by one person and he knows it's in a religion that guy's dead okay so let me have this is boy this is rough territory but are you okay let's say let's say yeah all right let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets all that dude okay I don't know if Moses did come down the mountain with the tablet I don't think he did let's say dead okay um did he didn't 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 in there's 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

111:33from the other dimension that you go into when you go into the DMT trance with all this really standard these standard messages that I've 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 were 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 like this is essentially what the 3000 year old version of Moses or more than that Moses his tablets were that they

112:23were the God was the burning bush perfect perfect so can I 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 yes definitely okay was it true well it definitely has benefitted me true or false I asked me is it true that you have had positive experiences from psychedelic drugs where you have interpreted those experiences and improve 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 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 gonna 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

113:20fan of the idea that these substances should be used recreationally I think that's a mistake I think 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 you only think 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 it's something it is a metaphor for something lodged very deep in the mind where you can't find it

114:10directly 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 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 yeah you know 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 serious so instead of like this 10 to 15 minute trip you're

115:00gone for a long time half hour plus and deep deep experiences that a lot of these people mirrored they they all 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 it was really just speculation was there was anecdotal evidence but now they know that rats produced this well so they don't know exactly when people do it because they would have to do the same thing they do they're rats you'd have to open your brain up until they develop some sort of sophisticated detection methods it's just speculation as to when the brains producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug but it's there I 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

115:50sure I have a good insight into why okay but for the moment let's pursue the issue of what the implications are yeah I'll hold on to wild 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 right 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

116:46means 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

117:54time did so because their value to the people who believed in them was so great that those that disbelieved were out competed 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 um Scientology is that a cult too early to tell okay but let's stop well the guy who created it well we do but we also let me drag you back a so 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 um 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

118:52think it called it well I think it 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 the church well no not like Catholic here 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 on but let me let me okay take this there's a very interesting comparison so Joseph Smith who started the Mormon Church had a competitor right he had a competitor at the time as a book called the kingdom of Mathias right about his competitor at the time and to me the two looked equally plausible the story that they were selling now Mattias never had more

119:52than thirty followers and his religion died out and Joseph and Joseph Smith won and in 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 conman right okay and so 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 the

121:00head burning in the fires of the pits of hell if they decide to have sex with another man or where two different types of cloth or you know 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 it's not really structure it is a an analog for truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them mmm so let's let's deal with the church on the one hand and Moses on the other okay Moses is obviously important in in Jewish history if Moses ate some DMT from the acacia bush I think it was smoke oh he smells why the whole thing in the burning okay does 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 suppose that he had some ancient model of something and he there must

121:58have been something in that plant that caused crazy things to happen let's suppose he didn't believe that he had contacted God where the 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 gonna write it down and tell them came from God Brian is Judaism now a cult I think they're all cults I think all ideologies are cults I just don't I don't know I 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 your you're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore right and you're also dealing with an oral tradition of who knows how many years before was ever bothered to be written down but right but written down by people and then people decide what stays in and what doesn't

122:55they changed the rules like the priests used to be able to marry priests in the Catholic Church they the Pope used to have wives sure no they ran armies I mean that 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 well 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 that I don't agree what's in what case like the money and the the amount of I'm not I'm not saying you don't have corruption in all of these prayers you do but I am saying that there is a it mean this is exactly parallel to what we were talking about before there is the predatory version which I would call a cult right and there is the earnest version which I would not call a cult now I'm very uncomfortable with any of

123:44these 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 are no there's no religious wisdom maybe there's a problem in the word cult maybe 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 these supposed grave consequences for deviating right well so alright let's let's pick up Catholicism because it's easy because so much of the structure is visible to us yeah okay I would argue that Catholicism is gonna be true of all of Christianity it's gonna be true of Judaism but Catholicism is it is easy to see how it would facilitate

124:47collaboration 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 mmm thinking 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 no word it so every week you have to go and confess to 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 knows 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

