Joe Rogan Experience #1055 — Bret Weinstein Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Boom and we're live. How are you? on it and maybe some furs pull up in a Cadillac. You'd get crazy for a couple months. warriors, people who, there's a movement going on in this country, and it's very aggressive. You're out of there. And then he put his hands away 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.

3:32 It's not logical. There are a lot of people who go along with it who I would argue are tools of the movement. 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 That's always the big one. and just saying, frankly, no, I'm not a racist. Well, here's what's really important for people who don't know you.

7:17 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 Tell that story if you could. relatively standard fraternity shenanigans, the event turned into one in which the fraternity had hired prostitutes,

9:46 And I ended up writing an editorial for the paper, and all hell broke loose. came into the witness room and started bullying these witnesses you could have probably stopped it so that the world can understand how such things occur and do something about it. You're 18, right? mean they're just all living together, feeding off of each other. 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.

13:52 But just, man, you should probably have some fucking adults in that room. Don't do that. it's clearly the evidence points to the contrary. Well, I, you know, this issue of conservatism closet conservative, that the, what I faced must have turned me against the left. And that's, I don't think it's normal. But there's a very good game theoretic reason that that can't be.

17:29 are good for you. Competing is good for you because it teaches you about focus and discipline themselves with some endeavor. But whenever I hear equality of outcome, that's when I put my And you have two different kinds of lives, two different types of human beings, a style of human. Equality of outcome, it's impossible. 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

21:02 So I'm a tremendous fan of the idea that even if your because everybody looks at everyone as an equal. to reduce somebody's opportunity. What you don't want is any systematic bias in luck. In other And so this is an uneducated, not very well thought out perspective on equality of outcome. And that is not what's going on. I didn't get was one has almost no ability to address the question of how the cards are dealt.

25:01 you need to play them very well. me into that conversation so I could hear it and finally figure out what was going on. that's a win in the game. So anyway, again, I don't want to trivialize any part of this. I And then we separate that from what it is that we individual level. Because I mean, affirmative action isn't even legal in Washington. fueling racism inadvertently.

30:25 We don't know what role that plays. damage happened in that process. And we also have to realize that that damage, you know, I mean, No, I think you're right about fearful. Yeah, well, let's fix the knee. So you'd want to go and find these places where people are in these economically deprived areas where there's a ton of crime and violence and they don't have like a real good sense of like a potential positive outcome from where they're at.

34:19 He sort of explained all the different issues that happened in Baltimore, particularly where But we're doing that. part of the healing process was not protecting the knee, but putting it through physical therapy that has anything to do with it being inobvious that it would be a good thing to do. I think it has to do And I mean, that's, uh, I've always felt like that conspiracy was really just, there's no motivation to, to make it better.

38:21 not known before. Your first experiences with so many Like I had my head down, got through that year. Yeah. You know, I'm hesitant. I'm not always hesitant about conspiracy. There are conspiracies and we don't deal well with it. But one doesn't need conspiracy to explain this. This effectively can evolve without anybody's consciously thinking I want to sabotage somebody else's kid's school.

40:34 but I was very nearly the only person on faculty anywhere that I could think of who had not been a But having had the experience of school completely failing That's so crazy. professors. So there's almost nobody on the faculty anywhere who has a clue why bad students And so they would get these kind of two different views. Just show up and try, and I'll give you an A.

44:34 where someone has been speaking English their whole life and you'll get a nice evaluation. We wrote written evaluations of them. I would usually know. But there were lots of students in the middle who might have gotten I loved saying that. case. Right. And there are some or many activities in which your how you do initially doesn't they don't throw themselves into it instead they avoid it and they try to find workarounds

48:20 I had assumed that it was simply the fact that I'd showed up on your podcast and obviously you're in that world. And so a certain number of mixed martial arts people were now But if you're really good at arguing, then it shouldn't really matter. As long as the person And he's capable of shooting, like, way faster than the average person and multiple arrows.

