And it’s gonna destroy those of us who stand up, then the point is, what that will do, is it will destroy everyone else shortly thereafter. So you’re not saving yourself that much by not– – You still have no choice. – You might as well face the thing.
And the lesson of frankly, the woke revolution, and COVID, and much else, is that actually, you might be surprised that you end up on the winning team and that feels pretty good. – All right, Brett Einstein, last we did this, we were in London at the ARC Conference, about a month, or five weeks ago or so, and we agreed to do it again. So here we are, and you’re in a suit this time. I’ve never seen you this professional.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wearing a tie. Are you going into a new line of work? What’s going on here? – Well, Dave, we are at war, and I think it’s incumbent on us to dress appropriately. – We are at war, at some level, I think, sort of across the board.
We’re at war with our institutions, we’re at war with our sense-making apparatus. We seem to be politically at with everybody. I guess, why don’t we just start there? What is on your mind the most at this very moment? – Well, I’m concerned that we are in a kind of war
That none of us have seen previously, and that this is a war that actually must be won, that were we to fail to win the war to, I don’t even think defending the West is possible at this point, but to rekindle it from what remains.
If we lose that war, then where we’re going, I think, is unsurvivable for the species, really. And I wish there was more nuance about it, but that is how it looks to me. – All right, so let’s do the black pill first. So what is the black pill?
Where is it that you see us going that if we don’t rekindle, we are going to end up at? What does that place look like to you? – As we may have talked about in London, there are really two bases on which you could run a civilization. One of them involves just simply
Narrowly trying to advance your genes into the future at the expense of other people’s genes, and that looks like lineages battling with each other. Sometimes it’s genocide, sometimes it’s war, sometimes it’s more cryptic than that, but it really is about what we have come to call race. And then there is–
– That’s sort of the battles of the old days, in some respects? – Yes, that was all there was for a very long time. And in fact, that is the crucible that shaped our species. And it happens that in more recent history we’ve discovered a better way,
And that involves putting aside lineage-level concerns and collaborating with people who are in a position to be good collaborators. Really, that idea has to take over the whole world. That is humanity’s future, if we’re to have one. And unfortunately, I think what has happened, is that what allowed a civilization
Based on reciprocity to thrive was a commitment to the consent of the governed. And the problem is, for the rent-seeking elites that have hoarded so much power, the idea of the consent of the governed is very frightening, because it can take power away from them at any moment
And award it to somebody else, and that is indeed a frightening prospect. But they’ve conspired against it. And what is going to happen is that that beautiful system, which we never completed, but the system that was being erected in the West, when it collapses, it’s going to return us to that lineage-against-lineage conflict
Because that is the more fundamental, more stable state. And unfortunately, if the world returns to that mode with present level of technology and weaponry, we aren’t going to just get through it and a hundred years from now, emerge to rediscover what we once knew. I really don’t think we’ll be here.
– All right, now everyone watching this knows that I’m not gonna let you just black pill us the whole time. And I know that that’s not your intention, and actually, your life’s work is to not do that at all, but just to give the devil his due
And do as much of what you just discussed as we can. So would you say it’s something like, we’ve had 250-plus years of the enlightenment that got us past much of the tribal stuff, and now we’re just at the end of it? Does this feel inevitable, where we’re at at the moment?
Especially if you look at what’s happened since October 7th, where we’re now seeing a new version of tribalism burst forth? Does it seem like the obvious end of enlightenment liberalism? – Unfortunately– – Something that guys like you and I tried to defend very hard before it was cool, I guess?
– Right, and while there was still more opportunities. – Some juice. – It’s now later, unfortunately, in that history. But I think it was not inevitable, but in order to avoid it, we needed to recognize what we had and not delude ourselves about how complete the job had been. In other words, recognizing
That we had effectively discovered the broad structure that we needed to live by, and had never fully achieved it. Obviously, the founders of the American experiment simultaneously understood that nobody needed to be given advantage over anybody else, or it was essential that they not have advantage over anybody else.
At the same time, they preserved slavery. So it was never perfect, it was at best a prototype. But we had to recognize what that prototype implied about what kind of world we could have, and then we needed to defend it with everything we had. We needed to defend it and we needed to,
I don’t even wanna say complete it, because that implies that you’re gonna get there. – Right, and there’s no there there, sort of. – You’re gonna approach it. You’re gonna get to a place where the gap between the system you have and the system that you’re shooting for is so small,
It’s not worth messing anything up over. – What do you think the closest we’ve ever got to that was? I always say on the show now, if we could just reverse it to 1995, we’re probably pretty good. – Well, yes and no.
I think 1995 is not a bad estimate of the closest we got. And just as a proxy for it, the degree to which one’s race, for lack of a better term, mattered, was probably at a low ebb at that point. It didn’t matter at the level of zero, it mattered,
And certain races mattered more than others. But everybody understood, all of the decent people understood that it was desirable to have a world in which everybody had access to the market, nobody was barred because of where they came from. And we have now lost touch with that, obviously.