125:41genes so not how they are Oh what are they doing they're sneaky no their facility 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 synonymous with the population that they are 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 I'm if I die before next week and I haven't confessed my adult you go to hell I'm gonna go to hell that dad has a very unpleasant place I'm told it doesn't get to have someone to tell him so now the person I've been committing adultery with is thinking oh well I was gonna keep this a secret but now the priest is gonna know that I've been committing adultery he's gonna hear from the other person and so I better confess too so now the priest has a sense of

126:32like oh there's a dull tree problem right in the in the congregation and the priest is you know flip them through the book and thinking ho 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 saw him whatever and starts going on about adultery and the people in the congregation who are engaged in adultery are thinking oh this is God talking to me directly god knows what I've been up to and he's not happy and that's why I were reading this Psalm I better cut it the out hmm 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 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

127:30dog in that fight because he's not involved in business he's not involved in mating and dating you know loss all relatively recent when it comes to the Catholic Church in the last couple hundred yes and I would argue if you look back at any of these traditions any of the one that worked will successfully have addressed the question of how you prevent corruption from emerging well apparently with sexual corruption these guys were rock stars like the priests were essentially the 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 they're students like look at them like oh my god I can't believe the professor sitting down here with my work and you mean it's like that's a very minor connection in comparison to the connection to God anybody who's gonna

128:15have her anybody who is gonna have power is in danger of abusing assur 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 from a virus so an outbreak of corruption in the church is a bad thing from the point of view of the well-being 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 you know hanging around with cute girls people are gonna look at you funny because you're not supposed to be having sex so this limits their ability to 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 in

129:14each 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 right what to keep and what to throw out I'm not arguing anything else 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 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

130:10understand the language and you're just observing the structure you would cease error-correction the structure would say oh they realized there's 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'll keep them from being invested and you know Inc okay yeah I see 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 you know it's like constantly putting a finger in the in the eye of an analytical person of course I mean just the way they dress right I mean just the wearing the wizard costume and holding the staff and sitting on the golden throne and in all of it I mean all the pageantry to it it's all preposterous I mean I agree looking at as a modern

130:59person it 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 to show them to be wrong on this front the there is no way that the huge amount of effort and resource that is invested in these structures was an error 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 the population and then you have positions where the the 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

131:56thousand 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 didn't go through the Enlightenment mm-hmm 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 create it to the part of the world in which they live you could equate there's a lot of different ways you could try to figure out why this happened but the reality is that that thing has not changed that structure has not changed well a long time I think you've hit on exactly the the right point Islam's mechanism for preventing outbreaks of chain parasitism was to to

132:51hard-code the thing and this is a tragedy because it what it means is that where Islam needs to update it doesn't have the mechanism for doing it so what also has a built-in way to keep people aboard oh yeah she's becoming apostate that you're allowed you can kill them right in kill apostates which is there's no other religion that we have right now that operates like that has draconian imagines if Scientology did that right well I mean Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving well but how is that not a cult since it was created by a science fiction writer literally out of nowhere I'm gonna be horrified if I said it wasn't the call 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

133:46the 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 rests so anyway I I'm not arguing that it isn't a cult it has lots of hallmarks that make me think I'm troubled by well including much like Mormonism you know the guy who made it but and unlike Mormonism which was in 1820 we have video we see Elrond hovers bad teeth and his 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 this the Mormons get a

134:42planet when your dice are used 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 something that seems didn't read to me because universe is so big we can each afford to get there as the plan that's it see that that is some Joseph Smith by the way it's a wonderful book if you if you read the the actual origins of Mormonism people to listen and 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

135:43the lost work of Jesus I was at the inside of the album with all the planets so I believe he was actually illiterate yeah and that was a con man you murdered put a sheet over his head and dictated what he was supposedly reading to somebody else that's my understanding of it but it was a charismatic person but 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 joined the Mormons but where they up as they regulations came in they started restricting the market they started the regulator's came in and stopped these people from having nine wives and then they're not gonna be so nice anymore the reason why they were so nice is because they have these crazy relationships they were having

