#1055 - Bret Weinstein

Dec 19, 2017

Bret Weinstein was a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Sign up for a free crash course on Evolutionary Thinking at http://bretweinstein.net/early

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hey everybody happy New Years is coming up is it going to be a happy New Year are you sure I listened with that kind of fucking attitude it probably won't be listen we're gonna be okay and we're going to celebrate New Years Eve at The Wiltern in Los Angeles two shows with the Great and Powerful Ian Edwards and me if you've never seen Ian he's one of the best stand-up comics alive go to Joe Rogan dotnet forward slash tour for details a bunch of dates coming up all over the place I'm coming to New Orleans

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forward slash Rogan ha ha my guest today is the great Brett Weinstein not to be confused with Weinstein and I have fucked that up more than once we explain who bread is early in the podcast I don't have to explain it right now but he's brilliant very very interesting guy and I'm honored to have him on please welcome

Bret Weinstein

The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day

boom and we're live how are you I'm a man doing are a lot of stuff is going on a lot of stuff a lot of sense Your settlement Jamie and I were hoping that you would come in with one of those Paul Wall grills like diamonds on it and maybe some Furs yeah but a Cadillac unfortunately it's enough money to make a difference but it's not enough money to do no longer have to think about such things so yeah you can temporarily ball though if you were irresponsible and you didn't have a family if I didn't have a family you get

crazy for a couple months yeah nah as it happens it gives us room to think about how to replace our incomes we have about two years at our current rate of burning to keep the family yeah for some people just so this is a standalone podcast a people can kind of what you need to do if you're really interested in this really interested is Google Bret Weinstein and you will get the full story from beginning to end with Evergreen State College

I'll just give you the short version of it there was a bunch of what you would kindly call social active people social justice Warriors people who there's there's a movement going on in this country and it's very aggressive and one of the things that they wanted to do is they wanted to have a day where all white people stayed home you thought that was racist they thought you were racist for saying that was racist and

they decided to literally take over the college for a short period of time the dust settled you just got a big fat settlement you're out of there and so and then the woman who is kind of at the head of it she got a nice little chunk of change to which I thought was quite odd yeah the college settled with her even though it was quite clear she had no legal case so there's a bit of a mystery about why they would have paid her to resign when in fact they could have just stood their ground she could have probably become the

another College of she wanted to the way that guy had responded to the students when they told him to put his hands down because he was being threatening and then he put his hands away he's chocking them and using hand gestures know like put your hands down you're threatening us with microaggressions puts his hands down they all started laughing which just tells you everything about what their intent was what was really going on there and I but after I saw that and my God she could have in the president I should have just had her be president the whole thing's it's it was

as a kangaroo court was mockery the whole thing was absurd I will say I've it's very hard to get the story right in any sort of short synopsis and So for anybody who really wants it's not even complete but Heather and I my wife Heather was also a professor at Evergreen and we wrote a more complete version of the story that allows people to see how the internal politics of the college played out into what they ultimately saw on YouTube so that's in the Washington examiner last

Tuesday I read that yeah it's deeply disturbing it's but it's not if you've been paying attention and you know you and I and Jordan Peterson and spoil a bunch of people have tried to figure out what's going on today like why has this movement become so aggressive and so not just aggressive but observed it's not they're not it's not logical like the way they're approaching things as from this very strange

old and just oddly fanatical way you want to be careful not to mix what they say with what they're actually up to because what they say is very confusing it can't be parsed logically there's so many contradictions so close to the surface that one has the sense that they are deeply confused and some of them are but there is also a strategic movement under the surface which we can't listen in to directly and it is more sophisticated than we

I think in other words it is managing to wield power in spite of the fact that it's explanation for why it is entitled to wield power doesn't make any sense what so what do you think the underlying motivation and it's like what is there or there at least their underlying plan I would say we have to be careful there are a lot of people who go along with it who I would argue are tools of the movement and they are doing its bidding without understanding the objective but the prime movers are quite clearly interested in

taking power they want Power they have a superficial rationalization for why they are entitled to power and they are wielding weaponized stigma as a mechanism for gaining it so you said that Naima could have become the president of the college I don't know whether she could have it would have been a very unusual path but I do know that for more than a year I watched people unable to resist anything she said even people who

better wood in faculty meetings they would reflexively thank her for anything she said no matter how absurd it was and that was clearly as sort of you know it's the equivalent of wolves bearing their jugular it was don't hurt me I'm with you don't hurt me and so that kind of power is something that a person who is cynical enough to two-wheeled stigma to get it might covet and so anyway I think there's a small number of people

who really do know what they're doing and their point is we can wipe many of the obstacles to our having power off the map by throwing accusations at them that they cannot resist yeah the big accusation is racism that that's always the big one that's one that you never want to have thrown your way if you are deemed a racist it's like it's akin to being deemed a rapist even if it's a false charge like boy most people are going to

you're the first statement before they ever look into the the possibility you've been exonerated it's you you being called a racist is a very very dangerous thing in today's society it's a very dangerous thing I do think it's important that we not do their bidding by inflating that danger beyond what it actually is so I do we will never know for sure what the trajectory would have been absent what happened at Evergreen but I do think standing up to the Mob at

Evergreen and just saying frankly no I'm not a racist your well here's what's really important for people don't know you you are a very Progressive guy you're you're very left-wing very left-leaning you're not in any way shape or form a conservative so this like this is this is the left eating itself it is the left eating itself but I was also in the lucky position of being able to

imagine what was going to happen when that accusation broke and knowing that there were so many people who knew that that couldn't possibly be right about me that I was going to survive it and it's not as if there aren't huge numbers of people who still to this day apparently believe I'm a racist in spite of the fact that nothing has emerged in all of the time with all of the incentive for somebody to bring something forward that would suggest that I have an issue with rice somewhere in my history it never emerged and so people

you need to understand that it is possible to survive that accusation well especially with your background though I'm running people don't know your background was it at Yale that you had pain pain yeah to tell that story she could sure I'll do the quick and dirty version Cliff Notes I was a freshman at Penn I friend of mine was rushing a fraternity and that fraternity was

in what they called a mystery event and I wasn't rushing a fraternity I wasn't interested but he convinced me that I didn't have anything to do that night and that I should go with them and I did and after some relatively standard fraternity Shenanigans the event turned into one in which the fraternity had hired prostitutes black prostitutes from the local environment and the situation pain is in a pretty rough neighborhood

this was a pretty wealthy Jewish frat and so there was you know something pretty unsettling about a wealthy Jewish frat hiring black prostitutes from the local neighborhood to engage in what it started out to be a striptease as this thing began to unfold and I realized I didn't have any interest in being part of this event I made one of the bigger mistakes of my life and I left the event but when my friend and other members of the fraternity rolled into the dorm that night and

told me what happened I was absolutely appalled because what had happened was the fraternity had enacted a mock rape of these prostitutes using cucumbers and ketchup and the idea that there was anything acceptable about a you know an organization that had special privileges on the campus behaving this way I couldn't get past it and so anyway I went to the paper

and various things unfolded the paper botched the story and made it look like I was troubled by the fact that there were strippers rather than troubled by what actually had ended up happening and I ended up writing an editorial for the for the paper and all hell broke loose there you know I got death threats the police started tracking phone numbers on my phone to see who was threatening me ultimately there was a trial of the fraternity the college did not want to put the return

He on trial But ultimately public pressure forced them to do it I testified at the trial although since I hadn't seen the thing directly what I could say was limited but while I was in the witness room with the other Witnesses people who had rushed the fraternity but had not pledged at the fraternity Brothers including I believe the president came into the witness room and started bullying these Witnesses and coaching them on what they should say in front of this this University panel anyway ultimately the

the University was at the University through the Frat off campus for a year forbid them from pledging a class and anyway there's a lot more to the story I got an award from the National Organization for Women actually for I forgot their terminology but for basically for standing up for for women who needed to be defended or something like that you said you made the biggest mistake one of the biggest mistakes your life by leaving me

meaning that if you were there you could probably stopped it or you could at least have known exactly what was going on there's no way I could have stopped it right but I left because I didn't want to be party to this event but sometimes I think you know journalists know this I was you know freshman in college so I didn't know it yet but journalist understand that sometimes something horrifying happens and the job that you are best positioned to do is documenting it so that the world can understand how

such things occur and do something about it and if I had understood that that was probably my highest and best use at that moment I would have stuck around and paid attention to what had happened rather than having to go through convincing the world that something had happened which I had not directly seen yeah but how could you have known there's no I don't think you should be hard on yourself at all you're 18 right exactly how could you have known and how could you have known even if you were 30 how could you have know what was going to

happened it looked like prostitutes you like that don't want to be here see ya exactly you didn't know there was gonna be a mock rape right I couldn't have known but in any case in retrospect it was a mistake it's it's so crazy that they let groups of kids live in a house together and get hammered when they don't even have their frontal cortex develop yet managed all living together feeding off of each other you have mob mentality all this diffusion of responsibility because you have a large group of people that's also like you and everybody's it's so bananas

has that that is few incidents happen as they do I mean you would think that those things would just be chaos the moment you opened up the door to every frat house yeah and you know there's more chaos than we know because a lot of what takes place we don't we don't find out about but it's a shame because one could take the thing that drives people into those organizations and one could use it to power something that was useful and interesting yeah and you know really was deeply enriching and I know they're you know how much flak am I going

like for giving the fraternity system a hard time on your podcast but plenty of people will tell me how enriching their fraternity experience was and you know even at Penn there were a couple fraternities that were I was as you can imagine hated throughout the fraternity system at pain after I had come forward but there were two fraternities that actually didn't hate me and we're welcoming even in that climate so I don't want to portray them as a monolith they're not but but it

does seem like a wasted opportunity that that kind of energy that goes into fraternity life could be directed to something really amazing and it's a shame that it doesn't happen more often well I'm sure there's a lot of great camaraderie and it's probably a lot of fun to go through that experience together with people that are your same age you're actually living in a house together but just manage probably have some fucking adults in that room something like that it's just seems like it just seems like you know just to limit your liability yep right we'll have to have a few 35

girls running around going hey what are you doing over there Mike about that light the whole place on fire don't do that you won't be able to put that out yep yeah I don't like that one on fire yeah just I don't know just crazy so that's your safe your situation so anybody that would think of you as a conservative or a racist it's like it's clearly the evidence points to the contrary well I you know this issue of conservatism is one that I would like to also get right and

I'm not sure I ever say this in a way that people know what I'm talking about but I'm I'm very Progressive but I'm very Progressive because I live in a world that's really screwed up and so the idea that we have to make some progress seems just transparently correct me I would like to live in a world that is so well structured that I could be a conservative in it and I don't mean a conservative in the sense the ideological sense I mean I would like to be in a world where tinkering with it stood a better chance of making it worse and was on

necessary and so that that would that would turn me into a conservative because it would be the right thing to be and proper analysis would tell you this is the time to conserve the structure rather than change it but in this world yeah I it turns out I'm a progressive and the events that people keep telling me that they are sure I'm now a closet conservative that the what I faced must have turned me against the left and that's not at all what happened yeah I agree with you I've

face that myself the people say oh you know you're going to turn more conservative with all this no I'm just more resentful of these this fake Progressive Movement that like you said has ulterior motives there's there's more to it there's it's and it's not it's not accurate like the the portrayals of humans in these movements are not accurate it's not so I don't think it's healthy I don't think it's normal and I think there's a lot of that like the kid

I'm of capitalism is a very confusing one and there's certainly certainly is very evil aspects to it right but the idea that the the answer is Marxism seems to me to be just as just as poorly thought out oh it's it it's at least as poorly at least you know Marxism the flaw is more obvious I think the flaw is what we in biology would call group selection the belief that if we just all right

oh in the same direction will get somewhere marvelous and that's true that if we did all Row in the some same direction we would but there's a very good game theoretic reason that that can't be yeah that as soon as you have everybody rowing in the same direction then the win goes to the person who figures out how not to row and gets the benefit of everybody else's rowing in that direction while they sweep in the profits and so that tears apart anything structured the way communism is structured yeah that and that's conveniently ignored I think I'd really have always believed the

his good and it's because I've been involved in competition my whole life and I think it's it it helps you understand yourself you're competing against other people but ultimately you're really competing against yourself because you're trying to better yourself and I believe that that's the argument for getting children involved in athletics or games or something that's very difficult to do whether it's chess or pool or something I think things that are hard to do are good for you competing is good for you because it teaches you about focus and

