Joe Rogan Experience #1494 — Bret Weinstein Transcript

Transcript

0:00 If anybody sounded the alarm that all this madness was gonna come to fruition in the real world, it's you, sir. I did. week or two, the people who mocked me and others, including you, for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses, some of them have started to call and Well, I have to tell you, I'm not optimistic.

2:23 the force that gets in its way. and we really have to take this back a number of years to understand why it happened, but I'd be on board with it. It doesn't. It means a great deal more than that. And we're beginning And then everyone's like, good job. Great, great first step, at least. Well, no, it's a dishonest presentation. And I'm concerned that there, as I've also said in many

5:11 fiasco, it's that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of Well, Camden just – they sort of broke the police down but then built up a new version of the police, right? Yeah, they shifted it to a different jurisdiction. Why were the police even called for that? or we're going to take you home. And we're going to just write you a ticket and work this out in

7:38 And then as they were speaking to him, clear, real clear, not a bad guy. Well, one of these is a long story that goes back to my first research gig in Jamaica. But that's not what this movement is really about. 20%. And that having higher qualified police officers, better trained police officers, better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this.

10:13 fully agree with. The implication of what you just said is that less funding isn't the solution. If And to the extent that I think we can all recognize that there is something absolutely organic about the anger that has caused people to spill into the streets in large numbers, that anger is the result of a process that does not begin with policing.

11:36 Economic despair, communities that are filled with crime and violence and gangs, And that created a problem. So during the Clinton administration, we saw the end to aid with family and they became the party of other businesses. So now you have two parties that are basically It's not even evenly rigged against them. does. It means that don't The other thing that our system does is it reproduces

15:38 But the results of that are still alive today in the South. Opportunity has been hoarded. The Democratic Party is more interested in serving the economic interests in the French Revolution or maybe it will be some unique version and it'll get its own name. ways when it comes to movements and particularly art and and and you know and expression. And I see this leaderless movement

18:43 But what is that thing that they're a part of? That police department has been disbanded. and that's what that's very concerning to me i'm very concerned about that because it seems like absence of the police. And it really doesn't even matter how corrupt the police are. The absence of change, I would argue overdue change. I mean, I would say there are several ways it could go.

23:03 it's impossible. I think if there is a characteristic think makes it impossible. I don't think it's impossible. I think if there great for everybody is obviously the right thing to do. But what we are now doing and the thing Oh, yeah. Well, here's the thing. I never have. 5,000 scientists and two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged

26:22 What do you expect? one reason for existing is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is Yeah. But what has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public. autoimmune disease of the academic culture. And by and large, the scientific part of the academy Yeah, which is total nonsense. They think science is the enemy. And instead of democratizing the tools of science and giving them to the people who need them most, they want to end science.

32:23 Let's take the honorable part of it, right? black and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you and you made it. I'll be like one in 20. So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. the university. And the way you do that is you bring them on as graduate students, and you pay But this means that we overproduce PhDs.

36:34 You're going to take having gotten your head above water and then you're going to voluntarily drown. It's again, one of these echoes of a past racism or a past indifference that is having huge impacts on the present. Okay. So these people that want to, that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it. and I watched this happen at every- You've talked to them directly, so you know this is actually

38:48 What did they mean by enlightenment is a problem? They're human. distribute them as broadly as possible. But if you're in critical theory, first of all, inside of these departments. And we also know that the product doesn't add up from A student of Heather and mine, an excellent student, What did they say when they say you're a race traitor for studying science?