136:34jeez every night well nine people living in the house them they lied to have sex with there's a problem with your day because for everybody who had nine wives there were eight dudes who had not those guys got to get their together and start their own cult I guess we're you know well maybe they're gay I don't know well what about the women too right well how about a woman who has ten husbands you know this is for her that doesn't happen yeah it should right now it'd be possible no now see there's a very good reason doesn't make any sense but Polly Andrews on me he went 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 because that's the abortion of game B game B game B well I don't want to say it there is no game B at the moment there is a conversation that emerged

137:29from this well the basic point is that one can structure a superior deal to what people are able to work out for themselves and it can function inside of the system and it can gain adherence 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 how it enhanced your ability to function in the world and rational people I mean and 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

138:29sophisticated 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 to insulate from the the predatory things that emerged in the market what you will get is the spread of these technologies and if there is one sort of key message here about all of the objections that one might raise about the difficulty of creating such alternatives and getting them to be adopted the number of things that we have already adopted because we got something for it cellphone being the perfect example we didn't have to tell people to get a cellphone people got a cellphone because other 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

139:26problem for you in some way that's good that causes the thing to be adopted out of self-interest and that 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 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 camp can't be I'm gonna be a it's got to be almost like a natural chain of events or it has to be like water flowing downhill mmm that so I I can speak scientifically about my own field because you know I I did enough training that I I know where the bodies 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

140:31change 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 what happens is the same thing that you know Lars Andersen 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 document 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 a 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

141:39noise by getting 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 work 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 then that way that that causes adoption and it doesn't take very much 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 right right but now it's not a currency with 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

142:32are 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 I might have taken several decades a few decades ago would only take a few years today well the there is 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 so we have an economic system that generates technologies that create great benefits in the short term at some massive cost

143:34in the long term and we have no mechanism once they've generated massive profits there's no ability to shut them off right that's a problem that has many many symptoms that we could name but that we we in effect don't have much time that the rate at which we are liquidating the well-being of the planet at present is so fast that effectively we need we need to change quickly and it doesn't mean I guess that's the other thing that I haven'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 that is correct and we can discover what that answer looks like in other words the right model is not the writing down of the new rules of the world and the embrace of them because you get benefits it is prototyping what the new structure would be and then you

144:34Institute the prototype in some group of people who have signed up for it and then you discover 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 all 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 gonna create a dystopia it's virtually guaranteed the

145:31way 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 the you know game theory is a very important topic it's less complicated than people

146:42think there aren't as many games as you would imagine there are a few canonical ones and then they're 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 evolved 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 has happened just over the last couple months since the Harvey Weinstein hmm do you see what's happened I mean literally is probably stopped sexual-harassment dead in his tracks women who work in these workplaces that had to deal with the

147:37consequence of these guys the 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 a medium for change and then using it to their own benefit people could get greedy and corrupt this right but I think already happening sure I'm sure what you know netic examples yeah a couple of them I mean I don't want to I'm like every other man I'm hesitant to put my weight on the ice with anybody because who knows what you don't know right 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 is

148:37I'm guessing it would have been with you and your friends and 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 right that wasn't the reason that we didn't grow up anybody but but nonetheless it turns out to have been a benefit that we're don't we're not worried about what's gonna 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 because I think either one is the most disturbing one it's not actually but it's not no there's one more there's a first one tell everybody that Garrison Keillor story garrison keillor story so by the way the only thing we have so he was fired from Minnesota Public Radio his radio program

149:39was not only renamed but the old ones were disappeared I 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 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 6 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

150:39until he got a contact from her lawyers and how long after the event was it didn't say but my feeling is let's take the worst possible interpretation the least generous tequila interpretation of this said he groped her a little bit yeah maybe you lost his place yeah maybe he just was leaned in he leaned in the for a moment he had a sexual thought or something I touched her back and then you know he did what he should have done which is not apologized right she accepted the apology he still felt bad about it he apologized again yeah and so and it was just a back right it's just about Shane so yeah 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 disturb and it this would not have happened if it wasn't for like