Alan and understanding that there's you can reap the rewards of hard work and you know obviously this can get distorted and you can get these you know billionaire oligarchs who you know control vast amounts of wealth and then they have their family and everyone inherits it and you have these fucking mutants that are all inbred and they're all in the same bloodline mean that's that's history right mean that has taken place but I think that

we should work very hard for equality of opportunity I think it quality of opportunity give everybody a chance to play a game everybody a chance to get into something and and try to better themselves with some Endeavor and Summit but whenever I hear equality of outcome that's when I put my foot down I'm like that doesn't it that's not real you can't say that because some people work harder and if you have true equality you're never going to have equality of outcome

is true equality is I have friends that are brilliant that are fantastic human beings but they're essentially Beach Bums you know they did slight kick back and relax and do the minimal amount of work get things done and just enjoy life have a couple cocktails go to the beach have laughs with friends that's what they like to do and then I have other friends that want to be you know World Martial Arts Champions and that's you know you you've two different kinds of lives to

current things to different types of human beings that style of human one person is going to be extremely satisfied with one life and extremely dissatisfied with the other life and you can interchange them back and forth well you said a bunch of things we could spend three hours unpacking what you just said let's say a number of things one equality of opportunity is something I have yet to find the reasonable person that does not agree on this point in principle lots of people will tell you it's not worth the effort

trying to pursue it because of the danger of what happens if you do but nobody disagrees nobody reasonable disagrees that it would be desirable to have that equality of outcome it's impossible if you pursue it you end up with a dystopia and even if it were possible it would not be desirable for the reasons you point to about the benefits of what you're calling competition and I would want to tear competition into a couple different values there's

ooh competition against yourself you know you your skiing down the slope and you're paying attention to how you're doing and you're trying to do it better than you've done it before right there's competition against others and the thing that unites those two things is that the what you are trying to accomplish is real 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

given to you by somebody and there's a tremendous danger in a socially mediated World in which those who are successful are successful because some social thing has told them that they are correct because you can be dead wrong seem correct and move ahead in a social World whereas if you're doing carpentry if you're in some sort of competition the nature of the Beast is one that will tell you when you've got it wrong and therefore it will allow you to actually improve your Insight

in whatever form you have it so I'm a tremendous fan of the idea that even if your world is largely socially mediated you have to make sure that some part of it isn't and you are confronting something real enough to tell you when you're confused so that you can learn how not to be confused but there are people in this world that do want to push towards an equality of outcome yes and they make it sound as if this is not just logical but ethical and possible and the

her and that you are on the wrong side of History if you if you think that capitalism and competition and all these things you just talked about are good and that really the best thing is to force people to become some sort of utopian creature that works together in unison and and everybody is egalitarian and there's no need for feminism and men's rights activists because everybody looks at everyone as an equal well there are two kinds of people who will advocate for equality of

outcome one kind of person who will is confused they don't understand what happens if you go down this road and the other one is cynical and they're using this as an excuse to justify something that just so happens to reward them but equality of opportunity isn't this way it solves all of those problems nobody believes that you're going to have it ever realized in a perfect form there's always going to be bad luck that's going to reduce somebody's opportunity what you don't want is any systematic

in luck in other words we're all going to suffer some bad luck and we'll all have some good luck and some of those things will actually shape the trajectory of Our Lives which you don't want is some population that just so happens to suffer more than its share of bad luck which is what we have now right so there is there is something to pursue here but we're so busy on this other pointless conversation about equality of outcome that we can't we can't get back to the thing that we all agree on that's actually the right goal and there's also some

round chatter that you'll get from the less less thought out where the people are really just upset that other people have more and so this is an uneducated not very well thought out perspective on equality of outcome they just are upset that someone else has something and they're trying to somehow or another diminish the effect of their hard work and get something for themselves well you can imagine though

so maybe we take a little digression here my experience over the last six months has done a bunch of things in my life one of them is it has put me in touch with quite a number of black conservatives which I must tell you this it has changed my understanding of the world substantially because I used to I knew there were black conservatives and I always thought are they confused are they not understanding which side they should be on and that is not that is not what's going on what is going on is that

if there is a dialogue which I couldn't hear at least which looks at the world you can view the unfairness in the world two different ways you can look at it you can say well there's structural unfairness in the world and the cards that we in this community are dealt are not fair we're not getting our share of the good cards or you can look at the world from the point of view of personal responsibility and you can say well it's kind of an academic question whether the cards you got were Fair

you should play them as best you can give them what they are your the thing that I didn't get was one has almost no ability to address the question of how the cards are dealt it's just not in it's not in the range of somebody an individual who discovers that the cards are unfairly dealt can't do very much about that fact but that individual can do a hell of a lot about their own position in the world by recognizing that actually you especially if the cards

unfairly dealt you need to play them very well and that developing the skill to play them well has the ability to overcome at least some of the unfairness and how they're dealt and so I have now listened in on this conversation been invited into the conversation amongst some of these black conservatives and this is what they are really saying is that there is from the point of view of where to put one's efforts dealing on the personal responsibility side pays back better which I don't think

freeze Us in Civilization from addressing the question of how the cards are dealt I think we should be focused on it but anyway it more or less solved the mystery in a way that I thought was was quite fascinating and you know I'm I'm heartened that they were willing to invite me into that conversation so I could hear it and finally figure out what was what was going on so they Advocate towards discipline and personal responsibility as being core tenants that you should reinforce right and they are very sensitive to the issue of what

happens when you focus on the unfairness of how the cards are dealt which is that you know what what progressives typically Miss is that it really does create a culture of dependency if you focus on the fact that the cards are unfairly dealt and that that's why you're facing a disadvantage which is largely true nonetheless it demotivates you from pursuing success because you you recognize that you're starting at a disadvantage and that you know you're unlikely to win the game on the other hand the game isn't what

we think you know if you can make progress and deliver your kids a head start relative to where you were that's a win in the game so anyway I again I don't want to trivialize any part of this I think the unfairness of the way the cards are dealt is really important and we have obligations to address it but from the point of view of individuals within a community trying to plot a course being focused on the personal responsibility side makes a ton of sense what are you thoughts on affirmative action I've changed my tune

I used to be for affirmative action because it is Justified but now the the downsides of it are they Loom very large for me and so what I would say is we want to separate the whether or not it is Justified to engage in some kind of intentional intervention to fix a problem that has become chronic and then we separate that from what it is that we are advocating and I don't think the substitute for it is

something that anybody has properly spelled out but but let's just say I would be much more inclined to see a substantial investment in community that makes sense rather than it applied at the individual level because I will say before any of what happened to me at Evergreen happened I did have the experience of having quite a number of black students in particular who suffered a totally

a stigma that had nothing to do with them students who did very well on their own merits who lived in a world that was quick to judge them as having succeeded based on some advantage that for all I know they didn't even have I don't know that any of this I mean you know in the role of Professor you don't necessarily know how your student ends up in front of you but I had no reason I had some very bright students who I think suffered a stigma that came from the

at that people in general imagined that affirmative action was playing some role in their world that it wasn't I mean affirmative action isn't even legal in Washington so the fact that the stigma upends to people is preposterous in that context in particular that's fascinating I had a friend who was a fireman who told similar stories and he was talking about the resentment of the other people that were on the fire force if a guy got in even if a guy was qualified if a guy was black because they assumed that he wasn't as

qualified in the reason why he got through affirmative action he was like it's so crazy because what it is is they're trying to combat racism by fueling racism inadvertently yes it creates this whole Cascade of effects and so the question really the civilization wide question is what do we do about I mean and we could retune the analysis for each of the populations in questions in the case of black people in the new world that is the America

has most black folks in the new world are here via the route of slavery and the thing is slavery was so brutal in destroying the cultures that these people had access to where they came from and then putting them together in a synthetic culture that was built to serve the Masters right in other words the denying black folks the ability to learn to read

obviously limits access to the huge library of insights that happened to be housed with the population that transported these folks from from Africa so in any case my point would be that is hobbling that was intentionally hobbling during slavery the legacy of that hobbling is one it's hard to quantify we don't know what role that plays but I can say

any population that has I'm going to speak now as I do as a biologist I think of us as robots that have a computer on our shoulders that runs software and our culture is the software if you take that robot with the computer and you delete the software package and then you install some other software package designed to make it do one particular job that has tremendous harm built into it and it's reversible but it is not

I don't I think we know that we didn't succeed in fixing this problem I think emancipation did not properly deal with how much harm had been done by bringing people from different parts of Africa and pooling them in one population based on effectively skin color alone and then at the point that they were freed it there was no there was no

there was no understanding because our understanding of biology and culture wasn't sophisticated yet it still isn't and so I think I think we do at some point have to do an honest accounting of how much damage happened in that process and we also have to realize that that damage you know I mean I know right now having been active in trying to make the world a better place I know that I'm running afoul of an argument called White Man's Burden right and so we all

now that this is a narrative but the point is that White Man's Burden argument will be wielded against me for even saying this but nonetheless I don't see any way around it I think the real story of what happened in the Americas is not a nice story and the implications are with us to this day nobody knows how deep they go because we haven't studied the question properly and in fact many of the people who are on the left pushing the sort of naive

of about equality are I think fearful of what will happen if we study the question I don't share Their Fear now I think you're right about fearful that there's there's there's a lot of like what you were talking about before like with that woman bringing up ridiculous things and beatings and people just sort of showing their jugular please don't attack you got a lot of that I think of it in terms of you know the United States or just this mass of humans I think of us as a superorganism

and I think if you had an organism that had a broken knee you would go well I gotta fix that knee you know I can't just give that knee less work is it possible to fix the knee yeah well let's fix the knee you don't want to just give the knee less work I don't want to make it easier for the need to get by what you want to do is like strengthen it so my thought and I've said this is a very simplistic way of looking at it but if you really wanted to make America great again right you really wanted to make America great what you would want to do is

have less losers so you'd want to go and find 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 where they're at and transform that with a fraction of the money that we spend trying to rebuild Nations and invading Afghanistan

can we could invest in many of our gigantic problems that we have in inner cities and completely rebuild them it could be done I mean and it could have radical implications on the entire country as a whole if you have instead of like a place like Baltimore for instance right I had Michael Woods on who was a former police officer in Baltimore is he sort of explained all of the the different issues that happen in Baltimore particularly where there was areas where they literally weren't

homes to black people they would not sell homes like this is a like a white only area like they had systemic racism built into the system for a long time

in just if someone just invested money into the not someone the United States government you know if we systematically invested money into these places and rebuilt them with community centers places where people could go where there was safe staff them with a ton of people that were motivated counselors people that wanted to help give them activities give them skills and trades and show them ways out give them a design it that's not nearly as

impossible as trying to rebuild Afghanistan or nation building but we're doing that we're doing that all over the place I mean Halliburton got no-bid contracts for billions of dollars to do shit that we don't even know what the fuck they were doing over there right if we could have a fraction of that money and invest it into inner cities you could literally change entire generations of human beings that are coming out of there a couple things one by the way I love the analogy of

the busted knee because in fact we used to make this mistake medically right until recently we didn't really understand that part of the healing process was not protecting the knee but putting it through Physical Therapy that properly exposed it to stresses so that it rebuilt and came back strong and so we are making that error and we have made that error in terms of what to do with the stratification of society in a way that locks up

in some communities and not others I think we should be honest with ourselves about why that happens so I agree you could make what would be massive investments in communities for a fraction of what we spend tinkering abroad in ways that have just spent huge amounts of of treasure on projects that didn't work right so we could do that the reason that that doesn't happen I don't think it has anything to do with it being

in obvious that it would be a good thing to do I think it has to do with the same group selection issue that we were talking about with respect to Communism which is to say if you are at the top of the system do you want to educate somebody else's kids to compete with yours and so there's a reason that we why do our public schools suck is it because we don't know how to make a school I don't think so I think it's because people know

how to make a school when it's for their kids and they are not so interested in making a school for other people's kids and so this is a deep chronic problem with our socio-political system we have to confront that and actually I think we have to we have to come to agreement that actually it is in the long-term wise to educate other people's kids even if in the short term it's economically frightening yeah the big

conspiracy about children and schools and keeping them stupid and making sure that the school system is frustrating and that's I've always felt like that conspiracy was really just there's no motivation to make it better I mean and and the when you look at the amount of money that teachers get paid I mean it says disturbing the think of the the the job of I don't have to tell you you're a goddamn teacher but if it's too deep but you got paid don't go about it

we folks but the what you've what we're talking about here is the most important thing that can happen to your child in the developmental phase right the education like giving them a view of the world explaining them all these things that they had not known before your first experiences with so many different subjects and topics and Concepts come from your teachers and I got really lucky man I mean I went to a public school in high school in

in Newton Massachusetts I went to Newton South High School and was a really good school and I still had shitty teachers I still had you know even in that really good school it comparatively really good because I went to a school before that in Jamaica Plain which was like an inner-city school and it was scary real dangerous just like just you know not like the most dangerous in Boston but it's very sketchy 17 year old kids in seventh grade that had never graduated like violence like a lot of weirdness