We’ve embraced the idea that nothing matters more. And of course, that is gonna produce a revival of all of the ancient rivalries and a bunch of new ones, and it just doesn’t look survivable. And what’s more, I think, if you could just simply teleport everybody for a couple of days into the future
That they are toying with delivering us all to, they would recognize instantly that the loss that they were contemplating was just unthinkable. – What if you could teleport the other way? So what if we could teleport to 1995, assuming it’s a roughly, it’s not the exact year, but ballparking, that things were better,
What would you tell the people of 1995 you’re supposed to do in the face of this? Because that’s what I keep coming back to. A bunch of us were screaming about this. Clearly, that wasn’t enough. So what would you tell the people of 30 years ago, how are you gonna fix this?
– That is an extremely difficult thought problem. And in fact, I fear that the answer is, short of, by the way, I’m from the future. I know you’re not gonna believe that. But if you can get over that one thing, if I can establish that one thing for you,
Then I’ve got a message about what’s about to happen and what you have to do to prevent it and why it matters. That you could do. But if there’s no way to convey, hey, actually I’ve seen where this goes and it’s not good. – Right, so you need Marty telling Doc
That he fell off the toilet to figure out the flux capacitor. But short of that, we’re kind of screwed. – I think so. Actually, it’s funny, Heather and I have a little just sort of private thought experiment, Because we knew each other in high school,
I’m often saying to her, don’t you wish that we could just tell our high school selves about the present, and what would they say? And the answer is, it’s not plausible. The idea that we would get here is unimaginable. And I think people, I don’t wanna say would rightly reject the message,
Because it would sound too preposterous, but of course it would. I mean, we’re fighting about whether men can become women, whether pedophilia is a sexual orientation that you can do nothing about, and we should be tolerant of whether two plus two really equals four. I mean, literally there is nothing left
That we can agree on, nothing. – So okay, short of being able to prove that you were from the future, is there anything in retrospect that we could have done? Again, that’s the thing that I still seem to be hung up on. Is this all inevitable? That the system was going to collapse,
The algorithms were gonna grapple hold of us, the rent seekers, as you’re talking about, and the elite, all of it was inevitably going to get us to this civilizational moment? – Well, there are a couple things that go into it, which were probably necessary ingredients.
And so, maybe if you could prevent one of them, you’d be somewhere better, and the two that come to mind most directly… I think there was a terrible misstep with atheism, and what it did was it unhooked a set of protections, some of which really were no longer necessary,
Many of which were still essential, but for reasons that were not literally explained in the documents in question. And I know, because for a while I was pretty close to the only evolutionary biologist trying to bridge this gap and speaking to religious people and saying, “Look, my colleagues are telling you
You’re sick with a mind virus. I know that’s not right. It doesn’t mean that what you think took place literally happened.” And we have to have that conversation, what if what you believe is important but not literal? Getting there from an evolutionary perspective, if we could have done that earlier
And not temporarily flirted with the idea that simple atheism was somehow a sophisticated way of navigating through life, then maybe those people who had longstanding traditions that contained wisdom that might’ve prevented this would’ve had more power when it mattered. I really think that’s a possibility. – So you must be pleased then,
In that there doesn’t seem to be much of an atheist movement left in America? I dunno if please is the right word, but it does. I think that the Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson debates put an end to that movement in America. As they should have,
But I’m not thrilled with what I’m seeing replace it. Let’s put it this way. If we take your question about what could we have said to the people of 1995 to get them to save us from the world of 2023, the coming calamity that is going to happen
If we just simply embrace the religious doctrines, philosophies, and values of the past and hope that we can now ride out the storm, that’s when we could stop now by having a conversation that says, look, it was wrong to dispense with these compendiums of wisdom
That we’ve been handed in all of these traditions. But, those compendiums of wisdom were built by natural selection in an environment we no longer live in. And so, we are stuck in a terrible problem, which is, you can’t embrace the solutions of the past to get out of the problems of the present,
And you can’t abandon the solutions of the past because they’re outdated, because you’ll end up abandoning all sorts of stuff that matters in ways you don’t know about. I don’t wanna candy coat it. There’s no simple solution to that that doesn’t involve repeatedly injuring ourselves as a civilization as we discover
Which fraction of those traditions is still relevant, which fraction has become toxic and inappropriate, what it should be replaced with. That’s a very long-term puzzle that you can only solve if you’re careful about it. There’s no solution you can deliver in the present and say,
Here’s the subset of those traditions that’s still relevant, here’s the part that needs to be replaced, here’s what it needs to be replaced with. That’s an evolutionary process that’s gonna do it. – What does that tell you about the evolutionary process of the forces that have led us here on the negative side?
So if the forces on the positive side and the ideas of classical liberalism, let’s say, and the things that have been good for the last 250 years, if those are pretty good, but clearly faltering, what does it tell you about the bad ideas that somehow got into the system?
– There are a couple of concepts. Maybe I’ll step back one second. What we teach people, even before the academy went completely insane, the set of things that we would teach somebody on the way to graduating from college was pretty arbitrary. It was not the set of things
That you would really wanna have on board in order to live a life in which you were empowered to do meaningful things. It was just some set of things that people had taught in the past and seemed like they were still useful. – Are you saying Lesbian Badminton 201 isn’t?
– No. I mean, really almost everything. We don’t teach the right geology frankly, in order to understand what kind of a planet you live on. The biology we teach is not focused on the things that actually allow you to figure out how to evaluate claims about a medication or a food.