42:37 It's nonsense. any place where that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism. Imagine you're cornered, you know, you're alone, you've got a mob that's And what they did with shutdown STEM, tactical. important institutions broadcasting this thing. Something about our environment is not calling it to the attention of people who might be in a

46:09 this far ahead they're not playing this long game okay I would just I would tell It would be a disaster. Economic opportunities. So not in favor of reparations but I would be in favor of something that did the job that reparations are imagined to do. interaction, there is no way it could possibly work. And it invalidates all of the most important called jury nullification. And Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what

50:35 I knew damn well that the charge was completely empty based on my history as a human being. When they promote this, people that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country, that there is a situation in this country, The Chinese had a very sophisticated mechanism for basically brainwashing. under communism. Okay. that doesn't strike me as

54:23 say to yourself, oh yeah, I said something I didn't believe because I got a lot out of it. On the other hand, I really thought he got it wrong. I have for a very long time. anecdotes, no matter how egregious they seem. Is it weird to connect all those things together, And people did say, you're making too much out of it. hysteria does lead to pretty despicable acts and that there is sort of a mob mentality

58:16 you have the mass movement of all these people taking the streets saying we've camp out around that area and figure out what the fuck's going on. Yeah. And like I said, at first I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it. And so that's what Dave Chappelle was responding to. I'm not sure that that's actually what is supposed to happen.

1:00:55 Well, murder is a crime. Yep. you know, But what makes you think that it's not murder? Why is that? That he may have been having a heart attack before he was on the ground. Now, again, or was it active in his system? Was it something that he had taken fairly recently, but So again, I am not rooting for him to be. I mean, if he did say he can't breathe, it also could be that he was struggling and that there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe.

1:04:29 In other words, it may be that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department – whole video. There's another problem with the way he did it. There's a drain there. You see that I'm not saying that this wasn't murder in the first degree based on prior interactions. I'm not saying any of that. was Derek Chauvin being a dick and using the policy of the police department and being indifferent to its effect,

1:06:09 What did it say? My real point is that we are all acting examiners. You know what you need? What? You need a court. You need a court to examine the evidence. This is, we're talking about Rodney King times a thousand. Nobody anticipated this or saw that, And you agree that that might be for the best of everybody. And, you know, you can't use the term lynching for it

1:10:13 to look at it. If I decided to lean on someone's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds with all my weight, Okay. the way he was convicted. I agree. And we are convicting him in the court of public opinion, you put your knee on your neck on their neck to hold them down in place and i think that is a when you got him cuffed, that he needed to be taken

1:13:01 That could be used against people who are actively resisting. He was not exhibiting active aggression. but I know that the American thing to do I say he's guilty. It was a chokehold. Well, can we come – you say what kind of a world are we living in where somebody selling loose cigarettes has this kind of interaction? Police brutality is a feature, not a bug.

1:15:58 police brutality is you see police brutality being utilized on wealthy people. If they don't know, And that process, I think, should be similar to buds, like what Navy SEALs have to go through communities from speaking out and demanding their fair share it's a bug of human beings who have I know that putting a badge on somebody and giving them a weapon and giving them all of that power, it brings the worst out in many people.

1:18:35 But let's put it this way. better options. So let's talk about a couple of things. And I do hope we get to some science at reworked for different habitats. The reason that human beings teaching slaves to read and things like that. So there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had who were in the New World and a substituting

1:22:06 So in any case, that carries through to the present. of how another population accesses the shared culture, Okay. incarcerating massive numbers of them. And we incarcerate a much larger fraction of our in traditional family raising. process, a demographic process that unfolds very naturally if you remove a disproportionate number and it's repeating itself over and over and over again,

1:26:52 If this is causal. So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on. Right. So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on. Right. There really is a problem. And what this movement is doing is it is advancing a phony explanation, bad policy. And then on the other side, everybody who's not going along with this, you know, or a vast majority of those who are not going along are thinking,

1:28:02 So that looks to me like kind of worst possible. at an all-time low and that you know he was all these great things were happening it's like addressing you're not addressing the foundation you're only addressing like the windows of a You find the spots where the people have an unfair shot and you fix that. You fix those spots, sort of an economic opportunity that it gives you hope that you actually strive for something and

1:30:47 And so they hear all this talk from politicians about black unemployment and this and that, I don't know. Yeah, I agree. But I still don't think here at The Root. And we're going to have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? I really like Obama personally. He's not really a Republican, right? But he's also not really an alternative. It's like a third

1:35:20 they used to be able to count on the shills on the left and the right to get the word out for them but they don't have that anymore you have so many people that really don't have an There's none of those out there, though. but the working title is the Dark Horse Duo Plan. And the plan looks like this. Center left and a center right. president now runs for president. And they continue this way until one of two things happens.