I had my head down for got through that year and then all of a sudden I was in this we called Fast Times at Hebrew High because it was like predominantly Jewish neighborhood yeah but it was even then there was there were still some terrible teachers there you know it's just the job is so important and we in this country have done some weird thing where we've taken one of the most important jobs that you could ever you could ever hire someone to do

educate children and made it almost like it's inconsequential yeah and I'm hesitant I'm not always hesitant about conspiracy there are conspiracies and we don't deal well with it but one doesn't need conspiracy to explain this this effectively can evolve without anybody's consciously thinking I want to sabotage somebody else's kids school but I will say my experience in school

was it was horrifying school did not work for me and maybe you know every five teachers I hit one yeah invested and cared and took the time to scratch their head about why I wasn't succeeding and dad must have like had an impact on you though as an educator that you remember those people those one out of five well this is the funny thing is I while I was teaching I taught for 14 years at Evergreen and I

like maybe I wasn't the only but I was very nearly the only person on faculty anywhere that I could think of who had not been a good student and well but this was a very interesting window because I you know I became a professor because I loved science and so the academy was where science happened not because I wanted to be a teacher my experience in school made me want to get away from the thing as fast as possible but having had the experience

variants of school completely failing and my to my own surprise learning how to think without school that's not where I learned it I learned it primarily from my grandfather and my brother and other people in my environment who weren't associated with school but once I got to being a professor and I think this was only possible at Evergreen Evergreen made no rules about what you did in the classroom literally no rule about what subject you taught they could hire you

the biologists and you could teach dance if people showed up to take it so you can teach whatever you wanted and the key was you could teach in whatever way you want it and so that's so crazy well I'm like a great idea if you're super motivated it worked two ways people abused it and they would use it to reduce their workload to next to nothing and they wouldn't invest in their students and then other people looked at this and they you know it was it was glorious to have that kind of freedom and so I taught in a way that would have worked

for me if I had been a student there which changed a lot of things and it actually worked for a lot of you know

bad students don't typically become professors so there's almost nobody on the faculty anywhere who has a clue why bad students are the way they are right they just don't intuitive because it wasn't their experience but if you were like me and you were a bad student and then you ended up with a class suddenly all sorts of you know bad students aren't uncommon and so suddenly somebody who's speaking to them and says I know that you're being a bad student isn't synonymous with you not having potential right that's really empowering for them so yeah

it was it was an interesting experience and my wife actually is it was a tremendous student she loved school and we would actually often teach the same students either together or we would they would take my program and then they would bounce over to her program next and so they would get these kind of two different views and you know each of us we were both enlightened by our relationship with each other because you know to the extent that I might have been dismissive of the greats

students right here I had one who you know was my my closest person on Earth and you know I got to a window into how she saw the world and she got a window into what the kids who weren't performing well in school might have been thinking and so anyway that was a very very useful background to have for teaching this is a tremendous amount of power and teaching people it's a weird relationship between and especially when you're teaching someone and you're giving them credit

Words Their degree I I was very poor student in high school and I've wasted a ton of time just going to college so people didn't think I was a loser but I taught at Boston University I teach Taekwondo and I taught accredited course it was pass/fail a but it actually counted towards your GPA so I had kids in my class and I would tell them it's really simple just try and you get an A just show up and try and I'll give you an a

because like Athletics or it's not it's not fair you know there's people that are just extreme endomorphs and their body holds onto too much fat they're not they didn't have a background in any athletics they're not flexible it's very difficult for them to understand how to move their body correctly there's it's essentially like trying to teach someone to be a professional speaker or someone has been speaking English their whole life where other people just learning it for the first time it does

didn't seem fair to me so the judge them in terms of like the actual outcome that was like it's almost contrary to what I said I was giving them a quality of outcome but not really no I was I'm pretty sure I know what you were doing because I did the same thing so I would tell students you show up and try and you are completely safe you're going to get full credit and you'll get a nice evaluation we wrote written evaluation to them but if you want an evaluation that Raves about

you that talks about you know your your extraordinary capacity you're going to have to strive yeah so what I wanted to do which it sounds like what you were doing is make them safe enough to discover what they could do because I don't know whether this will make sense to your audience or not but I think we are overly concerned we have been sold the idea that the job of a teacher is to assess how much the student has learned that basically the job of the teacher is largely to report

to the world how qualified this person as hmm that's a very hard job in some disciplines in mind you know the student who did brilliantly I would know and the student who did nothing I would usually know but there were lots of students in the middle who might have gotten the lesson really deeply and it might have matured over the course of two years after they were no longer in contact with me at the point I was writing the evaluation of them that might not have been a good place to assess how much they actually

really learned so I I steered away from the idea that my job was to tell the world how well this person had done unless they've done great if they done really well if they'd you know surprise themselves and me about everything that they were capable of I loved saying that but I didn't want to run down a student who hadn't really shined in the classroom because there's it was a totally artificial moment to judge how much they had picked up yeah no need to run them down yeah and again

buddy starting off at a different position it's not like everybody's on the same line and the gun goes off and everybody runs with the first step you know in the same spot it's just not the case right and there's some many activities in which your how you do initially doesn't necessarily predict ultimately whether you'll be unusually good sure yeah well one of the things that I found particularly with Athletics is that people who are extraordinarily gifted

gifted oftentimes don't Excel because it seems to come too easy for them and they never develop the proper stamina for hard difficult work they shy away from that because if things aren't easy they here's a perfect example people that are really gifted in one a someone martial art like say like someone who's gifted as a striker will though enter into mixed martial arts and find that they really are not very good at grappling and so they don't like that feeling

being dominated in training so they don't give it a hundred percent they don't throw themselves into it instead they avoid it and they try to find workarounds and they're almost always defeated by Grapplers it's like they've because of the fact that they're gifted and talented they've avoided the difficult real character building moments so this is interesting that you say that I was on a train in New York and looking at Twitter and

somebody had posted an article that caused the dime to drop for me with respect to mixed martial arts and why they were suddenly a thing in my life where they hadn't been I had assumed 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 following me and I was seeing their tweets and things but this guy I think his name is John kirbo posted an article that he had written about Bruce Lee and his

did you see this article and argument was why Bruce Lee and mixed martial arts points the direction to how to fix our political dialogue something huh and so anyway his argument was and you know I'm no expert on this at all but his argument was that Bruce Lee effectively the the innovator at the beginning of mixed martial arts was interested in testing a martial art against

it's all comers rather than requiring the person on the other side to be practicing the same martial art and that there is a kind of model in that for other disciplines then any any time if your debate style requires somebody to be debating in the same way on the other side of the argument then it isn't very strong right then it's a formalism but if you're really good at arguing that it shouldn't really matter as long as the person speaks the same language you

be able to meet them on that playing field and hash stuff out so anyway I think a number of things linked up in this way that there is a kind of artificial boundary placed between things and that those who are interested in tearing down those boundaries even though that opens up a huge range of things that they may face often have something to teach in their particular realm and

I was trying to think of other examples of this and Lars Anderson Archer again this is a place where you're an expert or not but what do you think of Lars Anderson Well he does like a lot of weird trick shots with archery it's kind of fun to watch very interesting stuff and what he's essentially done is he believes he has not reinvented but rediscovered a method of holding arrows in your fingers so that you could with practice

repeat here Jamie's got video this character that you could release a bunch of arrows in a row and he he's capable of shooting like way faster than the average person and multiple arrows he can throw things in the air and hit it with multiple arrows before it hits the ground yep so my thought here is that this is I have a number of different examples so there he's throwing a he's going to use through

bottle cap in the air yeah and he hits it with an arrow and so crazy even if there are lots of cuts here with that we're not seeing where he misses the fact that he can do this with enough reliability to make a video make a video you can tell there enough things where he hits two things in one shot that it's not it can't be completely fiction and if you look at his explanatory so he took a lot of crap for this from people who were in The Archery World who didn't like the way he violated all of the rules about what good archery form looks like and so

made a response video English isn't his first language so it's a little hard to follow but but anyway it's pretty clear that what he's done is he's just said well okay there are bows their arrows what is the best way to think about these things from the point of view of solving these different problems and he's discovered a whole landscape of stuff that I don't think you would discover if you took archery and took it seriously and learn from you know a master who had good form you've never Discover it and I guess there might as well put the

examples on the table let's see there's Danny MacAskill the bicyclist are you aware of this guy I feel like I've heard that name before Scottish kitties very young I think at some point unfortunately he became a surprise sensation on YouTube and Red Bull figured out that he was a moneymaker and they've sort of pushed him so he's now had a couple of serious accidents but anyway he is capable of doing

in things on a bicycle especially in an urban environment hopping from this guy yeah this guy Scruggs this did you see that that One of These Guys these Daredevil YouTube guys just died a guy in China oh God yeah let's get some paint out of his me he's out of his mind but let me check that out for people that are listening only this guy's on a rooftop and he's doing these stunts where he's riding his bike doing flips from one side of the building to the other

the other he's riding on the edges of the building looking down hitting the brakes certain death on either side Jason yeah I mean look at that I have a hard time looking at that right it's pretty rough look at that it's pretty rough but you know and it's fallen and hurt himself and that's not a BMX bike either know it's like a regular bike it's I think it's it's not quite standard but it's it's more mountain bike proportions but anyway just probably has to be to be so rugged right oh yeah

it's been a souped-up in particular ways so that it you know it can endure the kind of forces that he's on it but he's at he's discovered stuff about what you can do with a bicycle that I think you just would I mean in fact you know in the era we grew up we didn't know that these things were possible I mean you know what he's doing emerged from from observed trials which was a very regimented kind of competition for mountain bikers but but anyway he's discovered a landscape of possibilities on a bicycle not unlike the lamps landscape of possibilities that

ours Anderson has discovered in in archery parkour is another place where you know growing up I didn't know that all that was possible and I thought you know frankly I thought that Olympic gymnastics was pretty interesting and you know now I look at Olympic gymnastics and I think that's a I mean I get it damn it's tame and the thing is it has one advantage which is that everything is so standardized that you can compare two competitors

if you want to award a metal maybe it has to look like Olympic gymnastics but but these guys who can look at an urban environment and figure out how they can make use of these objects and their relationship to each other are discovering something about what the human body is capable of that isn't obvious if you you know if there isn't somebody to point it out so there are innovators I don't even know if we know who the initial innovators are with something like Park who are probably somebody does

why Russians could be those Russian kids you ever see those videos them hanging off of the side of buildings I really think that they were the innovators of this that was the first step that we ever saw maybe and you know reg word right what's that core French it is yeah but in any case one of the things and you know you when you when you asked me to come on we decided we would talk a little bit about what to do about planet Earth because I had mentioned the first yes on your show that that was a let's get away from parkour

well but my feeling is actually this is this is about parkour and my point is where we are with civilization

we're stuck and we are on a trajectory that you don't have to be deeply knowledgeable to recognize that it is unstable on enough different fronts that we can't go on like this much longer we're playing with powerful enough tools that we're in tremendous danger something going wrong and so the question is it's very hard to imagine how you use normal tools you know are you going to win an election and get policy through

Bruce that's going to change the world and suddenly make a safe it's almost impossible to imagine something like that happening and so the question is is there a parkour kind of innovation something that is not obvious to us that's it's there the city was always there people were not always doing parkour with the objects in it but they could have been and so are we missing the obvious is it in front of us what we're supposed to do to take a civilization that's hurtling out of control with to

many people consuming too fast and using mechanisms that are dangerous is there a route to put us back on track to something reasonable that looks like one of these innovations that you don't know it existed until somebody shows you that it's there

so what do you think those things are well I'd assume there's more than one right there's more than one I would say the conversation doesn't sound familiar and

I don't think anybody has the answer to that question I before I go deeply into this question I should probably say something a little bit self-protective which is talking about the question of what to do with planet Earth can be it can be an idol discussion in which case there's no there's nothing to be navigated but if you want to do it seriously there's a danger of triggering a kind of