151:34Harvey Weinstein right Harvey Weinstein who's 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 right ass more often the renowned Lauer story came out on same day as the Garrison Keillor story and that one is truly disturbing to 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 I 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 they all have buttons that's a really common thing and NBC it is yeah yeah yeah see that's the problem with these chrome wheels story but so it's not

152:35something you really want to go into and start reading you feel like you're gross 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 anyone comfortable now because I can't establish that any of this stuff is true but I will say this story doesn't sound like the Lauer story it doesn't sound like the Harvey Weinstein story or Karen Spacey and the gal Franken one one of the women said that he grabbed her waist he SQUOZE the the fat around her waist when 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

153:30we need a very separate category for Franken but I was going to tell you what was worse than their story so the Keeler 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 would open season but the story that disturbs me even more is the Matt Taibbi story I don't know who that is I know who Matt Taibbi a us 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 Rush and he was publishing a satirical magazine I guess it was and the Sottero satirical magazine so there's the story that came out which was that he had written all of these things about about assaulting women and mocking them turned

154:37out 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 the point is this was a case in which the evidence against Taibbi was ironic because it was really tight be 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 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

155:35behaving 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 and what he's doing is important is amazing he's a brilliant writer right and so you know I was a gonna be pretty surprised if he was behaving this way but okay I've been surprised by a few of these and it wasn't even necessarily behaving it was writing it was writing but the fact that there's no there there when you pursue the story there's not women who were in a position to say yeah actually he was kind of a dick right 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 me2 movement should applaud yet retweeted and quoted a woman who wrote something and i retweeted it as well

156:28when you did it which he 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 you know 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 you follow the thread before she turned her page to private but one of the more hilarious things they turned it on her saying what about men of color who are falsely accused and oh not men of color well you know she felt the racism coming her way and immediately acquiesced it was it's 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 just like we're talking about with other things systems correct themselves you find this this one terrible example and

157:23then everything sort of like it gets washed out because of this one terrible example and then I feel like it'll settle you know well I don't know I'm just guessing you're the biologist I do I'm disturbed that particular tweet you're talking about about yes 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 if that's a terrible idea because it's a team thing then it's this is 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

158:18often cynical decides to go after them hey you're going to eliminate all of the courageous men from the system because all those people have enemies yes 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 ship yeah and to not have any respect for due process it's just crazy I mean that's but you're gonna go back to the McCarthy era you're gonna 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 the I I've always said this the environment of an office is so entirely unnatural that it takes incredible restraint just

159:11to 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 right a secretary someone who makes a fraction of what you make or someone who's under you know they're 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 what they'll be able to go on vacations whether they can live comfortably pursue their dreams well 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 the deep

160:04question 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 crucifying people for infractions that don't amount to you know the same tragedy right so right 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 suddenly you're staring at a major career decision right do you say no or do you say yes

161:10and that's it's not 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 cuz Matt Lauer's an ass and go somewhere else but if Matt Lauer is not only has the power to make 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 and that's a tragedy and in fact did you read Salma Hayek's yes story I'm 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 today 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 Weinstein's and you didn't know which one you were gonna get

162:07so 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 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 things I've ever seen in my life yeah like they literally said if you have one infraction it's this amount of money to infractions it's half a million dollars three infraction just monetized it's insane and the point is well there's something unhealthy about a system that creates somebody's so powerful that they are capable of just treating their own sexual assault

162:55of 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 you 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 yeah and so anyway curing the concentration of opportunity problem is part and parcel of solving the sexual-assault problem hmm 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 they want everyone they want you know I mean you hear horrible stories throughout history