We are teaching an arbitrary curriculum, and it’s now turned into a toxic curriculum. But arbitrary wasn’t very good. And so, one of the things that I would– – But do you think that was arbitrary, or do you think that was by design? I mean, when all the liberal arts colleges
Started teaching all of this nonsense instead of teaching, I don’t know, say either better at STEM subjects, or financial literacy, let’s say, which nobody learned in high school, and then they get to college and then they don’t even teach it. Is that arbitrary, or is that intentional? – The last chapter clearly involves
A whole hell of a lot of sabotage. And frankly, the folks who invented postmodernism were pretty straightforward about the fact that they were interested in sabotage. So it shouldn’t surprise us. But I mean even before that we were dealing with a chaotic collection of ideas that weren’t…
We left a lot of value on the table for no good reason. And so, one thing I would do is I would look at certain concepts that are just disproportionately important. I didn’t learn about Chesterton’s Fence until, I don’t know, 2016, maybe even later. Chesterton’s Fence is an incredibly important principle.
The precautionary principle is incredibly important. The relevance that these things have to the battle between, and I don’t even wanna say battle, the tension between conservatism and progressivism, which is a natural tension. I think, if you kill either of those things off, you end up in one disaster or another.
So understanding that just because you don’t know why some thing that we do is there doesn’t mean it’s actually pointless, and you damn well better keep track of what happens. If you decide something like the rules of interaction between the sexes, if you think, oh, that’s just prudishness, it’s oppressive,
Whatever force you wanna attribute it to, and we’re wiser than that. We know we’re just primates, and let’s just get over it and stop pretending sex is something other than it is. Okay, not that there’s no truth in that. There is some truth in it.
But when you get rid of all those rules, you invite a whole lot of chaos that you didn’t anticipate. And it is incumbent on you at least to track the consequences of the change and see how they match with what you thought was going to happen. If we had done that,
If we were comparing the world of 2023 with the world of 1960, we could say, oh, there are some things that are quite a bit better, and then there are a whole bunch of things that are a whole lot worse, and we could start looking at cause and effect
And say, actually, we could get the best of both of those worlds without paying the huge price we do by drawing a line here. – But is the inherent problem with that, is that that’s just not how humans organize or actually respond to things? So for example, you could say,
Like gay marriage to me was a completely just, obviously a completely just mission in that it was equality for people to live the way they wish. There probably should’ve been a discussion around it going, okay, well what’s gonna come after this then? And now this radical trans thing,
Which has nothing to do with equality and now is an assault on science and biology and blah, blah, that there should have… You’re basically asking for, well, can there be like a postmortem on the good things so we don’t let in the bad things? But it’s almost just not how humans operate, right?
We just look then for the next thing, and that, I guess, is the problem. – You’re right. This is exactly how we do things. – I get one a show. I get one a show. – No, you’re right on target. But notice this. We embrace stuff because we see some problem
That’s galling to us and we want solve it. That’s the progressive instinct. And so, we tear apart some rule that seems antiquated to us, and we notice that yeah, we’ve liberated ourselves in some way. And then, 20 years later, 30 years later, we discover, holy crap, we liberated ourselves in this way
And then we constrained ourselves in some other way. And we have to do a net analysis, and the carnage is tremendous if you did that. If you did it one thing at a time, it would be bad enough. The needless losses of doing it that way would be intolerable, in my opinion.
But when you do it on every front– – We’re doing it this way now, instead of occasionally moving up the ladder or something. – We are revolutionizing our civilization each decade, which means you don’t get time to even figure out what the consequences of the last change you made are
Before you’re somehow onto some next monumental change. There is no… I mean, anybody who has gotten good at let’s say, making a car run, knows you can’t do this. If you have a problem with a car, it’s not running, you change one thing at a time
And you figure out which thing causes it suddenly to run. Now you know what the problem is, you know what to do. If you say, well, you know, the car doesn’t run. It could be the starter, it could be the alternator, it could be the battery, it could be the wiring harnesses,
And you change them all and it still doesn’t run, you don’t know that you didn’t change the thing that was broken and introduce another thing that wasn’t working, and that it’s now not running for a whole new reason. You can’t do it that way. So one of the lessons here is,
The rebellion into conservatism is largely right because we’ve done a lot of foolish things and we’ve done it too fast and too many of them, but it cannot be allowed to silence the progressive instinct, because the way we got here is through progressivism. – What would be left
That the progressive instinct should be looking at then? – Interesting. I would say, like everyone else, I have seen a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that the story that we’ve been given on climate is not a true story. It doesn’t mean that there’s no problem, although that’s within the realm of possibility.
But that fact… – I veer more towards that at this point. ‘Cause I think we’ve been fed so much nonsense on so much that it’s just not, if I’m looking at my hierarchy of things I’m voting for and thinking about, it’s not in the top 10.
– You just said the thing though, which is, if you look at the kinds of bullshit we’ve been fed over a wide range of topics, this looks more like that. And the problem is, I guarantee you that the story of climate that we are being given is saturated with bullshit.
It can’t help but be saturated with bullshit. For one thing, it comes from an academic environment that we know what would happen to you if you discovered climate change wasn’t that big a deal and you tried to publish it, we know what would happen to you.