51:20 To make a video. if you took archery and took it seriously and learned from, uh, you know, a master who had good form, Look at this. For people that are listening only, this guy's on a rooftop and he's doing these stunts where he's riding It's pretty rough. But anyway, just- things were possible. And you know, what he's doing emerged from, uh, from observed trials,

55:04 if we know who the initial innovators are with something like parkour. Maybe. And we are on a trajectory that you don't have to be deeply knowledgeable to recognize that it is unstable on enough different fronts that we can't go on like this much longer. We're playing with powerful enough tools that we're in tremendous danger of something going wrong.

56:50 people consuming too fast and using mechanisms that are dangerous? Is there a route to put us And I don't think anybody has the answer to that question. Before I go deeply into this to contemplate that they might know or might be tuned into a conversation that could find its way to some new answer, the place functions or my kids and your kids are in serious trouble. So anyway, that's why I would would go down this road.

59:44 Fair enough. playing around in biology space very adeptly. people at that conference who have continued on in these conversations. I joined Occupy. I mean, that they had each arrived at, that the trajectory we were on was so dangerous that it required us to Some of them have figured out how to engage in something called rent-seeking, So what things are you referring to?

1:04:40 about the fact that they are an economic Goliath and that you don't have enough choice to be able So that's a kind of rent-seeking that we don't even typically model. which is you've got two things glued together, and you are challenging them as a package, but there's no reason they have the market can figure out how to solve that problem and it will do it very well.

1:07:38 about, right? Those are huge benefits and they're capable of taking a city that is too snarled with traffic and reducing the why a phone is so addictive is because it's attractive because you can get You're going to be able to say a sentence that you think is clever and suddenly hundreds or thousands of people are going to be able to react to it. Whoever has access to your phone camera, your metadata, your, you know, all of these things.

1:10:30 I mean, the cost is really high, but we signed up for it incrementally in a way that never But it's not only a negative. I mean, you just, you mean, you pointed to it yourself. So the privacy issue being cookies or cameras, like which one are you referring to? Right. So how do we fix it? Well, so let me, we've gotten a little 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

1:14:24 because the system has so much inertia in it that you would think it is completely impervious to any if you're not requiring it to validate your perspective. need it a lot. That's how you win at the insurance game. So the insurance industry is always looking the conversation of people that has coalesced, people who are discussing the question of how

1:18:17 The same tools that cause Facebook to be successful can be used to repair the system, that begins to sound plausible to me. I think it's fascinating. so he set up a Bitcoin wallet for me. Like 70 grand or something like that? for those people in the congo well but people were actually mad at me that i didn't buy those It's on her grin. There are obstacles to it functioning.

1:21:09 much matter. What we know is that somebody, without asking permission, found a better model It probably is going to crash because it's probably overinflated at the moment. services that would deliver information. And frankly, it's winning because it's superior. of successful, competitively successful, innovative challenges to the model that preexisted them.

1:24:58 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. access to excellent insurance that correctly hedged out the danger of bad medical bad luck most of us cannot negotiate on the open market. they're going to be working for you

1:27:45 Okay. And one of the reasons that equality of outcome is absolutely not desirable, even if you could arrange it, is that the inequality of outcome is the incentive that drives people to achieve amazing stuff that we want them to achieve. Right. Right. Of course. So how far ahead of everybody else should you end up? Well, without any real benefit to the people that are around you.

1:29:49 you built it. And so you're not really doing anything, but you're just constantly collecting of value, right? If you take waste and you get paid to dispose of it and you dispose of it in a way that it creates cancers where you can't detect that they've been created by what you've What you can do is restructure things so that going forward what is rewarded is actual productivity that is not harmful

1:32:22 Three mile island, Fukushima okay the 10th degree so how do you i'm still confused You start balling. like Facebook is a perfect example. but so much so that I kind of avoid Facebook. I'm on Twitter. Yes, exactly. It works for me in a lot of those ways. Yeah, exactly. you're not constantly checking your likes, but it wouldn't be, here's the thing. It wouldn't

1:36:29 Which things? I'm going to tell you. You never got that before? I'm not. How can I get with you? become famous. all these weird people that lack normal social skills. Thirst trap. Listen, we can save the world, but the problem is we have to be cognizant of normal human They're very interested in the conversation about how we might fix the world. that you will get more liberty. Net liberty will go up in a system that functions well.