163:55of things that men do and they have ultimate power the old phrase 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 where 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 with these alpha chimps that are running these giant groups but then I think this technology is it's exposing us is gonna give way to something that's even scarier and my number one fear over the last year has been artificial intelligence oh I'm tremendously troubled by it I'm

164:52more 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 Terminator movie I think it's both better and worse than that we it's happening already and because it's not robots we don't see it right it's happening in your phone yes it's yours yeah and the thing is it's a it's not AGI right so AG being general okay so the fear the one that we have sent you yeah that the thing is smart enough to start thinking on its own and that it might come up with its own asses be creative it might be creative and either misunder you know the paperclip problem is you tell it to make as many paper clips as possible and it sees your attempt to turn it off or reprogram it as an obstacle to making paper clips and starts liquidating the universe so that's not a malevolent AI that's a confused AI right

165:52malevolent 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 I met frankly 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 danger we've

166:47created 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 oshit rationals better or conclusion is that we there's no stopping this there's that we can rationally debate how far off it is but once it gets going there's essentially no good there's no good way out so and there's no one that's gonna agree to stop right now right there's too much competition involved and in terms of the the you have 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

167:47the quickest and it's this mad race towards the edge of a cliff and no one exactly knows whether or not we're gonna be able to use the brakes right and so in some ways I think this is the 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 you we have to confront this at the level of what is allowed right I don't like earning myself say that because I hear people turning off on the other end when

168:46they hear oh he doesn't want to allow us to innovate but for the survival of the species I think it's imperative we have we have about no choice I'm just so scared that we're caught up in all this other nonsense and we're thinking about so much stupid 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 layers left of this I really feel like we're in a science fiction movie and we're at the beginning of the movie where everything's great right it's like we got a problems we got a lot of dudes out there pinching butts and some some dudes are pretty rapey and we got Kevon space you got taken out of that movie

169:34we're doing pretty good right and then in the meanwhile there's robots that are being built by boss dynamic that does backflips and they're gonna be able to think for themselves they're gonna have machine four hands right and their bodies gonna be filled with bullets what could go wrong it's crazy because it's happening at such an accelerated rate that it's literally what I'm sitting around I'll be playing with my kids I'll be hanging out and I'll be like are they making robots right now is that is our wee-wee like a year away from this being a real problem well this is 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 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

170:25safe right because it can't possibly be right if 99% of them are safe 1% is enough to create the problem so once you once you've got that information you can then begin to extrapolate to all of the other problems that don't have the same the same intrigue around them you know there's something Sam Harris makes the point that as you talk about the you know the AI apocalypse it is simultaneously horrifying but kind of fun to to get into because you know because it is sort of sci-fi and all but the whole landscape that we have built right our socio-political 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 in which stuff evolves and they didn't know to worry about it so the AI problem is a very concentrated version of a very general problem which is if you build a habitat and you

171:25install 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 my real issue with this and this is something that I've been battling again with for a couple years now is that the this is what we do and it's one of the reasons why we're so fascinated with technological innovation and I mean that literally we are the caterpillar that is becoming the electronic butterfly and we don't

172:20realize 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 how you do the same I did on my old iPhone 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 gonna be wonderful and you're gonna 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 gonna 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 Lara's Anderson with his fancy

173:08archery 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 changed 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 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

174:12that 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 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 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 that evolution

175:16built 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 entire material possessions and we've 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 gonna finally reach the promised land well we technology is one thing really we are built to pursue something that economists call growth but I would say human being is 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 on to for a population of humans it can be a new continent that's a huge

176:11opportunity for human beings it can also be a new technology that takes whatever opportunity you have and make 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 marvellous 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 to utilize the amazing brain capacity that evolution has given us for something that's actually worthy of it Bret Weinstein on that note let's wrap this up all right thank you sir I really appreciate you some lot of sorry

177:10I hope I hope someone can actually do this I hope it can be done awesome thank you thank you very much all right thanks Bret Weinstein on Twitter and you don't have that those other things you don't use those other terrible technologies now right