So that tells you, you can’t look at the stuff that’s coming out of that discipline and say, well, the science is pretty clear, because you didn’t see any science that went in the other direction. That’s one thing. But the problem is, the fact that somebody loaded that story with bullshit
Does not tell you what the baseline would look like if you took the bullshit away. I know I was promised that Kilimanjaro would be free of glaciers, I know that I was told Glacier National Park wouldn’t have them, I know I was told there’d be an ice free arctic,
And I know none of these things have happened. – And by the way, before that we were told about global cooling. – Absolutely, and I remember that. I remember that well. So one doesn’t want to miss a signal that something important is happening, and one doesn’t want to assume
That because some academic environment, especially one like the study of climate, which is so thoroughly based on models. Now, I’ve been saying forever, models are not a test of anything, they can’t be. The best they can do is they can generate hypothesis that you then need to test.
And we are using them as if they were a test of something, and we’re panicking ourselves, and we are threatening to upend our civilization over ideas that are probably just false. But you asked me what we would keep if we were interested in not just simply sidelining progressivism.
The top one on my list would be environmental concerns that are about stewardship of a planet which I feel we are morally required not to degrade. We have an obligation to give the next generation, and on into the future, a planet that is equivalent of the one that we were given.
– By the way, I think that’s a message that most conservatives hear. I mean, the word conserve is in there, and conserving the environment is part of that. I think there’s a twofold problem now. One is the river of bullshit that you just described, and then the second one is,
They’ve become so skeptical of government, the idea that even if they believed that the river of bullshit wasn’t a hundred feet of bullshit, that they’d still say, well, the government can’t do anything, and I’m extremely sympathetic to that argument. – Me too.
I mean, the fact is, the government is not on our side. It’s in the hands of people, I don’t know what they’re thinking. It looks to me like they’re destroying a planet that they need to live on also. But whatever it is that they’re thinking, they’re not wise people,
And I do not want to see them empowered with regulatory capacity. But it doesn’t mean that if we manage to make it through this bottleneck that we are facing, that the degradation of the planet is not a top priority. It really needs to be. And this is hard to convey…
If you have a cursory relationship with the natural world, if you like it, you visit it and it’s an aesthetic joy to you, but you do not, let’s say, return to the places that you went as a younger person and note the radical decrease in certain species.
If you don’t have that kind of longitudinal sense of what’s taking place, then you may not realize how rapidly we are degrading the place. And it’s not a hundred percent. We’ve done some… When I was a kid, I never saw a bald eagle. I see them all the time now.
I’ve seen them in the last two days here in Florida. I see them at home in the Pacific Northwest all the time. We rescued that animal from the brink of extinction, and you could say the same thing about sea otters, you could say it about elephant seals.
There’s no shortage of creatures that we’ve actually… Condors, I’ve actually seen them in the wild. This is incredible that we were able to do that. But each of those cases are things that we set about conserving intentionally and it was not a small effort.
And the number of cases that I could describe to you, just from my own experience, of creatures that I remember well that I haven’t seen in a very long time, that’s a longer list, and it says something about the rate at which these environments are actually coming apart.
– How worried are you that peoples’ brains will have so been blown apart by TikTok, and algorithms, and gender confusion, and neo racism, and the list goes on and on, that even if you sat here and gave me the one sheet, here are the solutions, we checked them, did everything you could,
That there’s not enough brain power left, that the next generation is just so blown apart in so many different ways that there just won’t be enough to fix this, that people don’t understand what freedom is, that they can watch mobs rampage through their cities and think the bad guys are good guys,
That everything is so upside down that the cavalry just ain’t coming? – Well, I think unfortunately, there’s more to that than I would like. But I also, in the heyday of what was called the IDW, we all stood on stages and watched hundreds or thousands of people cheer for rational discussion
Like they were looking at the Beatles. It was crazy that they were so enthusiastic. And I don’t think that they were there for the nuances of epistemology. I think they were there because they were cheering on rational people who cared and were willing to discuss the finer points of what mattered.
So I think we need to separate out the question of, are people going to understand the nuances of climate well enough to be able to spot rational policy? No, but our system was designed for them not to have to. The problem is really the capture of the system,
Which means that it’s not in the hands of people who actually represent the public. It’s in the hands of people who represent… Moneyed interest is probably an antiquated way of thinking about it, but rent-seeking elites who have hoarded power for themselves, for obvious reasons. If people heard folks who really represented their interests
And were interested in doing the heavy lifting of figuring out what’s true, even when it’s counterintuitive and doing the right thing, they would be enthusiastic for it. Because frankly, I think everyone is panicked over the fact that there seem to be no adults.
– I’m guessing you’re at least a bit of a sci-fi guy. – Yeah. – You must be. So I constantly am bringing up basically every Philip K. Dick book, and “The Matrix,” and “Terminator,” and Skynet’s gonna turn on. It’s sort of feels to me that we’re
Right before that scene in the movie right now, except, what’s different about us now is that we all know the books, and we all know the story. In all those movies, and in “I, Robot,” the robots become sentient and all these things, they have never really thought about it beforehand for some reason,
Or there’s a little bit of it in some Asimov books. But it’s like all of us, we’ve been warned about all these things forever. And it seems to me, we’re right at the moment where AI won’t need us, we’ll be the problem in the system
Instead of the solution to the system, and all that, but I don’t see a good way around it. – Well, forgive me, I don’t remember what we talked about in London well enough to know if I said this to you, but we are simultaneously facing the battle of, it’s not even our lives,
It’s clearly the battle for the future, whether or not we’re going to have one in some meaningful sense. It is that scene in the movie, and it is confusing because it isn’t even one movie. It seems to be all of them simultaneously. And we are facing…
It’s not aliens, AI is involved in some sense. I mean, I’m even talking in the pre-ChatGPT days, the algorithms, the fact that they were trying to accomplish something that was counterproductive from the point of view of humanity is clearly involved. So anyway, it is that moment,
And there are a couple of odd facts. One, yeah, we all read the books, or saw the movies. That’s not the same thing as– – But we still seem to careen towards it. – We seem to careen towards it because that’s not… We think that we are synonymous with our conscious minds.