1:38:02 But then that's an obstacle. It's probably a good idea. Okay. Yeah. You know who else looks like a president to me? of duty. The other is crazy enough to want the job in the first place. And what are they? Well, really good ideas. Yes. interested in as they are running against Trump and Biden is hearing who it is that they would American, they do want to see a plan to how to get out of a lot of the messes that we see.

1:42:57 And really that wrong idea isn't even about the fact that we think we want to hear the that they were progressive because I believe we need to make progress or we will perish. And, you know, they've basically just made this concession in their head like, hey, you know, this is what I'm voting for now. And if you go back to when he was a younger man, that trend didn't exist.

1:45:22 He is not an idea guy, right? He's the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. We did – we should have known that this was building, right? a courageous, capable patriot in that office. How dare they play games with this thing? It's not You start feeling cramps. You start looking for a way out. And he's a pace of seven miles an hour, things get slippery. You start feeling cramps.

1:48:02 Like, what the fuck are you even paying attention to? Those shoes suck. i never wear them Totally. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Hillary Clinton advanced Trump's candidacy because she wanted to run against him. build that wall, make America great again, all that kind of shit, He has all these nicknames for people. These fucking people have been in it in this Bush League way.

1:51:27 And let's get them the hell out of there. I don't know. But if they did, then it's the perfect moment. Actually, the world, we could be, you know, we could be speaking Chinese in five months. I am very concerned about SARS-CoV-2. But if you're – I am looking at New Zealand with utter envy. been told it is. How so? So I have, initially, I thought that this was a bat-borne virus that

1:55:36 but looks to me like the Wuhan seafood market is the source that the virus comes from bats. And we We have faced all kinds of pushback. So one of the techniques that labs who study viruses like this use is something, And what happens is evolution. insert rather than mutations of nucleotides that were there. It's like somebody spliced it in. and suggest possible laboratory manipulation. The furrin site that I referred to that has been

2:01:00 I don't want to say fact as if it is a fact. But if this was an escape from the laboratory, then the virus, I mean, just as, you know, maybe we'll end up talking about the telomere problem in mice, which you spoke to Eric about when he was on your podcast last. So is it possible that this virus has adapted to the laboratory environment, an indoor environment, and that it has forgotten how to get transmitted outdoors?

2:02:43 At the moment, this might be an advantage that we have. And we're going to lose it if we're not careful, to transmit outdoors at night. If it's not UV light, then that's not likely to be it. even if they're outside talking for the same amount of time, If you've ever seen one, it doesn't even take that long. You take this wand, you put it in like a bottle, a water bottle, and you spin it around in this creek water, and it kills all the bad stuff.

2:04:56 body. You remind me of Sarah Cooper when you do that. I thought that that's what he was talking about. Oh, that's – no. person's ever said has been in office well that maybe he's done more than maybe abe lincoln who He's winging it. Okay. and they put Trump's face on this baby, and then they change the words. Yes, you did. Mr. President, you said the virus was just like the flu.

2:09:45 If you can find it, folks, anybody who's listening to this, you should see it because it's really disturbing seeing a baby with Trump's face. and address this one issue that seems to be when it seems to be an issue you must be some sort of a right-wing nut. Right. And- Have you faced that? I have not heard that. the key question. When something leaps into a new species and then it becomes a pandemic, it's

2:13:05 in Wuhan and immediately spreads, tells us that this virus was well adapted to our cells and well Absolutely. It is established in the literature that the addition of a fern site makes the virus much more transmissible in human tissue. So if you were going to study it, this would be high on your list of things to do. Unfortunately, this goes back to our earlier discussion.

2:15:51 of the other things I wanted to say to you about the danger of letting this virus run its course. And that would be a major loss to humans. businesses versus treating protests. months in here. I want to be in this position months in here. And the thing that we've done that I find the most troubling is that we have not bootstrapped a mechanism for high-quality ubiquitous testing.