Flex of penalty that we all carry around so arrogance is something that we don't like people don't like to hear people being arrogant and so we all have like a detector for that that we listen and when somebody Strays into arrogance maybe it goes off in order to have a conversation about what to do about planet Earth obviously we're talking about very serious stuff and for anybody to contemplate that they might know

or might be tuned into a conversation that could find its way to some new answer we are in danger of triggering that oh my God that's arrogant circuit and so at some level in order to have this conversation properly I need to I need to turn off my own sensitivity to hearing that little warning Bell in my own head and you know if if the conversation is preposterous fine that's that's something a reasonable person could conclude about

anybody who was talking about changing the way the world functions maybe it is preposterous and I leave that possibility open on the other hand you know I have kids I'm pretty sure I can do the math myself on how much danger were in I may not know the full extent of it but I can tell that we're in enough danger that we have to do something counterintuitive and different enough that it stands a chance of changing the way 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 but I have to do it in that kind of context where I'm not too worried about whether people here this as you know maybe in full of myself or something like that that makes sense yes why would why would I get it see I lack those self protective instincts I just about off all right fair enough but go ahead okay so there are a lot of so I should say where where does this all come from

my initial foray into this style of thinking actually starts with Eric who you had on your podcast I saw a lot of feedback about him on your podcast is great people were really jazzed about throwing bro you have brilliant brother I have noticed that he is absolutely amazing and there's no place to hide from him because he is so good across you know all levels of analysis so you know he obviously even on your podcast

he was playing around in biology space very adeptly I can't do that I can't go over into math space and do the same favor for him but but anyway yeah he's a he's a very interesting thinker and across many more levels than I think anybody else I've encountered but anyway he some years ago after the financial collapse of 2008 decided that there needed to be a proactive

discussion about what had gone wrong and economic space that had allowed that catastrophe to happen and so he and some collaborators put together a conference called the economic Manhattan Project it was at the perimeter Institute in in Canada and so I went I attended this conference and it was it was the first place I encountered an intentional conversation about changing

a large enough piece of the puzzle to actually fix the way the world Works to prevent another Financial collapse like the one that happened in in 2008 and I also met people at that conference who have continued on in these conversations I joined occupy I mean not that there was anything really to join but I participated in it in hopes that it would turn into something capable of changing the way we functioned and I ended up being very disappointed and frustrated

the quality of the conversation inside of Occupy Wall Street but anyway it revealed some things to me and then after that there was a group of people who gathered in is something that ultimately was called game be and game B is really where the thinking that I want to talk to you about emerged most clearly game be no longer exists but a group of us

from across the political Spectrum various different kinds of expertise we had tech people we had professors from various different disciplines we had a Buddhist I mean we really had a lot of different people who were United basically by an understanding that that they teach arrived at that the trajectory we were armed was so dangerous that it required us to take action and we tried out various different ideas about what might what might be sufficient to

to avert the danger we were heading towards and give Humanity more time to find a way to exist on the planet so I should probably say something about what game be means and it carries a relevance into into what we might do in the present game be was basically proceeded from the idea that what we live in is a game theoretic landscape right that the winners in this game theoretic landscape

are individuals who have figured out where there's a niche some of them have figured out how to engage in something called rent-seeking which rent-seeking basically means making money without producing some without producing value so there's a lot of stuff that goes on in our economy that is not productive and good but nonetheless generates fortunes so that's rent-seeking as opposed to Innovation or productivity you talking about like hedge fund type stuff moving money around well I want to be a little careful about this because

because it is quite possible for things like hedge funds to actually correct in efficiencies in the economy in a way that is productive that doesn't mean that that's the average thing that's what things are you referring to well I mean you know let's let's take the the ultimate example that will make it clear a warlord is not responsible for for building the road that they then stand by the side of and extort money from people who want to travel it

a cable company May produce some benefit they obviously have infrastructure that allows you to get content but what fraction of what you're paying for is actually about them delivering a service at some price and making some reasonable profit and what fraction of it is about the fact that they are an economic Goliath and that you don't have enough choice to be able to negotiate a decent price with them so there's some fraction of what they're producing that is productive but then there's a large amount of profit

there that isn't about productivity or innovation it's about the fact that they own a choke point and you can't get around it so we don't know what fraction of the economy is rent-seeking and what fraction of it is productive but there is especially if one is broad-minded about thinking about all the ways that one can engage in rent-seeking one can actually be destructive of value if you destroy future well-being for

our descendants it may look productive in the present but it isn't productive it's actually destructive so that's a kind of rent seeking that we don't even typically model but

where we headed so oh yes so we live in a game theoretic landscape that's both good and bad as you point out competition is a healthy thing and competition in markets produces a huge amount of value so I hear people deriding capitalism and I always want to make the same point to them which is you've got two things glued together and you are challenging them as a package

but there's no reason they have to be packaged so we would be foolish to give up markets markets are amazingly powerful engines of innovation they are capable of solving problems that we cannot solve deliberately even if we wanted to so we need markets but we don't want markets ruling the planet and deciding that anything that spits out a profit is there for good and that we should be exposed to whatever the market discovers can be viable so we what we

we want is ultimately to provide in provide incentive structures that cause the market to produce things that are good for us right in other words if you tell the market that you want the solution to some problem the market can figure out how to solve that problem and it will do it very well but if you allow the market to decide what problems to solve it may end up for example addicting you to your phone right addicting to you to your phone in a way that harms

social relationships harms your parenting of your children arms all kinds of things that are really important breaks the ability of your children to have a educational experience in school we don't want the market discovering how to disrupt useful functioning of people we want the market to stay out of that stuff and then to provide us benefits that only it can provide like all of the mechanisms that now allow us to navigate seamlessly in places that we've never been

been avoiding traffic that we wouldn't know to worry about right those are huge benefits and they're capable of taking a city that is to snarled with traffic and reducing the degree to which it it is snarled with traffic so they're very powerful but we shouldn't we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater markets are good allowing markets to discover any and every mechanism for exploiting you is not good at all and in fact it's a large part of why we're in the predicament that we're in

that we let the market decide what problems to solve and then if it solves them and they're very lucrative there's no way to say no once so there are they attracted to people I mean that's one of the reasons why iPhone is so addictive is because it's attractive because you can get access to information at the drop of a hat so you just constantly want to feed that machine it constantly want to go what what can I do can I play a game on it you can I take a picture of myself who can I give myself a dog knows who

oh right but imagine I mean it's amazing to me that it's even hard to do this thought experiment that put yourself in you know in your own mind 15 years ago and present yourself the deal that the phone represents you know Hey Joe all right check this phone out right this phone is going to allow you to navigate in a place you've never been it's going to connect you with all sorts of people who share your interests you're going to be able to

say a sentence that you think is clever and suddenly hundreds or thousands of people are going to be able to react to it I mean all sorts of marvelous things and then the point is well here's the downside okay you're going to be hooked into Mega corporations that are going to study your psychology and they are going to compete in order to keep you paying attention to their site and they're going to become so sophisticated that you're going to lose control over your own mind

you are going to become addicted to it in the way that you might become addicted to nicotine right so that that's a pretty high cost what's more you are going to surveil yourself you're going to surveil yourself and your only protection from surveilling yourself are going to be end-user license agreements that you're not going to be legally sophisticated enough to understand and so you're going to be at the mercy of whoever has access to your phone camera your metadata your you know all of these things so

point is if you said this to you 15 years ago you'd know to be afraid of it right I probably wouldn't I want to be like yeah I'll put it down if I don't like it okay well I must tell you if you told me that I was going to be bugging myself with a sophisticated device like that that I know I can't even I can't even turn it upside down because of the camera on both sides of the damn right I mean the cost is really high but we signed up for it incrementally and

a way that never left the ability to say no and what's worse it is now inconceivable if we discovered that the net cost of such a device exceeded the value of it by 10 times we still couldn't get rid of them you can't pull them back you can't unmake them this too much benefit to them though you're making it seem as if it's only a negative but it's not only a negative it's also answering every single question you could ever have about anything technical anything involving history anything involving

facts and the obviously in today's day and age with hashtag fake news you're gonna get a lot of bullshit facts in there as well but just the sheer access to information to be able to ability to contact each other instantaneously as a lot of Pros to it huge number I'm believe me I'm not under rating the value of I mean he just you know you pointed to it yourself having even just Wikipedia in your pocket is like that such a fantastic gift to have that access to information not only on your home computer

right there in your pocket that's amazing so I'm not saying the benefit isn't spectacular and you know I've signed up for like everybody else but the cost is very high and didn't have to be in other words if you had set the bounds in which the market was going to solve this problem so that you for example prevented it from breaching our ability to protect our own privacy you could have had the benefit of Wikipedia and instant communication and all of these things without

out the huge downside so the Privacy issue being cookies or cameras like which which one are you referring to well first of all I think the cameras are a bit of a red herring I don't think anybody at first of all there's a huge amount of data involved in video to the extent there's an issue it would be more about the microphone mmm and the fact that it can listen in the conversations and basically track who's thinking one and there's so much power in that potentially that even even if it's not being used presently it's only a matter of time before somebody

into that data and starts using it to shape things they are not entitled to shape right so how do we fix it well so let me we got a little off track here right game a is what we live right it's a marketing which we decide how to behave and if we have Insight maybe we come out ahead if we don't have correct Insight maybe we lose but anyway that's that's game a it's the market as we find it game be

was the idea that that there are ways that you could restructure the deal we have with each other so that you could compete in game A's terms without losing to game a so the the conclusion and you know again game be is not a live organization anymore but it was a place in which a lot of work was done that I think feeds into the conversation about what we do very clearly in order to change

way the world functions most of the mechanisms that have functioned in the past are no longer viable it is almost inconceivable to imagine that you could have a revolution in any standard sense that would successfully capture power and then wheeled it wisely I can't even imagine it happening so game B is the idea that one needs to

create an entity that is capable of competing in the market it is capable of competing in game a is terms and winning against game a so game a is the way things Run game be is an alternative that can compete in game a is terms and when and that sounds first time you hear it it sounds Preposterous because the system has so much inertia in it that you would think it is completely impervious to any challenge but there's a hidden

factor which I think is evident in those various examples we were looking at in parkour and Lars Anderson and his archery Innovations and Danny MacAskill I would also say Jane Goodall and her success at sorting out what was going on with chimps

the point is systems that become very difficult to dislodge that have great inertia are almost inevitably feeble in a particular fashion so this is true of academic disciplines to if a discipline becomes stuck it is very hard to get a hearing within the discipline but the discipline loses track of

where it has made assumptions that aren't true or aren't certain and so it becomes relatively easy to compete against it if you're not requiring it to validate your perspective so that feebleness is a feature of our system our system is delivering the goods to people at a low rate most people are dissatisfied they are unhealthy they are not well protected from things like

bad luck and those are all problems that can be solved by a an entity that is capable of restructuring the deals between people in other words let's take an obvious one like insurance

insurance is not well delivered by a market there's a very good reason it isn't which is that the the strategy for winning in the delivery of insurance is

perfectly obvious you want to ensure people who need it very little and you want to uninsured people who needed a lot that's how you win at the insurance game so the insurance industry is always looking to make that deal with the world that's always looking to figure out how to discipline to to dis ensure those who are most likely to need it and what that means is that we can't provide a risk pool the risk pool just means you don't know if you're going to get a brain tumor I'm going to get a brain tumor so how about we both agree to pay for whoever's

it needs it and whoever has the bad luck wins in that deal and whoever has the good luck losses but because we don't know who it is ahead of time it's a win for both of us right so that structure is one that you can build inside of this competitive architecture and what I'm what I'm getting at is that the conversation of people that has coalesced people who are discussing the question of how to make things fun

auction in a way that solves the problems that we all face without having to win some unimaginable electoral Victory or to challenge these governments outright that conversation centers around a game theoretic insight and this is something I mentioned before that I had participated in occupy and had been quite disappointed and really

I was before I ran into this conversation was

I was if I'm honest with myself I was becoming a little desperate because I could see how much trouble we were in but every mechanism that you might use to fix it seemed very unlikely to function when I heard a presentation that said actually there's a mechanism that does not go through any of the familiar historical means but uses tools that we all see deployed right the same tools that cause Facebook to be successful can

used to repair the system that begins to sound plausible to me

that make any sense sort of but this is we're on a long road yes is there a way to boil this down well let's try an example okay how do you feel about Bitcoin I think it's fascinating you wish you had more of it well no I have some of it but it's not mine it's all donated towards fight for their forgotten their building wells in the Congo I had Andreas Antonopoulos on and he introduced me to bitcoin so he set up a Bitcoin wallet for me

I took donations from people but I didn't think it was right they just gave me it was very little at the time yeah but I said I'll just give this to my friend Justin who builds wells in the Congo so now it's worth wizard with like 70 grand or something like that

something like that 200 but yeah he's got to figure out when he wants to cash out it's up to him but so far they've gotten at least 10,000 out of it and we've built a bunch of Wells with that money so I think it's great in that regard it's served an amazing purpose for those people in the Congo well the people are we're actually mad at me that I didn't buy those things with Bitcoin that instead use the kept the Bitcoin but gave him the money value of the

Bitcoin they were upset like why don't you just pay for it with Bitcoin but about I wanted to see as an experiment where the Bitcoin goes and turns out it was a lucky guess on my part and now it's worth far more because what was worth 5,000 at the time is now yeah it's honored Grand right so we don't like it okay I like it too and whether it's Bitcoin or not there's something clearly happening in the in the blockchain cryptocurrency yes so

so people the world is trying to figure out which which of these currencies is going to function at the moment it's blockchain is looking the most promising there are obstacles to it functioning there are ways in which those obstacles are being addressed and you know would be pointless to get into the details of the community I really I really like the idea behind it to me I like things that don't have a whole lot of rules where people sort of figure out what's right right good so if we take