That’s the thing that read the books and saw the movies. That’s not the thing that acts. The conscious mind has a limited role to play, and it’s the part of the mind that plays tennis that needs to understand the lessons of those books and movies and start acting,
And it can’t because it hasn’t been through the training course, the equivalent of what we do for special forces, where you know how to keep your fear in check at the point that you’re staring at a ferociously powerful enemy that presumably has access to every email you ever wrote.
So people need to steel themselves, and then they need to figure out who they are in those movies. I think they will feel better when they do. Because on the one hand, yes, they will end up calling attention to themselves in the eyes of whatever it is that we’re up against.
On the other hand, they will not be paralyzed by fear. And so anyway, I think people need to convert over into an action. – Do you think it’s possible that when we pulled that curtain back, that it actually is just the old washed up wizard and not the all-powerful Oz?
‘Cause that’s basically what you’re saying, that what people are afraid of is, if they saw what was on the other side, we’d be so cowed, or were imagining something that’s so scary that we’ll never pull it back. On the other hand, maybe the whole lesson was
That when you pull it back, there’s not much there? Wouldn’t that be nice? – Well, I think it’s going to be a mixture of things, because let’s take, and I know people are sick of talking about COVID, nobody more than me, but I think we need to talk about it because.
– The fact that you showed up here in a mask is still so frankly disturbing. – Yeah, a Fauci mask. – Yeah, exactly. – The lessons of COVI are profound. The most important lesson of COIVD is that, outgunned as we were, not understanding what this virus was,
What the treatments that they wanted us to take or the preventive measures they wanted us to take were, what the drugs that they seemed hell bent on preventing us from having access to were, without understanding the game, we outfoxed ’em and their narrative collapsed. People are now aware the shots were very dangerous.
There were drugs that worked that they were not allowed to access. There were contributing factors like vitamin D that were important, that people who claimed to be obsessed about their safety never bothered to tell them about. The virus didn’t come from bats in nature. It came through a route
That could easily have been prevented by wiser people. So how did people get wise to this in light of the fact that this thing owns every major broadcast network, every newspaper, every medical school, every university? Well, I don’t know. It happened on podcasts that shouldn’t have been possible,
And what that does suggest is that there’s a good bit of the shriveled old man behind the curtain, that as powerful as this force was, it wasn’t especially smart, it did not especially understand us. It is now, I swear, looking for a rematch. If you look at what it’s doing
In the World Health Organization, what it just did with the FCC, what it’s doing in Colorado with a new program to infect bats with dangerous human pathogens, it looks like it wants a rematch on every front. So it wants new rules that will prevent us from doing that next time. It’s leveling up.
We now need to level up. But were we to level up, here’s the good news that I know you’re asking me to tell you about, which is, forgive me for saying it this way, Goliath fucked up, and Goliath took every intelligent, courageous person with integrity and shoved them all onto our team simultaneously.
So we don’t have the technology, we don’t have any of the materials that one would want to fight this battle, but we have absolutely every player that you would want. So we outfoxed him once. We need to level up. We cannot assume that what we did last time
Is going to work in the same form. It will not, because Goliath is very stupid when he sees something new, but he learns, and he’s learning. So we need to go after him with an improved game plan. And if we do, my sense is, actually, we can stay ahead of him.
– It’s interesting, ’cause you said, one of the big problems is how atheism crept in over the last 30 years, or whatever it is, and then the way you just described that was actually kind of biblical, because you’re talking about David versus Goliath. And I wonder if you think, as a biologist
Who is largely a secular person. You’re Jewish. I think Heather is Catholic, or is Heather Christian? – Her father was Catholic. – Father was Catholic. I only mention that because I think that something weird is going on with a little bit of the code as it relates to the Jews,
As I’m seeing a whole bunch of Jews more into religion over the last two months, and into the traditions, and some of that stuff that you were asking people not to throw away before. – Yeah, let’s just put it this way, this is not new with me. I freely use these metaphors
Because I think they’re fundamentally important. And interestingly, you heard me say Goliath, I didn’t say David because there’s a literal version of this story that probably did happen. David was not the killer of Goliath. Goliath was probably a pituitary tumor giant, and he was killed by a guy named Elhanan,
And those who wrote the Bible composited characters because David needed an origin story. But anyway, the point is, I don’t expect anybody else to do this. I think it’s cool if you can, and think it’s worthwhile. But I don’t have to resort to anything supernatural
In order to maintain contact with those biblical stories and what it is that they’re trying to tell us. They do need an update. Goliath is not an individual anymore. Clearly, David or Elhanan is not going to be an individual either. – Right, it’s gonna take more than a slingshot,
’cause this thing has a lot of firewalls. – Right. But again, the real lesson of COVID is that when we got our bearings, we ended up remarkably powerful relative to this force that had us so thoroughly outgunned. – Well, that’s why I mentioned the religious part, because I’m starting to think
That survival is baked into the code, too. The oppression is baked into the code, and then the survival part is then always baked into the code, too. – Yes, and then there’s one other element. – Uh-oh. – No, it’s a good one. I think. I honestly believe that the thing I’m calling Goliath,
The force that opposes meaningful change, does not understand and therefore, does not anticipate the action of people who have courage and integrity and insight. It can’t fathom them, because it’s not built of that kind of stuff. And so, it keeps misjudging what we’ll do, what will cause us to back down.