2:19:57 But are masks really effective? Because one of the things that the CDC was saying was that you Some of us were shouting and saying, and I don't know why we are pushing this madness I do. So the fact is I have it. stays in place. That makes total sense. But I mean, the funny thing is I'm an animal biologist, I look like a ninja. the hunting gear that I'm wearing

2:22:51 You've never seen anything like it. They are the fastest deer I've ever encountered in my life by far. Yep. Okay. And that means that the story of how a terrestrial mammal gets there is pretty rare But anyway, my point would be Hawaii is a tropical landmass. then the species that are there are not in a position to fend it off competitively because they're not adapted to compete.

2:26:26 have crossed on its own right and we are sitting ducks for this thing so this is why i'm really on the deck. You could have given them the finest possible care. And we could have learned a lot What are the numbers of these people? Yeah, I think the people to study would be those NBA athletes I would think, I would want to know what's going on with their lungs. Yeah. What is it like when you get an elite athlete and you give them this disease and why are

2:29:51 I want to see that. China was giving us bad information. You say, okay, what would a reasonable person do at this moment? But we also have to bootstrap our way out of a predicament where our whole system has been overrun by perverse market incentives that is causing everybody to turn into a liar or a dupe. Well, you know, this is weird because it's going to sound self-aggrandizing maybe.

2:33:12 Okay. I actually haven't heard from them. and they didn't anticipate that the bats were going to shit on them africa they flew out of this cave and that they shit whenever they fly out and that these people didn't think about this. get histoplasmosis, which is a fungus. It's a fungus that also afflicts people in the poultry industry. So anyway, that's a danger.

2:36:20 like your example of these people, tragic as it is, represents a case in which something jumped but didn't spread. So what we're looking at is the strong possibility that we were looking to prevent a pandemic at this perception has been amplified by the president that this is potentially, if this leaked from the lab, that this is a Chinese problem.

2:38:54 So anyway, there was concern. But like so many things, I think it hovers outside of most of our awareness. right? And we need to really get ahead of that problem. We need to start finding out what most people call aging. not live long enough to suffer the cost. And so if you have the trait that makes you powerful when Certain creatures live longer than others, even when you correct for things like body size.

2:42:20 So we knew that this hypothesis was right. causing us to grow feeble with age, because if your cells can't divide anymore, then they won't that's helping us in youth. We have a counter that is limiting the number of times a cell can divide the internal mechanisms because there just wasn't a lot that could be said. Anyway, I retained an interest in the cellular

2:45:48 So if it were true that the length of your telomeres dictated how quickly you were going to age, And I started to wonder, is there something going on at that lab? And I said, Carol, you don't know me. And lo and behold, they had short telomeres. altered and using them as models for normal physiology? And the other problem, maybe even more serious, was that we

2:49:47 has the ability to replace its tissues indefinitely. A toxin that will harm you by killing tissue Now, the problem is I was absolutely unable to alert the world to this problem for reasons that still elude me. So let's say that you took some drug that killed every 10,000th cell or every 1,000th cell. Vioxx, and it put together a report. And the report's 300 pages. It doesn't mention mice.

2:53:36 I can't even say whether or not. would have happened in the breeding colonies in question. You've got my paper, which proposes a hypothesis. Several people. It's a general systemic failure of reason. I cannot explain it except to say that the culture of science has become so rotten that this When you've seen it, when you've lived it, you never go back.

2:58:07 How is this not something that's an enormous story? and I think Eric has actually forgotten what happened. So I was dogged about this for a decade. So I tried everything I could think of. But you're wrapped around the axle. from that point forward, I tried to teach the science as clearly as I could, and try to keep It is possible that that is enough

3:02:19 the portal number 19. And you can hear him, you know, he catches me off guard. He forces me to But I guess the question is, is the era different because we're at a higher profile or isn't it? And I was interested in evolution. these systems go wrong. I think we have taken the magic of market forces, which really are magic for and at the point we do that, we'll be in a much stronger position to protect ourselves.

3:06:05 Very brave points too. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks, brother. Bye, everybody.