Bitcoin as an example of something that addresses the problems of fiat currency when the dollar nobody asked permission to build in fact we don't even know who innovated it pseudonym that we have we don't know whose identity it is a recently someone thought it was Elon Musk which I would not be surprised that crazy guy and I couldn't say and I think it doesn't much matter right what we know is that somebody without asking permission

and found a better model for a currency that addressed issues that we all face and we're not individually capable of addressing ourselves and it's pretty clear that a something in this realm is going to win and it's going to become an important player if not the important player on the world stage currency wise that is a an entity which exists in game a space right you can convert Bitcoin to Dollars that's not hard

hard Bitcoin functions inside of this realm it's not illegal it works it's reliable the problems have been solved by people because solving those problems made sense it is enriched them for doing so they made their currency more functional so that entity is a solution that is superior to game a but it functions in game a terms its winning in game a terms at the moment I'm not saying it is

going to crash it probably is going to crash because it's probably over inflated at the moment how much will it crash will it come back or we going to go through repeated Bubbles and Bitcoin will still win out I don't know buddy clearly nobody knows but the idea that it is a Superior Solution invented inside this other system that is winning against the dollar at the moment that's a fine example likewise you could use Wikipedia

you as a fine example this is an entity that is functioning inside it is competing with the old encyclopedias it is competing with for-profit services that would deliver information and frankly it's winning because it's Superior it's a perfect no but but it's a it's a demonstration that you can do things inside this space that in fact have reorganized our relationship to information and in fact in a way that we don't typically

knowledge is challenging the the Academy I mean maybe part of why the academy was so feeble at the point that this social justice Madness started to challenge it had to do with the fact that without the Academy's permission information became free the fact that everybody was a Level Playing Field for information meant that the academy needed to figure out what it was going to deliver on top of that information and it didn't figure it out and I would say there was an obvious answer which

just it needed to deliver stuff that didn't scale it needed to teach insight and critical thinking and how to wield that information properly rather than continuing to deliver textbook level information when effectively text books are obsolete but these are these are examples of successful competitively successful Innovative challenges to the model that pre-existed them okay and the question is can that set of models

a systematized so that it without having to do the impossible simply replaces the system as it stands because it delivers the things that the system claims to deliver more successfully than the system delivers okay like what things we talking about we are talking about

insulation from bad luck luck is a tremendously negative influence so like insurance but ensuring that we collectively utilize correct something that we collectively utilize so imagine that you could have wonderful insurance but that in signing up for that insurance you were agreeing to some sort of larger social entity so like your taxes would go towards life insurance but meaning like

things that go wrong in life like some part of what you would spend on things would be attributed to this fund yeah and it's I think we unfortunately default to thinking of everything in monetary terms you could also invest in such an entity let you know let's talk about the question of teachers that you were pointing out okay why are good teachers so few and far between well of course we pay at a level that we get exactly what we ordered and

and you know the few good teachers that we run into are by and large people who are doing it in spite of the fact that they're being economically penalized for doing it but what if your your insurance your access to excellent insurance that correctly hedged out the danger of bad medical Bad Luck came with some sort of social obligation in which you know I don't know the three years after you had gone to graduate school and gotten your Advanced degree in

thing you spent teaching in some school that needed that so you didn't sideline yourself from the economy for the rest of your life teaching in some school where you were forever going to be hobbled by bad administrators but you decided to take some period of time and invested in your community or somebody else's Community using expertise that that you got that you'll be highly paid for later so it's almost like you you know I've mandatory military service and enter it mandatory military service is

yes it is one version of a much larger space of potential agreements that you could sign up for an exchange for benefits that you can't most of us cannot negotiate on the open market so to get your education you would agree to use that education for the good of community for a certain amount of time absolutely absolutely so instead of walking away with massive debt that is

to hobble you in economic terms as you're trying to find your Niche that you would sign up for some agreement that was you know but wouldn't that still benefit the elite because would have Scrooge McDuck has a kid and Scrooge McDuck skid he pays for his kids educational they listen son you're not going to do any service what you're going to do is use those three years to get ahead and those little fucks when they get out of that service I got to be working for you ha ha ha I throw the gold coins up in the air right so this is

is another place nice look this is another place where two things are fused together that we need to tease apart okay I'm trying to remember I think Eric may have actually said this on your podcast if you didn't he set it elsewhere but Elites is not a good category right leitz takes two things that don't belong together and it decides that they are one and so the Scrooge McDuck thing becomes

um it blocks the other thing we want people to innovate right and one of the reasons that equality of outcome is absolutely not desirable even if you could arrange it is that the inequality of outcome is the incentive that drives people to achieve amazing stuff that we want them to achieve right right course so how far ahead of everybody else should you end up well this is a difficult problem because you to the extent that

D earns a fortune because they've they have innovated in an important way but then they have gone on to be a rent Seeker we don't want them rewarded for their rent seeking but we do want them rewarded for their Innovation so there the problem is the elite is two different things and even worse individuals who are members of the elite are Composites of both things

you get into the elite because you innovated something amazing but the degree to which you have been rewarded is I don't know 60 70 percent the result of rent seeking rather than what you innovated and again for people just tuned in to us now rent seeking meaning doing things with to which you extract money from the system without any real benefit to the people that are around you yeah it's any time that you get paid without

producing something of value either Innovation or productivity itself or something like that but how would you regulate that how would you how would you figure out a way to regulate the amount of profit that someone could like if you have a system right if you build something and then you get you know some sort of a residual benefit from that system because you built it and so you're not really doing anything but you're just constant collecting money from this thing how would you stop that or regulate that well as an example of it what I just the way I just described it yeah it's

it's a pretty good example you know we do want so it's a very tough conversation because one has to be very careful that you don't remove an incentive to do something valuable even though the value of it may be very subtle so okay the example of you know investment like playing the stock market might look on productive but to the extent that you are correcting the fact that certain things are undervalued and other things are overvalued you are actually

really doing a kind of service that is not as obvious on the outside unless you've spent time thinking about the logic of why you want the market to be efficient so I don't want to I don't want to declare that certain things are in and of themselves bad because we can't see the obvious value of them on the other hand there's an awful lot of stuff that is either totally valueless for rich people are very handsomely paid or Worse counterproductive destructive of value

right if if you take waste and you get paid to dispose of it and you dispose of it in a way that it creates cancers where you can't detect that they've been created by what you've done but it's not that you solve the problem of that waste you just caused cancers in random homes that won't be able to trace their their Misfortune to your action that's not not only is that unproductive but it's counterproductive it's harmful so how do you address these questions well

a you this is a much harder problem if you imagine that what you want to do is fix the landscape that you're walking into and say you're a rent seeker and you're productive and your 30% productive but 70% around Seeker nobody believes you can do that what you can do is restructure things so that going forward what is rewarded is actual productivity that is not harmful or actual Innovation that is not harmful

and what is penalized and what you really want if you if the system is to function what you want is a disincentive to do anything that hurts other people that has a net negative impacts sure on the system like the BP oil spill BP oil spill the Aliso Canyon leak Three Mile Island Three Mile Island Fukushima right okay 10th degree so how do you I'm still confused as to what different like what's going on here

here what is going on is that if you if you array incentives so that the point you have solved a problem that is good to solve okay that the well-being starts flowing in your direction you made it perfect widget everybody has got my God this fixes my life right I love this widget so by a bunch of them you start you start ball and you get a Paul Wall Grill there you go yeah exactly house exactly

but as you start moving in the direction of doing something that interferes with other people's well-being but nonetheless they can't help themselves if you're innovating how to addict' people to their phone right then actually you're hurting people and we don't want you to do that now it's very hard are you going to tell Facebook you know what it's allowed to study as well so people that have good intentions but it turns out that they're like Facebook is a perfect example one of the executives from Facebook I was just reading on dig the other day there was

an article where he was sorry for what they've done it was one of the original guys from Facebook's like I really think that we've done a terrible thing with Facebook and we've made people addicted to social media Facebook is seems to me to be particularly addictive and I'm not exactly sure what they've done different than anybody else but so much so that I kind of avoid Facebook you know it's funny how many conversations I've had in the last month in which somebody has said that they're avoiding Facebook including me I think I can like Instagram because I just see

sure it's now look pretty and I'm simple well yeah I mean each of these things has their their Valley I'm not on Instagram I'm on Twitter I'm on Twitter to foot from me what's good about it is this it you're being programmed former Facebook executive warrants for me for my business is very important to let people hey brat Weinstein is going to be on today as dying man I'm sorry either serve me yes everything happily he did sign I said it right earlier Brett Weinstein is going to be on today

day people tuned in and know now there's people that are listening right now because of social media right and then you know comedy shows that I have coming up its works for me and a lot of those ways but as time has gone on I've pushed it away in most other ways well and the thing the the interview that you just referenced I saw it too and was quite Blown Away by it I've been tuned into that because Tristan Harris is a friend of mine and tryst on Harris is sort of the

the Paul Revere on this issue has pointed out how much danger we are actually in and I must say he's a very interesting guy because his other area of expertise is Magic and so he's very interested in lunch hand yeah exactly interesting and so anyway he's watched as an Insider as these economic goliaths have conspired to not let us go and to turn their product from a facilitator of social interaction into a cigarette which is

you know or a brought machine or something like that but the how would you pay analyze them then like well save this in this new system how would that work say if you came up with this new widget and this new widget does amazing things but turns out it also makes you addicted to widgets okay so I'm speaking only for myself here I would not penalize Facebook or Twitter but what I would want to see is somebody

rate of the alternative that has the benefit of not doing that to you okay so a new Facebook that doesn't work with likes and all these things you're not constantly checking and likes but it wouldn't be here's the thing wouldn't be a successful people love likes that's why girls stick their butt out in those pictures they want to get those likes that's what that's all about is that what that's all about acts that is that's what jizzing yeah oh there that they've said first of all that people that do that you know what those things are called which things when girl

stick their butt out and they have other straps thirst traps yeah you don't know about that I don't kids you don't know about thirst trap I don't know about their stress I'm going to tell you all right thirst traps are you look for people that are thirsty they're like ooh girl you look good damn you look good people who are like extra thirsty thirsty means you're getting at but never got that for now I'm thirsty okay you're married you've been around intellectuals and trapped up in Progressive Pacific Northwest you're not going to embarrass them

girlfriend no don't worry Stevie is thirsty is people who are trying too hard like like you're not the type of person if you saw someone who's a beautiful girl who's in a bikini you would say wow that is a beautiful girl in a bikini what an incredible body she has and you would move on you wouldn't be like damn girl you look so fine how can I get with you right and I did you would be super thirsty right that would be thirsty so I'm getting trying too hard yeah they're so but

the internet is filled with thirsty people and so a lot of these girls become famous there's girls that you've never heard them okay I had a bit about it in yeah my last special about there was a girl that she all she does is take pictures of her butt and at the time she had like 7 million followers now that she's got a hundred million or something I don't know but that these people become these these like places where everybody goes to stare

but and these pictures of them and their bodies and all these different things are traps for all these weird people that lack normal social skills and their Uber thirsty yes a thirst trap okay well this is Michael that's the whole reason why these people use things like Instagram and she that there are strapped had a thirst trap on Instagram with cardi B see uh-huh see I'm talking I'm talking about the kids today

okay this girl I'm beginning to think maybe we can't save the world but listen we can save the world but the problem is we have to be cognizant of normal human desires and like the the traps there were traps okay so this is actually the perfect place to go then because one of the biggest obstacles to fixing the world is that although a huge fraction of the population is actually aware that things are off and they would like it to be better

there's so much low-level stuff that keeps us trapped in these unproductive kinds of cycles and one of the things that I keep running into now I'm now being included in all of these conversations with folks who do aspire to something better but everybody and I mean really just about everybody has stuff that to them is sacred and they want to take it off the table right they they're very interested in the conversation

ation about how we might fix the world but you know if they're a Libertarian the point is is soon as you can't even finish the word regulate and they're just like oh well sorry who you know who watches the Watchers and the point that it's a bitter pill for just about everybody who's got some sacred thing that they're holding onto is you are if we deploy something that functions well and is capable of replacing the system

we have without some gigantic catastrophe necessary in order to get over the transition the whole point is to everyone's net benefit right if Liberty is your thing and I'm virtually sure liberty is your thing as it is my thing that you will get more Liberty net Liberty will go up in a system that functions well many of the things that cause us not

to be free have nothing to do with governmental regulation they have to do with expectations that have been created by a market that does not have our interests at heart and so if you're tracking net Liberty then a system that functions well liberates you it may have more regulation in it than the one we currently have but that regulation is liberating rather than a pressing and so anyway with the Libertarians getting them to imagine

to wrap their minds around the possibility of Regulation that they wouldn't hate their so we are also experienced now living in a world of malignant government right where government government action almost can't be useful and so it is natural to rebel against it and say I don't want any more of that the less the better because the actions tend to be predatory but that is not the inherent nature of Regulation and so

constructing a set of incentives that caused the market to deliver you the good parts of what a phone does without secretly addicting you to something that you know we now know I mean I don't know how many people in Silicon Valley have now issued a note of caution but there's any of switch to flip phones themselves they have I mean this is this is Nature's way of telling you that these algorithms have escaped our control the fact that the people

all who are in a position to make a phone call and know more or less what the algorithm does can't even protect themselves ought to that off to set off warning bells for us right those people are in the best position to protect themselves and the fact that they are bending over backwards there they are externalizing decision-making power they're having their secretaries tell them when they can interact with certain sites in order to keep them from getting into habits that they can't manage this is this is the only warning we're going to get this is bad

could still do something about it but this is only getting more sophisticated and so if we do want to restructure things and I would argue that even though Market fundamentalists will you know here their little sacred sacred thing being challenged what we really want to do is free markets to do what the brochure says that they do while eliminating what the brochure never mentions the brochure doesn't mention the fact that a totally free