And as long as it keeps misjudging that, then we have a lot of room to maneuver. – It’s interesting, because that’s why I talk about Elon as much as I do on the show. Because I think if you would’ve said to Elon 10 years ago,
You’d own Twitter, you’d be in this free speech fight, you’d have the ADL calling you an anti-Semite, the list of craziness that everyone now knows, I think he’d say, “What are you talking about? That’s completely insane. I’m trying to get us to Mars. I’m building this cool car, blah, blah, blah.”
But he, I think, is the avatar for what you’re talking about there, the brave person that like doesn’t know exactly what they’re going towards, something like that, but then he’s like, I better buy this freaking Twitter thing because I see all the danger, much like a professor that’s like,
Oh, I’m gonna be hunted off campus because I’m gonna not bow, and the rest of it. – All right, well, I’m gonna take a risk, because I think frankly, time is short. I think you’re right about Elon. I don’t know for sure that you are,
But I think you’re right about what he’s trying to do, and how he ended up there, and how it would surprise him. I had a meeting with him. I flew to San Francisco and I had a meeting with him, and he said it had been a very good meeting
And he wanted to meet again. A series of events unfolded over the course of the next 24 hours. My Twitter account got commandeered. Maybe that was organic, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t think, I know Elon had nothing to do with it. But anyway, I reached out to him
And tried to alert him to this because I was concerned that he and I had private communications and he didn’t want. I don’t think there was anything compromising in them, but he didn’t want them in the world, and he needed to know that this was there. And he ended up blocking me
After having this meeting, and I remain blocked. Now, the reason I raise it is because there’s a defect in all of those players that I mentioned who have all been shoved onto the same team. They have some incredible strengths. And I have to tell you, there’s been a lot of
Pain inflicted on us for standing up. But the comradery, the discovery of people who were up to the challenge, their coming together as a coalition has been extremely rewarding and dwarfs any suffering that might have come along with this. – It sounds kind of corny, but I mean,
Those three days, or whatever it was, we had at ARC, to see everybody together again and all be like, we’re still alive, we’re still here. – It’s powerful. The problem is that all of those people who have the characteristics that I listed, that are courageous, that are insightful
And that have integrity, they tend, they have a lot of lone-wolfness in them, which means that they have a defect, they’re terrible at confederating. And my concern is, I’m watching Elon. Now, maybe Elon isn’t what he appears to be, but to my way of thinking, he probably is.
I think he’s got a desire to save the planet. It happens to be a moment at which saving the planet is not a ridiculous thing to be focused on. – Right, and he happens to be kind of the guy that can do it, it’s kinda like that.
– If anybody’s got fuck-you money, he does, and that’s exactly what you would want. And he also is very insightful. I see him as very strategically clever. But I don’t think he’s any good at confederating either. And my little story where he blocked me, it’s like, look,
Hey Elon, there aren’t that many people out here trying to advance the ball who have something meaningful to contribute to the team. We have to stop tripping over each other. – So maybe I feel like I’m missing a tiny piece of this story, which is, what do you think he blocked you over?
Not to totally sidestep us here, but I also can get access to him, probably. – Well, let’s put it this way. What happened was… So I believe that DarkHorse, that Heather and I have faced a whole bunch of suppression that has not yet shown up anywhere. The Twitter files doesn’t–
– That’s the podcast that you guys do. – Right, that’s our podcast. And there’s a reason that we still, we are demonetized to this day. YouTube demonetized us. I believe they were gonna throw us off. Joe Rogan held an emergency podcast and YouTube hasn’t messed with us since, but they didn’t re-monetize us
And it got rid of more than half our income in one fell swoop. Anyway, the point is, there has been a lot… And we know actually that that decision happened in the C-suite at Google. So whatever’s going on, there was a lot of direct interference with us. Why?
Because a lot of what happened over COVID went through DarkHorse, and the reason was, Heather and I are both PhD biologists who, what we were doing before, frankly May 23rd of 2017, shortly thereafter, I showed up on your podcast, first major venue I was on, what we were doing before that date
Was we were taking complex phenomena and making them simple and intuitive so students could learn and use these ideas. When we started to do that with COVID, when we started to take it out of the realm of here’s a bunch of stuff you can’t understand
And leave it to the virologists, and the epidemiologists, and the public health authorities, and the answer was no, actually, you can understand it, and some of which you’re being told isn’t right. When we started to do that, and then we started to interact with people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough,
Peter Corey, and then those people went on to affect a huge audience, largely on Joe Rogan’s program, that changed the narrative. And so, I think something has meddled with us in a unique way because frankly, there weren’t that many people who could bridge the scientific to public.