1:41:16 And so it is natural to rebel against it and say, I don't want any more of that. Those people are in the best position to protect themselves. The brochure doesn't mention the fact that a totally free market produces predators and parasites at a huge rate. How would we eliminate predators? How would we eliminate predators? what they are doing. If you don't want to see the predators, you eliminate the niche for predation.

1:44:50 If you had 150 people and somebody was a bad actor, their reputation would precede them We also, human beings are very good at taking a technological solution and kludging or hacking a remedy for a problem like that. So, for example, you on board in your mind have the ability to track something like 150 individuals with respect to their reputation so that you know how much to trust in any given interaction.

1:46:35 And this is not new. I mean, the library at Alexandria is a technological solution to And in fact, you can use to diagnose who's reasonable. we have in this country alone. Right. Look at all these likes. That's what, that's a lot of it. The world is not talking about blockchain currency. Is it a bubble? than people that are in cults? I think that's way off

1:50:39 I'm going to challenge you on this. In a religion, that guy's dead. Let's say. Yeah. All right. Let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets. Oh, that is rough territory. For you. Okay. Let's say. For me, this is every day. Let's say, yeah. But okay. And that Moses, during this psychedelic DMT experience, came back from the other dimension that you go into when you go into the DMT trance with all these standard messages that

1:52:15 Okay. Yes, it definitely did. you're going to experience it whether you believe in it or not. Right. And actually, I thought it was going in there to have a good time. Right. And they believe that this is because during REM sleep, your brain produces DMT. They had like super similar experiences. it's just speculation as to when the brain's producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug.

1:56:07 and we don't know. But the idea that your mind contains mechanisms that go into some sort of to a style of thinking that you're telling me has altered your understanding of your relationship to other and we can compare them to what we learn scientifically Because we know the guy who created it. very often to extract resources from them. Like the Catholic Church? Well no not

1:59:46 competitor at the time. And to me, the two looked equally plausible, the story that they were Right. It is an analog for truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them. Let's say he smoked it. But he woke up from the thing and was like, You're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore.

2:02:59 Priests in the Catholic Church, the Pope used to have wives. Right. earnest version, which I would not call a cult. Now, I'm very uncomfortable with any of these things governing policy in the present because none of them have a literal relationship with But the problem with religion it's going to be true of Judaism, but Catholicism is, So every week you have to go and confess the shit you're doing wrong to the dude in the box.

2:05:51 No, they're facilitating the stability of the lineage that they are in charge of. So the point is they don't pass on their genes directly. You go to hell. But now the priest is going to know that I've been committing adultery with is thinking, oh shit, well, I was going to keep this a secret. But now the priest is going to know that I've been committing

2:07:11 He's living in the church. couple of hundred years. like that's a very minor connection in comparison to the connection to god anybody who's gonna have because you're not supposed to have money. And if you're hanging around with cute girls, And so you're absolutely correct that all of the changes in religious texts that people looking out to prevent outbreaks of competition inside the lineage or outbreaks of infighting. So if you were looking at it in an objective way, like say if you were an alien from another

2:10:45 Of course. I mean, just the way they dress, right? the huge investment that been had with other religions as time has gone on that haven't happened there. And you could equate Islam's mechanism for preventing for doing it. Well, I mean, Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving. I do not believe that this is where it is headed.