it produces predators and parasites at a huge rate right it doesn't have to we can we can structure things such that a predator is not viable so that a predator has nothing to eat and if the Predator has nothing to eat the habitat won't have them right so that is the perspective that all of us if I would do that let's say this is these are abstract ideas right how would we how do we eliminate Predators how do we eliminate predators

you would eliminate Predators by disincentive so your question actually has a hidden assumption built into it you've seen the market as a mature entity with lots of full-grown Predators but just as it is with Biology all of those Predators started with something simple and what happened was they tapped into a niche and because that niche

each was allowed to exist the Predators grow and they get more and more sophisticated at doing what they are doing if you don't want to see the Predators you eliminate the niche for predation this sounds like it would be functional with if there was like a hundred people well first of all this is one of the primary questions in the various conversations where people are trying to figure out how to bootstrap such a thing is that we have what's called dunbar's number right and dunbar's number is

clear limit in the low hundreds of how many people you can keep in your head right and so the point is we are we are adapted to that and that number is probably an indicator of something like the number of people that you can adaptively interact with yeah I mean in other words if you had mean this is really the motivation for your question if you had a hundred and fifty people and somebody was a bad actor their reputation would precede them and you would you would detect I should be careful interacting with that

person so that the structure would be set up for tribes which is essentially how we evolved right I mean that's what dunbar's number essentially reveals is that we evolved growing up in groups of you know 52 couple hundred people and those are the amount of people that you can keep in your mind right so hard drive space essentially we do but we also human beings are very good at taking a technological solution and clue judging 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 a hundred and fifty individuals with respect to their reputation so that you know how much to trust in any given interaction in a group of you know 1500 you don't on the other hand reputation can accumulate in some way that you can check it through people who you know right so people whose reputations are directly known to you are capable of giving you a reference

in fact you know that this works because interpersonally if somebody you trusted to a great extent gave you a recommendation of somebody else you would you would know how to evaluate it so we are unfortunately for both better and worse we are living in a technological landscape that doesn't look like anything that our ancestors faced that provides mechanisms for

Building Solutions to problems that in an ancestral environment would not have been possible and this is not new I mean the library at Alexandria is a technological solution to the problem of information having expanded to a level that a human mind couldn't hold it and ironically burned down by ideologues well sure I mean that's you know yeah so you have to build a structure that is robust to challenge and right of all of the things that would have to be true

replacement system for for planet Earth the the key is understanding that there are certain values that all reasonable people agree on in fact you can use to diagnose who's reasonable so assuming that we don't all start at the same starting point right whether it's from our cognitive ability or education or opportunities how would you stop Predators how would you stop people from preying on the weak how would you stop like

because there are predators who they themselves are unfortunate mentally they themselves have a deficit of thinking and we're dealing with such numbers when we're dealing with 300 and whatever million people we have in this country alone yeah there's plenty of dummies that you could pray on well the first thing that you would want to do is you would want to build so if you came to me and you said I have a social network and it provides

the functionality of Facebook but it insulates you completely from dopamine traps being used to it predict you okay I'd sign up in a second okay right right but you are an intellectual and you are rare in that regard that you're worried about this these people that are in Silicon Valley that are talking about the dangers of the things they've created themselves they're rare most people like look at all the likes right Shirley's likes but well but okay so there's

sons are bored at work right and want to check their likes yes but I mean likes my but picked that's what it's a lot of it you must have a nice butt my boat's not bad okay but the first of all things spread in waves yeah and you know

it is possible to just look at the landscape and say well yeah only intellectuals are going to get why they should want such a thing but it's really it's not accurate I mean for one thing the world is talking about blockchain currency the world is not talking about blockchain currency a very small percentage of the world is talk about blockchain currency the same amount that are talk about the Earth being flat hmm I don't think that's right but I bet it is but I would say I grant your point that it's not a huge percentage of people who are talking about blockchain curiosity but

enough that on the network news people are talking about blockchain is it bubble so it is beginning to penetrate the the public Consciousness and it is penetrating it because people have to navigate lives in which economic fluctuation jeopardizes them and so there's an incentive if there's something over there blockchain is not it's not a joke anymore do you think that blockchain the people that are involved interested and comprehensively understand what

in is are there more or less of them than people that are in cults

there are vastly more paying attention then people in Cults yeah well what do you have to call yeah sniffs I think that's way off because I think there's like a billion Catholics well if you're gonna call Catholicism OK it's a cult I grew up in it okay a hundred percent it's just a coat with a billion people whenever you got a guy who dresses like a wizard who sitting on a Golden Throne oh boy we're here already yeah that's that's but but that is why this is a problem

is that there's many people that live their lives by these ridiculous ideologies that are illogical okay so I'm going to have a challenge you on this Tech them from predators and Facebook likes I'm going to challenge you on this please do Catholicism is not a cult what is the difference between a cult here's I had a bit for my ACT we just are a cult is bullshit and it's created by one person and he knows it's bullshit in a religion that

guys dead okay

so let me ask this is boy this is rough territory but are you okay let's say for me this is Everyday Say yeah all right let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablet all that dude okay I don't know if Moses did come down the mountain with the tablet I don't think you did let's say dead okay did he did he know he was bullshitting people well do you know what religious Scholars actually believe in Jerusalem actually believe that was all about now the whole burning bush tell me they believe it is the acacia Bush which is rich in DMT and they think the metaphor of The Burning Bush was actually a

academic experience 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 this really standard the standard messages that I've myself have gotten from these psychedelic experiences that you have to treat each other as if we're all one and that are separations are all illusions that you are literally living a life that if I was born in your body and I had your genetics I would

EU and you would be me because we are all the same and our differences are really what the illusion is we were these temporary beings and that negative thinking and negative feelings and all these things manifest themselves in the negative actions and negative thoughts and you can change that you can change the frequency in which you exist in this world okay like this is essentially what the 3000 year old version of Moses or more than that Moses his tablets were that they were the God was the burning bush perfect

perfect so I ask you a question you've done some hallucinogens oh yeah and you've had some insight yeah and that Insight had something to do with treating people well yes it definitely did okay was it true well it definitely has benefited me true or false if you ask me is it true that you have had positive experiences from psychedelic drugs where you have interpreted those experiences and improve your life yes that's true okay so if you now go and you convey

that thing to somebody who hasn't had the experience themselves is it bullshit well here's the thing about psychedelics as opposed to all the other ideologies is that they're very repeatable you don't have to believe in DMT if you smoke it you're going to experience it whether you believe in it or not right and actually I think this is I mean I am a cautious fan I say cautious because I don't think I'm not a fan of the idea that these substances should be used recreationally I think that's a mistake I agree with you I think I think

it's fine to have a great time but that these things are so powerful that one should be deliberate about it and you know don't do it with the TV the only thing that I like about doing it recreationally as it's going to get more people to do it and that if you think it's recreational and then you do it there's going to be a certain percentage of those people that go what was that that's not what I thought it was I thought it was going in there to have a good time and I just communicated with God yep air quotes God yeah air quotes well but air quotes God is

because yeah air quotes God is the real deal yeah right in other words it's not a dude on a cloud right it's something it is a metaphor for something lodged very deep in the mind where you can't find it directly and this is a hack that many cultures have used to access that layer and it's all very familiar to us and when you talk to people that have studied DMT in particular one of the reasons why I think it's so familiar to us when you when you have this experience one of the first things that happens is you feel like you've been

there before and they believe that this is because during REM sleep your brain produces DMT yeah and it's very difficult to monitor but they have been able to through the Cottonwood Research Foundation which all started from the work of dr. Rick Strassman out of the University of New Mexico who wrote a book called DMT The Spirit Molecule which was one of the very first times with the DEA allowed them to do clinical studies on people with intravenous dimethyltryptamine which is like fucking serious shit

so instead of like this 10 to 15 minute trip you're gone for a long time half hour plus and deep deep experiences that a lot of these people mirrored they all they they had like super similar experiences but through the Cottonwood Research Foundation they found that live rats are producing DMT in their pineal gland this has been proven now which it was really just speculation it was there was anecdotal evidence but now they know that rats produce this so they don't

know exactly when people do it because they would have to do the same thing they do the rats would have to open your brain up until they develop some sort of sophisticated detection methods it's just speculation as to when the brain is producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug but it's there Rhino it's producing it we know it's produced in the liver it's produced in the lungs it's endogenous to the human system and we don't know why yeah well I'm pretty sure I have a good insight into why okay but for the moment let's pursue the issue of what the implications

okay I'll hold on to while cross my fingers crossed my fingers on that one the story you've just told is perfectly plausible whether it's a hundred percent accurate or not and we don't know right but the idea that you are mind contains mechanisms that go into some sort of psychedelic State without your conscious mind being able to tap into it so your conscious mind walks around during the day not realizing that you're tripping at some other moments for some purpose it's all very interesting you're

not tripping in your sleeping mind for no reason at all you're doing it for productive reasons logically speaking it has to be the case that if you're burning energy and going through the costly exercise of thinking even in the Psychedelic way that it's happening for a reason right and that means that we have carried this with us from an ancestral State into the modern State and we now have molecules that we can trigger it when we want to that

gives you access to a style of thinking that you're telling me has altered your understanding of your relationship to other people and that it metaphorically lines up with what you often hear delivered in religious terms right abstractly yes right and so when you say Catholicism is cult I don't agree because Catholicism has store eclis must have been delivering messages

that caused people to correct their thinking in ways that made them collaborate more effectively that made them better able to find the opportunities in their environment I'm not advocating that we should sign up for belief systems that are

at odds with our modern environment but one thing we can say I believe for sure is that religions that have stood the test of time did so because their value to the people who believed in them it was so great that those that disbelieved were out competed now so we get into trouble in the modern circumstance because we can look at many of the teachings of any of these ancient religions and we can compare them to what we learned

typically in detect that there's something not right can I stop you there sure Scientology is that a cult too early to tell okay but let's stop well but we know the guy who created it well we do but we don't have so let me drag you back at so by the way I'm very uncomfortable with Scientology and what it does but the problem is as Scientology itself points out if you looked at the Inception of something like the Catholic Church you might be equally

troubled sure which is why I think they're both Cults well but let's be careful about that okay what do you what do you think of cult is what do you think of called well I think it cult is the predatory version it is tapping into people's natural tendency to believe in what I call metaphorical truths and it is using it very often to extract resources from them by Seth Church well no not well Catholic here at the Catholic church is so long standing and the population

that has I guess what I would say is if a population succeeds by believing in these things than cult is not the correct I think you and I have different terms we're using different definitions of the word called done but let me let me okay take this is a very interesting oh comparison so Joseph Smith who started the Mormon church had a competitive team right he had a competitor at the time as a book called The Kingdom of Matthias

he's right about his competitor at the time and to me the two looked equally plausible the story that they were selling them Mattias never had more than 30 followers and his religion died out and Joseph and Joseph Smith one and in the Mormon church is obviously a real thing but these sets of beliefs are Advanced by somebody whether those somebody's are cynical when they do it or whether they are earnest I think many of these the

that we have that have lasted for long periods of time have been Advanced by somebody who was in one way or another conscious or not DMT or not tapped into something that when delivered to other people actually constituted a kind of insight as opposed to being a con man right okay and so so the origins of the Catholic Church most likely came from some desire for order and a scaffolding

of how to behave and to give people rules and structure for how to get through this life with the most amount of positivity and love and by disciplining them and having these grave punishments being held over the head burning in the fires of the pits of hell if they decide to have sex with another man or where two different types of cloth or whatever the other silly things that were in the Old Testament by doing this what they've essentially tried to do was offer people

sure no it's not really structure it is a an analog four truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them hmm so let's let's deal with the church on the one hand and Moses on the other okay Moses is obviously important in in Jewish history if Moses

ate some DMT from The Acacia Bush I think it was Smoke always smells why the whole thing of the burning bush that's a he smoked it let's say he was super Savvy and farsighted and you know obviously he didn't know anything about molecules right suppose that he had some ancient model of something anything there must have been something in that plant that caused crazy things to happen let's suppose he didn't believe that he had contacted God that God had contacted him but he woke up from the thing

like wait a minute I know what these people are doing wrong I'm going to write it down and tell them came from God right is Judaism now cult I think they're all cults I think all ideologies are called I just don't I don't know I don't think there is any one person who wrote first of all when you're dealing with

Christianity you're dealing with translations right or Judaism you're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore right and you're also dealing with an oral tradition of who knows how many years before it was ever bothered to be written down but right but written down by people and then people decide what stays in and what doesn't they changed the rules like the priests used to be able to marry priests in the Catholic Church the Pope used to have wives sure now that they ran Army