– Sure, but connect that to Elon blocking you. Because on one hand, I think you’re saying he’s the good guy in this story. So I think there’s one missing piece. – Here’s the connection. When I contacted Elon after my account was commandeered, I was trying to point him to things about my account
That does not behave normally. And incidentally, in the conversation that I had with him. – I was unfollowed from you right before that, remember? I contacted you and texted you and said, hey, Brett. You were one of the first four people I ever followed on there.
– So that’s interesting, it could mean something. I’m not sure what it means. But I was trying to convey something to him, which is, I think when you, as you know, because you talked to Elon about the things he was discovering inside of the crime scene that he bought,
And one of the things that he discovered was that there were lots of mechanisms that caused things to be de-boosted that weren’t labeled as such. And so, he kept finding more and more levels. And I was trying to convey to him, look, I think you will find something special
When you figure out what happened to us. Now, maybe that’s wrong. But I wasn’t talking to him privately about this for personal selfish reasons, though I would love the problem to have been solved for those reasons. – Sure, of course. – I was telling him that because I believed
That in his quest to make Twitter into the new public square in which, right. – Ah. – That he would discover those things at the point he chased this down. So he then blocked me, saying, “Stop spamming me,” which was a very strange thing for him to say
In light of the conversation that he and I had had. – A lot there, a lot there. I’d be happy to talk to him about that. – Well, maybe he’ll… – Maybe we can send him this clip, or I’ll message him. – But let’s put it this way.
Let’s say that I’ve got it all wrong. – But is your fear, it’s not that you were spamming him by blowing up his feed, what you’re really saying, in essence, is that you were a little too ahead of something in the game at which the speed is played
That he may not want to be involved in that just yet. Something like that? – No, no. Well, that’s possible. If I take everything at face value. I was trying to tell him something about the machine that he bought, and I’m taking him at his word as to why he bought it,
What he wanted to accomplish. I was trying to help him in that, and it involved things that I can see in my account, and he told me that one of the things that was true before he bought Twitter, he had the most engaged with account, and that he could feel
That the way the account worked was unnatural. So I’m reporting something that he had experienced personally in his own life. It is possible that he took my messages to him as my thinking that he was customer service or something, and that that frustrated him, which I would get.
But my point is really this. No matter what happened there, the idea that people who are interested, who are aware for example, of the importance of even a single social media platform functioning in a free and open way with respect to ideas. On DarkHorse we have the phrase, zero is a special number.
What that means is, if you can turn a single social media platform, a single newspaper or a single university so that it functions towards its stated goal, you actually stand a chance of fixing the system. Because if there’s one social media platform on which you’re treated like an adult
And you can exchange ideas freely and discuss them back and forth, nobody’s gonna wanna be on the ones in which you’re treated like a child. – So in essence, that’s why he’s hated the way he is at the moment, or why the system reacts to it. That’s separate than whatever
May or may not have happened with you guys. – It’s why he’s in the bullseye. But I guess the point is, if we are talking about the fact that what he is doing stands to change the whole system, for deep game theoretic reasons that,
As far as I know, we’re the only people talking about, then it doesn’t make sense for us to be tripping over each other. Even if I misread the signals that were going on in my discussion with him, then the answer is, okay, so you said, hey stop spamming me. Message received.
It didn’t need to become a. This was the block actually before Elon even started talking about the fact that blocks were no good. – So without making it so specifically about you guys, since we just don’t know the answer to that. – We just don’t know. – Yeah, I get it.
You don’t know either. And I will ask him about this, and I’ll send him this clip. Like why not? Let’s see what happens. Hopefully I don’t get blocked. I don’t think I will, but you never know. – But who knows? – But do you think there’s probably a biological answer
For that too, in terms of how we all operate. Meaning that he’s in a complex system now, the system’s attacking him, he’s getting some sort signal boost from other good forces within the system, but he can only be boosted so far because he can only do so much at once.
So you sometimes wanna put blinders on for some of the other stuff. – Well, this is what I was saying about the lone-wolfness. For all of us who got into some interesting position in this battle because we were independent enough of the institutions that we were part of
That when they went crazy, we refused, something like that, there probably is a built-in circuit that says, don’t affiliate with things that are too complex ’cause you don’t know what’s buried in there. And what it means is, how do you create the pack of lone wolves.
A lone wolf is the opposite of a pack. At the point that the lone wolves are the only ones standing and they need to become a pack, the answer is, they’ve gotta now resort to a skillset that they pretty obviously don’t have. So they have to bootstrap it.
And I guess that’s what I’m saying, is this is the moment at which all of us who have found ourselves ejected and singled out and remain standing have to figure out how to do the thing that we don’t know how to do. And it’s not surprising that that is going to involve
A lot of missteps, and it’s going to involve practicing, and it is gonna involve us. I mean, there are people who do this very naturally. They just, or they’re not here. – Right, right, right. Bring everybody into the fold and figure out some of.
I think I was trying, maybe a little more than some of us, to do some of that. Obviously it didn’t fully work, and I don’t mean that as a pat on my back. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and whatever. But do you think it’s possible that this is,
What you’re asking for at the public layer of people, is exactly what everyone needs at the private layer of people, meaning? What you just said to me is what every single person actually needs, not just the crazy hundred of us who are yapping on online. – Well, two things.
One, I do think you deserve a pat on the back. You were doing unique things. When you used to take various ones of us up on stage with you for some hybrid between comedy and political discussion, that was actually bridge crossing stuff, and it was really cool, I think about it a lot.