2:14:42 the mormons get a planet when you die. Sorry. I'm confused. it up, it's all planets. That's it. Was that the inside of the album with all the planets? But- They started restricting the market. Those guys got to get their shit together and start their own cult. Yeah, it should, right? Oh, man, don't go polyandrous on me. Those are, with the exception of Bitcoin, those are game A examples and they are predatory.

2:18:36 like these dopamine traps and the like, who will embrace these technologies because they themselves are looking for a mechanism to insulate from the predatory things that have emerged in the market, what you be adopted, the number of things that we have 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,

2:20:42 by other means. And what happens is the same thing that, you know, by getting the systems that are supposed to function in our interest to do so more effectively. me that like new ideas are implemented so fast, new concepts are accepted so quickly that something it's a mistake to look at the problems of the world as individual problems. That's a problem that has many, many symptoms that we could name.

2:25:07 In fact, it creates, you know, massive harm and kills millions because you didn't understand what it would do in motion. 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 a few canonical ones and then there are a bunch of variations on a theme.

2:27:27 Do you see what's happened? treating this like the incredibly powerful medium that it is, the medium for change, I mean, I don't want to, like every other man, I am hesitant to put my weight on the That wasn't the reason that we didn't grope anybody. The Garrison Keillor one is the most disturbing one. So he was fired from Minnesota Public Radio. somebody. He had been comforting a woman and he had leaned in, I guess, to hug her and put his

2:30:46 He didn't say. He leaned in. He apologized again. and it this would not have happened if it wasn't for like harvey weinstein right harvey weinstein No, no, no. Yeah, see, that's the problem with these. He had sex with her. Well, I want to come back to Al Franken separately. I know who Matt Taibbi is. reason that this, you know, I wouldn't know what to make of that story, except that the person,

2:35:50 What he's doing is important. It was writing. It was writing. And he didn't even in exactly the way but one of the more hilarious things is they turned it on her saying, And then I feel like it will settle. accountable. And so a few men who suffer some bad stuff is tiny in comparison. We all get that. suddenly has to fear an accusation is just crazy.

2:38:59 from being groped at work, right? from behaving in the way that food chain, and you kind of can dictate whether or not they do well in life, whether or not they So we have to deal with the issue of men behaving this way. having before, where the power of men like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer fact, did you read Selma Hayek's story on Harvey Weinstein? Terrifying. Terrifying. And I thought,

2:42:12 honorably enough to say that It's actually written into his contract. He just monetized. Yeah. And it's also this giant enterprise, right? out how we interact and behave with each other, that information and the ability to exchange Every day I wake up thinking, are we just sleeping while this thing is about to go live? And the thing is, it's AI. Yeah, that the thing is smart enough to start thinking on its own and that it might come up with its own objectives.

2:46:10 And frankly, it doesn't even matter whether people are reprogramming them or whether they are reprogramming themselves. This is the place where we get a chance to recognize where we're headed and deal with it before it's AGI. this and do it the quickest. And it's this mad race towards the edge of a cliff. And no one what is allowed, right? I don't like hearing myself say that because i hear people turning off on the

2:49:26 We've got problems. We've got a lot of and they're going to be able to think for themselves and they're going to have Is that, is, are we, are we like a year away from this being a real problem? have the same intrigue around them. There's something, Sam Harris makes the point that as you talk about the AI apocalypse, it is simultaneously horrifying, but kind of fun to

2:51:37 are living that. We are suffering the consequence of an economic environment that is evolutionary, that creates giant rent-seeking monsters who are And we're so obsessed with the newest, latest, greatest phone that will ultimately lead, if you follow it to an end point, take control of our structure and to turn it to our, to basically creating a stable, non-utopian,

2:54:17 having a huge burst of dopamine and then it wears out and you're constantly looking for the next one, that understands what a human being is, that understands we are not built to be happy and But I would say human beings, like all creatures, are built to detect opportunities that they can capitalize on. But we are wired to search for those things. Brett Weinstein, on that note, let's wrap this bitch up.

2:57:13 Awesome. I'm not.