I mean this is clearly something that human beings have a hand in manipulating and changing and they do it for the benefit of the structure itself well they're not doing it for the benefit of the human beings that are a part of it they're doing it for the benefit of the structure itself oh that I don't agree what's what case with like the money and the the amount of I'm not we're not saying you don't have corruption in all of these stress you do but I am saying that there is a it mean it's is exactly parallel to what we were talking about before

for there is the predatory version which I would call a cult right and there is the earnest version which I would not call a cult now I'm very uncomfortable with any of these things governing policy in the present because none of them have a literal relationship with reality that allows them to deal with the fact that we've got all these new problems for which there are no there's no religious wisdom maybe there's a problem in the word cult maybe maybe we should just say

a structure created by human beings which is basically all structures all structures all all models of behavior where you have to adhere to certain things but the problem with religion and even with a lot of Cults is the supposed grave consequences for deviated right well so alright let's let's pick up Catholicism because it's easy because so much of the structure is visible to yeah

I would argue that Catholicism is going to be true of all of Christianity give me true of Judaism but Catholicism is it is easy to see how it would facilitate collaboration that effectively it would recreate in some sense the Insight that you're talking about from DMT and that it would instantiate it in the population in a useful way that would facilitate collaboration and disrupt

t' processes that cause in fighting Mmm Yeah I was thinking before I might be a structure it's the scaffolding for human behavior and ethics right but imagine I mean we can see it in Catholicism sure know where it is so every week you have to go and confess the shit you're doing wrong to the dude in the Box okay that's how they used to spy on you mean that's what that was for well but why are they spying on you I mean knows I want to make sure that they don't get overthrown well I don't I think I think you're too cynical really yeah because

you think they're doing well so first of all I'm a biologist okay how are these priests who don't marry passing on their genes are not oh they are oh what are they doing they're sneaky no there was Silla tating the stability of the lineage that they are in charge of so the point is they don't pass on their genes directly they're passing on their genes indirectly through the population their interests are synonymous with the population that they are

they are preaching to and so you tell the dude in the box which you've been doing wrong imagine it's adultery okay oh God I'm if I die before next week and I haven't confessed my adult you go to hell I'm going to go to hell that I'd had some very unpleasant place I'm told that guy who doesn't get to have someone to tell him so now the person 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 adultery because going to hear from the other person and so I better confess to so now the priest has a sense of like oh there's

adultery problem in the in congregation and the priest has you know flipping through the book and thinking how this week what should we talk about and so you know the priest and gets up at the pulpit and you know turn your book to Psalm whatever and starts going on about adultery and the people in the congregation who are engaged in adultery or thinking oh shit this is God talking to me directly God knows what I've been up to and he's not happy and that's why we're reading this song

home I better cut it the fuck out right so my point is the dude in the Box

we've taken a vow of poverty he's living in the church he does well when the town does well he's not having babies of his own so he can't really get ahead by himself he gets ahead Genetically speaking when the town does well and he's in a position to spot what's going wrong in the town and he doesn't have a dog in that fight because he's not involved in business he's not involved in mating and dating be no loss all relatively recent when it comes to the Catholic church and the last couple hundred yes

I would argue if you look back at any of these Traditions any of the ones that worked will successfully have addressed the question of how you prevent corruption from emerging apparently was sexual corruption these guys were rock stars like the priests were essentially the guys who have the direct line to God and just like professors have been known to do not you but you know some have sex with their students you know and because the students like look at them like oh my God I can't believe the professor sitting down here with my work and

I mean this is like that's a very minor Connection in comparison to the connection to God anybody who's going to have her anybody who's going to have power is in danger of abusing ashore or would say it's interesting that in the Catholic church and in other traditions where marriage and making money are impossible that these appear to be evolved what's the word it's like

error correction or protection from from a virus so an outbreak of corruption in the church is a Bad Thing from the point of view of the well-being of the congregation and something that says well if you're a priest in your spending money in town people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to have money and if you're you know hanging around with cute girls people are gonna look at you funny cuz you're not supposed to be having sex so this limits their ability to to get away with stuff I'm not saying it's zero obviously

not but the idea that there will be Protections in in each tradition for this that religions that don't successfully protect against abuses of power will succumb in competition to religions that do it effectively and so you're absolutely correct that all of the changes in religious texts that people believe in those that's all human beings making decisions about right what to keep and what to throw out I'm not arguing anything else but what I am arguing is that

those that have been insightful about what to keep from the point of view of the particular problems faced by the population that they are in will have a competitive Advantage because they will function more cohesively than a population of atheists who doesn't have somebody looking out to prevent outbreaks of competition inside the lineage Ur outbreaks of infighting so if you were looking at it in an objective way like say if you were an alien from another planet

it didn't understand the language and you just observing the structure you would see is error correction the structure would say oh they realized there is an issue here with power and so they are corrected by making these priests be celibate and then they figured out a way to keep them from having money and that'll keep them from being invested in you know in okay yeah so what you're saying and I think it's very misleading to people who analyze things the way you and I would because there's so much hocus-pocus associated with these structures

that you know it's like constantly putting a finger in the in the eye of an analytical person of course I mean just the way they dress right I mean just the wearing the wizard costume and holding the staff and sitting on the Golden Throne and and all of it I mean all the pageantry to it it's all Preposterous I mean I agree looking at this a modern person it looks preposterous to me on the other hand there is no way I'm telling you I mean most of my colleagues I'm sure would disagree with this but I hope to show them to be wrong on this

the there is no way that the huge amount of effort and resource that is invested in these structures was an error cannot have been an evolutionary error because if it was the huge investment that populations put into these structures is an opportunity for some population that behaves in exactly the same way except it doesn't make that error to win right but when you get power and then you have the momentum of that power overcome

being the the population and then you have positions where the behavior patterns are extremely restrictive and you have to behave inside these Behavior patterns or there's grave consequences I mean you could conceivably run that for a thousand years without any error correction and that's what you've got with this LOM right you've got a very ancient form of religion that Michael Shermer wrote a piece about it that's pretty interesting where he was talking about how it's the only

that didn't go through the Enlightenment and he makes these comparisons to like the corrections that have been had with other religions as time has gone on that haven't happened there and you could equate it to Resource Management you could create it to the part of the world in which they live you could equate there's a lot of different ways you could try to figure out why this happened but the reality is that thing has not changed that structure has not changed well long time I think you've hit on exactly the

the the right Point Islam's mechanism for preventing outbreaks of chain parasitism was to to hard-code the thing and this is a tragedy because it what it means is that where Islam needs to update it doesn't have the mechanism for doing it so but also has a built-in way to keep people aboard like you become an apostate that you're allowed to you

tell them right until apostates which is there's no other religion that we have right now that operates like that has Draconian imagines if Scientology did that right well I mean Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving right but how is that not a cult since it was created by a science fiction writer literally out of nowhere I'm going to be horrified if I said it wasn't a cult I think Lisa's too early to tell right so how's that possible okay

okay so there could be some benefits in the future if Scientology continues to evolve and self-correct it could get to the point where it's a behavior pattern that could be complementary and perhaps even beneficial to people I do not believe that this is where it is headed but if a thousand years from now it had flourished and the population that believed these things was successfully growing you'd have to say well there's something in that set of beliefs that's

for these right so anyway I'm not arguing that it isn't the called it has lots of Hallmarks that make me think I'm troubled by including much like Mormonism you know the guy who made it but this and unlike Mormonism which was in 1820 we have video we see L Ron Hubbard's bad teeth and his fucking Captain's outfit on with a metals that he gave himself he like hey what is this right oh right well you get a planet when you die or something like that it sounds like a cult to me

on the other hand you know I mean we've got some Mormons get a planet when your dice are used

scientologists don't get a plan no no the Mormons do and it was in one of The Osmond Brothers albums they all went to these planets in the album I forget what the album is it's a hilarious album but if you open it up it's all planets and the album the name of the album is this concept that you get a planet when you die is something that is more misleading feet to me because I'm gonna verse is so big we can each afford to get areas the plan

is it see that that is some Joseph Smith shit by the way it's a wonderful book if you read the actual origins of Mormonism people to listen to go wait a minute what do they believe wow do they believe some wacky stuff but he had a golden or a Seer Stone rather that allowed him to read the golden tablets The Seer Stone was a special magic rock that allowed him to read these golden tablets that contain the Lost work of Jesus that the inside of the album with

all the planets so I believe he was actually illiterate yeah and that was a con man he we ordered put a sheet over his head and dictated what he was supposedly reading to somebody else that's my understanding of it but it was a charismatic person like many people have created Cults he was

I think what they did right Mormons are some of the nicest people I've ever met they have an amazing sense of community they're super nice and I've always said that if I was going to join a call I think I joined the Mormons but where they fucked up is they regulations came in they started restricting the market they started The Regulators came in and stop these people from having nine wives and then they're not going to be so nice anymore the reason why they were so nice is because they have these crazy relationships there were having orgies every night well nine people

the house them they allowed to have sex with there's a problem with your they because for everybody who had nine wives they were eight dudes who had not those guys got to get their shit together and start their own cult I guess where you know well maybe they're gay I don't know what about the women to right well how about a woman who has 10 husbands you know this is bullshit for her that doesn't happen yeah it should right no be possible no no see there's a very good biological reason heading doesn't make any sense but you're ready

yeah polyandrous on me he went we went way far away from our original point which was that you could figure out a way to restructure with this I don't want to call a plan because that's the abortion game be game be can't be well I don't want to say it there is no game be at the moment but there is a conversation that emerged from this from the basic point is that one can structure a superior deal to what people are able to work out

for themselves and it can function inside of the system and it can gain adherence for the very same reason that people are buying Bitcoin for the same reason that people have decided to get smartphones for the same reason people have signed up for Facebook those are with the exception of Bitcoin those are game examples and they are predatory but you could provide a version that was not predatory that would function

in in a superior way with respect to how how it enhanced your ability to function in the world and rational people I mean and you know you make a good point it's not that we have billions of people who are sophisticated enough to know that they should be looking for that alternative and who will jump on it but to the extent that you have people that are sophisticated are aware that their lives are being disrupted by forces that they are incapable of managing like these

dopamine traps and the like who will Embrace these Technologies because they themselves are looking for a mechanism to insulate from the predatory things that have emerged in the market what you will get is the spread of these Technologies and if there is one sort of key message here about all of the objections that one might raise about the difficulty of creating such Alternatives and getting them to be adopted the number of things that we have already

D adopted because we got something for it cellphone being the perfect example we didn't have to tell people to get a cell phone people got a cell phone because of all the things that they could see that it did for them and that same drive to pick up some new technology or agreement because it enhances your life at solve some problem for you in some way that's good that causes the thing to be adopted out of self-interest and that that is what the mechanism for change

is going to have to look like is self-interest causing people to embrace a shift in the the opportunities and obligations that they are signed up for now I think one of the problems that I have with this is that I always assumed that this is going to be like on January the first was switched over to the new system but it's not right can't be Camp can't be I mean not to be a it's got to be almost like a natural chain of events or

it has to be like water flowing downhill hmm that so I can speak scientifically about my own field because you know I did enough training that I know where the bodies are buried when you're in a field and that field is stuck it is impossible to move the field you can't get a hearing that will allow you to change the way the field things but you can step outside the field you

and leave the reservation as it were and you can proceed by other means and what what happens is the same thing that you know Lars Anderson discovered with archery is that once you're no longer signed up for what good form looks like there are all kinds of ways to accomplish things that are not documented and so finding those Alternatives game a is not serving people's needs we

are all unhealthy you know even if we find a way to be physically healthy we are all overwhelmed by so much Social noise and so much choice that is meaningless that we end up wasting a huge fraction of our time spending a tremendous amount of our mental effort on puzzles that aren't interesting or worthwhile or productive and so we are all

each of us has a giant opportunity to upgrade Our Lives by simply removing a bunch of the Noise by getting the systems that are supposed to function in our interest to do so more effectively and therefore we are I hate to use the word consumers but we would be willing consumers for a better alternative where it to show up for us and presenting that alternative so that people find it they experiment with it and upon discovering that actually you know what I am better

when I participate in this way then that way that that causes adoption and it doesn't take very much you know Bitcoin obviously started with you know an ambitious person who set the thing in motion what's a currency with only one person using it right right but now it's not a currency with one person using and it's a currency you've used it I've used it so anyway it is possible to get adoption based on the fact that the thing solves problems that people are otherwise stuck with do you think that because

things are moving so quickly today it seems to me that like new ideas are implemented so fast New Concepts are accepted so quickly that something like this where might have taken several decades a few decades ago would only take a few years to that well the there it's become a thing there are 2 things 1 there is the possibility that things will change very rapidly and then there's the fact that they must because the trajectory we're on we are

playing with such powerful Technologies and being operated at such a high rate with such high throughput that those of us who have started you know I think it's a mistake to look at the problems of the world as individual problems it's much more effective to look at them as symptoms of problems that don't have names so we have an economic system that generates technologies that / create great benefits in the short

short term at some massive cost in the long term and we have no mechanism once they've generated massive profits there's no ability to shut them off right that's a problem that has many many symptoms that we could name but that we we in effect don't have much time that the rate at which we are liquidating the well-being of the planet at present is so fast that effectively we need we need to change quickly and it doesn't mean