I learned a lot in those few interactions. – The ones with you actually in some ways were the most fun, because you really considered yourself a man of the left at the time and were very proudly saying it, and I was the lead-the-left guy, and my audience, as you would always point out,
You’d always say to me, “Dave, your audience is more conservative than you.” So here we have tried and true conservatives coming to see me, certainly not a traditional conservative, bringing on you, a lefty, and we’d get standing ovations every time. I mean, it really was something. – It was great.
– So I guess I’ll pat myself on the back for that. – I think you should. But I also think there are many… This is now me pretending to be older than I am and trying to pass on some wisdom. There are many things in life that you don’t understand
How long the trajectory actually is, like healing. I had an ACL injury, a tear, and it was repaired, and there was definitely a one-year healing, but there was also a five-year healing and a 10-year healing process. I literally have to think carefully to remember which leg it was at this point.
– You don’t have a tore an ACL right now? – No. – I have no ACL. It tore about five years ago, I never did anything, and now it’s gone altogether. And yet, I’m playing basketball tonight ’cause of PRP, and three braces. – Three braces?
– I wrap it, I got the sleeve and the metal thing. I mean, it’s like I’m like a transformer out there. – Well, I have it on the inside, and I’ve now forgotten. – And now you forgot. It’s a beautiful thing. – But the point is,
If you checked in along a 10-year trajectory, you would find that actually there was important stuff in that process going on the whole time. So what you were doing, and what we were all doing. IDW doesn’t exist, but it was a very important stage
In something that I think doesn’t have a name at the moment. What you were doing was somehow a prototype of what you are doing, and I think there’s meaningful progress if you look across that whole arc. And anyway, I appreciate it, and I think it’s important stuff. So, keep it up.
– I should probably end right there, but I’m not going to. That would be an interesting ending to this. It’s interesting, because on some hand, you strike me suddenly as you’re very, you seem more of a realist than ever at the moment, or something? I can’t quite tell if you’re, not depressed,
If you’re dejected about the direction, or I sense also a determination in you that like, but we will beat this thing. – Couple things. I think what happened when you and I met, we met as I was dragged center stage in the woke revolution, or fighting the woke revolution, fighting against it,
That was not my first rodeo, which I think probably had a lot to do with why I was successful in that. That was chapters ago. We’re now onto the post-COVID chapter. I cannot emphasize enough how important each of these major events is in building a model of what these fights are about,
What tools are useful in conducting yourself during them, what the enemy is like, and then in these cases, the enemy is, there are overlaps. But I’ve now seen enough that I know this doesn’t get better if we don’t fix it. I’m deeply embedded in the complex systems aspect of this,
Enough to know that… I’m 54, I have two kids. If we don’t fix this, then maybe my kids find a way to live out their lives in some decent form. Maybe they find mates and produce offspring and they find some way to protect those offspring for their lives.
But it’s not a good story if we don’t fix it. And so, I guess I have just… The thing spends a lot of time trying to spook us about what’s gonna happen if we stand up to it, and I’m not sure that it’s bluffing, but what else is there?
– Well, that’s what it is, I suppose. So when you look behind the curtain, it might be the all powerful Oz, it might be a shriveled up old used car salesman, might be something in between. Either way, you gotta give it your best go, I guess, is the point, right?
That would be the point of humanity. What’s the choice? So you find out you’re wrong. Okay, you did everything you could. That’s still pretty decent. – I mean, it goes back to your point about those novels and those movies, because we all understand so deeply who we’re rooting for. It’s not ambiguous.
We know who we’re rooting for, we know what we want them to do. And then when we find ourselves in the position where it’s us having to make those choices, the point is, well, you know what you’re supposed to do ’cause you saw the movie.
– If Neo had put the thing back in his head, then you would be like, all right, I’m not so into this. – That’s why they gave us Cypher. Cipher is the cautionary tale. And so, at some level, the point is, look. – He just wanted that steak.
– It’s not gonna be the Hollywood version, it’s not gonna look like Neo, it’s not gonna involve the fancy battle where you’re dodging the bullets in the slowmo and all that. That’s not what it is. But to the extent that the Matrix is Plato’s Cave revisited for a generation that needed an update,
The point is that what must happen is still clear. The non-Hollywoodness of the story can’t dissuade you. I guess I’m hoping that people will realize that they’re not gonna feel just totally at ease when they confront their fears over standing up and what happens if you do.
In fact, they will spend a lot of time wondering what comes next. But there is a part of them that is not settled watching this happen and not standing up that will just simply realize that it doesn’t have a lot of choice and it doesn’t want a lot of choice.
You’re facing an epic battle that isn’t even just for western civilization. We are literally talking about the future of the human race, and whether there will be one. So if that doesn’t get you to stand up and face the enemy, irrespective of what it is. If the enemy is all powerful
And it’s gonna destroy those of us who stand up, then the point is, what that will do is it will destroy everyone else shortly thereafter. So you’re not saving yourself that much. – You still have no choice. – You might as well face the thing. And the lesson of, frankly, the woke revolution,
And COVID, and much else, is that actually you might be surprised that you end up on the winning team and that feels pretty good. So I think it’s just time. – That is the ending. If you’re looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop screaming,
Check out our politics playlist, and if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. And to get notified of all future videos, be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell.