I guess that's the other thing that I haven't said yet is nobody including me thinks that we're going to be able to spell out an answer in the present that is correct but what we can do is navigate in the direction of the answer that is correct and we can discover what that answer looks like in other words the right model is not the writing down of the new rules of the world and the Embrace of them because you get benefits it is

prototyping what the new structure would be and then you Institute the prototype in some group of people who have signed up for it and then you discover what you didn't know about it that you needed to know and you correct those problems so that what you get is effectively Evolution building an elegant solution rather than what progressives often accidentally invite which is good intentions that produce horrifying outcomes because you didn't know what they were actually

to do once you set them in motion right communism being a great example you think communism is going to solve the problems of the world in fact it creates you know massive harm and kills Millions because you didn't understand what it would do in motion so we don't want to ever face that again we don't want to be utopians because any time you engage in utopianism if you set it in motion you're going to create a dystopia it's virtually guaranteed the way

to avoid that is not to imagine that you know the answer it's to Define what objective you want the system to reach and then navigate towards it how do you think this could be implemented well it requires Capital frankly and it requires capital and people who understand what the problems are most importantly it requires people who

understand Game Theory because what we keep doing is setting systems in motion that have the characteristics that guarantee Evolution there are only four of them and if you set a system in motion that has those four characteristics you will get adaptive Evolution and what it will produce you have no control over it will produce whatever the niche space allows so you need people who are aware of the game theory

Eric parameters of the space and who understand if centrally the you know Game Theory

is a very important topic it's less complicated than people think there aren't as many games as you would imagine there are a few canonical ones and then they're a bunch of variations on a theme but understanding those things so that you can use so you can effectively harness the power of evolution to build a functional system rather than build a system and then suffer the consequences of evolution that you didn't anticipate that's what we keep doing we've built an economy and a political system that

evolved out from under us and they create monstrous phenomena that we didn't anticipate because they weren't in the plan do you think that it's possible that like you see the radical change the social change has happened just over the last couple months since the Harvey Weinstein do you see what's happened I mean it literally is probably stop sexual harassment dead in his tracks women who work in these workplaces that had to deal with the consequences of these guys

the amount of those sexual harassment episodes is probably been radically reduced like that yeah is it temporary though I don't know it's a good question it's a good question I think because my only concern is that with false accusations or overreactions or people that are just not treating this like the incredibly powerful medium that it is the medium for change and then using it

their own benefit people could get greedy and corrupt this right but I think already happening sure I'm sure what you know any examples Yeah couple of them I mean I don't want to like every other man I am hesitant to put my weight on the ice with anybody because who knows what you don't know right but I've seen several stories now that I find very disturbing the first one and I must say you know this was a topic of conversation with me and my friends as I'm

sing it would have been with you and your friends and

feel weird saying this on your podcast but here it comes

my friends and I have discussed this had a kind of reaction which was you know it turns out to have been a really good decision never to grope anybody who wasn't into it right right right of course it wasn't the reason that we didn't grow up anybody but but nonetheless it turns out to have been a benefit that we're don't we're not worried about what's going to emerge yes so that's what I was saying and then I saw this Garrison Keillor story

yeah and suddenly I don't feel so safe anymore because I've seen Killer one is the most disturbing one it's not actually but it's not know there's one more there's other words one tell everybody that Garrison Keillor story there's including story so by the way the only thing we have so he was fired from Minnesota Public Radio his radio program was not only renamed but the old ones were disappeared I mind you I don't give a damn about Garrison keillor's radio program right but the only thing

I think we have as an explanation is his own account right so is there another side of the story I can't say but I must say the account had the Ring of truth to it because it would have been very devastating if some compelling counter-narrative it emerged and the story he told was that he had been comforting a woman I think she may have lost somebody have been comforting a woman and he had leaned in I guess to hug her and put his hand on her back and he

I'd hit her shirt was open and he touched her back and he said his hand went up about 6 inches that she recoiled he apologized in the moment he then sent her an email apologizing she said don't worry about it it's not a big deal and he said that he and she were friendly until he got a contact from her lawyers and how long after the event was a didn't say but my feeling is let's take the

worst possible interpretation to least generous to Keeler interpretation of the city groped her a little bit yeah maybe he lost his place yeah maybe he just was leaned in he leaned in for a moment he had a sexual thought or something touched her back and then you know he did what he should have done which is apologized right she accepted the apology he still felt bad about it he apologized again yeah and so anyway just a back right it's just touching so yeah I'm not saying there's another

throw in the story but the idea that the guys entire careers being erased from the radio archives because of this one story if there's more there's more but if there ain't more that's really disturbing and it this would not have happened if it wasn't for like Harvey Weinstein right Harvey Weinstein who's his actions were so disgusting and so egregious and so numerous so despicable that it went so far this way that anything even remotely

remotely gross got shifted into that category right like into the Kevin Spacey category Kevin Spacey's grabbing dicks and write a cyborg - for now you're our story came out on the same day as the Garrison Keillor story and that one is truly disturbing to I mean really just you know rape presumably legally but even if it wasn't what is described and again you know I'm a Believer in due process I thought I just had a fairs no

no no there's really disturbing stuff including him I mean I want to be a little cautious about this business about him having a button under they all have buttons that's a really common thing and NBC it is yeah yeah that's yeah see that's the problem with these problems story but they're so it's not something you really want to go into and start reading you feel like you're gross it is gross but I will say there was one story whether that button is a commonplace thing that's been misinterpreted I don't know but there is some story in which some woman came into

his office he had her bent over his desk he had sex with her She fainted and he had his assistant take her to the hospital which you know anyway yeah I I'm uncomfortable now because I can't establish that any of this stuff is true but I will say this innocent Killer story doesn't sound like the flower story it doesn't sound like the Harvey Weinstein story or Kevin Spacey and the gal Franken won one of the women said that he grabbed her way

T squoze the the fat around her waist when and she uses a disturbed because even her husband is not allowed to touch her like that in public well I want to come back to Al Franken separately I believe we need okay very separate category for Franken but I was going to tell you what was worse than their story go ahead so the Killer story is disturbing when I heard that one suddenly my feeling of safety based on the fact that I haven't groped anybody who didn't want to be groped vanished because suddenly

it was open season but the story that disturbs me even more is the Matt Taibbi story

I don't know that who that is I know who Matt Taibbi via so Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone reporter who's been really excellent at confronting power especially in the financial sector and you know he's been very consistent on this apparently as a young man he was in Russia and he was publishing a satirical magazine I guess it was and the cetera satirical magazine

so there's the story that came out which was that he had written all of these things about about assaulting women and mocking them turned out he didn't do the writing it was his partner and that he and his partner were engaged in producing the satirical publication that was in fact mocking the culture of Americans who had gone over to Russia and we're Snortin tons of coke and

living it up as they were corrupting the society that had recently been freed from communism and so the the point is this was a case in which the evidence against Taibbi was ironic because it was really tiny be critiquing this bad behavior amongst other men and so the reason that this you know I wouldn't know what to make of that story except that the person the journalists who started sorting this out interviewed both Matt Taibbi his girlfriend who worked at the

Ian and other women in the office soliciting stories about what had happened in the office and the women in the office universally reported these guys were honorable and they weren't behaving this way and this was all about satire of these bad folks and so anyway there's a way in which this story creeps me out Beyond any other because the danger of losing you know Matt Taibbi there isn't another one right and what he's doing is important is amazing these are brilliant writer write

and so you know I was a going to be pretty surprised if he was behaving this way but okay I've been surprised by a few of these and it wasn't even necessarily behaving it was writing it was writing but the fact that there's no there there when you pursue the story that's not women who were in a position to say yeah actually he was kind of a dick and we actually write it right he didn't write it it was designed to Lampoon people who were behaving badly in this context in exactly the way that the me to movement should applaud

you retweeted and quoted a woman who wrote something and I retweeted it as well when you did it which he said here's an unpopular opinion I'm actually not at all concerned about men who are falsely accused of sexual assault / harassment and you said rethink this you know there's the idea that Honorable Men Who are on your side could get caught up in this and you're not even remotely concerned I don't have to follow the thread before she turned her page

a private but one of the more hilarious things they turned it on her saying what about men of color who are falsely accused and yellow Rock men of color while you know she felt the racism coming her way and immediately acquiesced it was it was fascinating because I'm watching this social dance this weird peacocking of morals and it's just it's so odd but I think that it's a like we're talking about with other things systems correct themselves you find this this one terrible example and then

everything sort of like it gets washed out because of this one terrible example and then I feel like it'll settle you know well I don't know I'm just guessing you're the biologist I do I'm disturbed that particular tweet you're talking about about I don't care if some innocent man go down is based on one relatively easy to understand conclusion but it misses the more important one so what she's effectively saying is there's been a ton of Carnage lots of women have suffered

awful stuff at the hands of men who weren't accountable and so a few men who suffer some bad stuff is Tiny and comparison we all get that but that's a terrible idea because it's a team thing then it's that were Cyrus's them it's the worst idea because what you want is a system in which men are honorable and if you allow men who are honorable to be skewered simply because some person often cynical decides to go after them a you're going to eliminate all of the

courageous men from the system because all those people have enemies yes and so the point is anybody with an enemy suddenly has to fear an accusation that has no truth in it that's going to be reflexively believed so if you want the system to work the last thing you want to do is just decide it's fine for innocent people to go down with the ship yeah and to not have any respect for due process has just crazy mean that's that you're going to go back to the McCarthy era you're going to go to the Salem Witch Trials it is that it is that it is the yeah I just hope it keeps

our daughters and wives and girlfriends and moms from being groped at work right I mean it might it might look the I've always said this the environment of an office is so fucking entirely unnatural that it takes incredible restraint just to keep people from behaving in the way that they would if they were surrounded by these people on a regular basis and like we were talking about before with professors the relationship that a professor has with a student but it's even more so with boss

and an employee right a secretary someone who makes a fraction of what you make or someone who's a under you know the below you in the office food chain and you kind of can dictate whether or not they do well in life whether or not they Advance your input can change the course of their career how much money they make whether we'll be able to go on vacations whether they can live comfortably pursue their dreams I mean it's a crazy environment the office environment

is a very bizarre environment it's super dangerous and what I keep waiting for maybe somebody's written at I haven't read it yet but the Deep question so we have to deal with the issue of Men Behaving this way obviously it's completely unacceptable and you know we have two dangers we've got people cynically wielding these accusations and we also have predatory behavior crucifying people for infractions that don't amount to

you know the same tragedy right so anyway so those issues are important but what I want to see is that what happened is actually a consequence of an unhealthy truth of our system and actually goes back to the conversation we were having before where the power of men like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer comes from a very unnatural concentration of opportunity

so women have been compromised because if you're in the news Biz at was at NBC and Matt Lauer tells you to open your blouse suddenly you're staring at a major career decision right do you say no or do you say yes and

that's it's not one person is not supposed to have that much power you should be able to walk out of NBC and say I'm not working there anymore because Matt Lauer's and ass and go somewhere else but if Matt Lauer is not only has the power to make a well to make your career but he also has the power to break you because you can't you can't endure having said no to him right then that's a tragedy and in fact did you read Salma Hayek's yes story on Harvey Weinstein

terrifying and I thought I mean a I thought it was very courageous of her to write it that she didn't need to because Weinstein was already understood to be the monster they was and I actually thought she did a good job I mean he is a monster but she went she even though he was her monster in her words she said that there were two Harvey Weinstein's and you didn't know which one you were going to get so she actually she dealt with the part of him that wasn't this way if

lightly honorably enough to say that when nobody else was talking about so I don't wish to resurrect anything Harvey Weinstein here I think the guy is getting what he deserves and even though due process is super important in this case there's so many stories that it's impossible to imagine well it's not just stories it's actually written into his contract yeah and the settlements yeah but the sexual harassment Clauses in his contract with the craziest fucking things I've ever seen in my life yeah like they literally said if you have one infraction it's this amount of money to and fractions it's half a million dollars three infractions

it's me just monetized it's insane and the point is well there's something unhealthy about a system that creates somebody so powerful that they are capable of just treating their own sexual assault of other people as a cost of doing business by writing it into the contract so we have to fix not only do we have to fix that you if you're a man and you behave this way you're not safe we also have to fix the system that let this go on So Long by concentrating opportunity

that any person who decided to say actually things are not healthy here would have been a not listen to because everybody else had stuff to lose if Harvey Weinstein didn't like you and so anyway

curing the concentration of opportunity problem is part and parcel of solving the sexual assault problem hmm yeah and it's also this giant Enterprise right and when you have one person who's the king which is essentially what he was they behave like kings have classically I mean that's what Kings do they they they want everyone they want you know I mean you hear horrible stories throughout history

of things that men do when they have ultimate power the old phrase ultimate power corrupts you know or absolute power corrupts absolutely yeah it's just there's no way around it it seems like unless there's full disclosure and less I firmly believe that all of this is there's two things going going on right now that we are in sort of an adolescent stage of human evolution in terms of our culture and that we're working

nowt how we interact to behave with each other that information and the ability to exchange information is highlighting all these flaws in these natural systems that we have with these Alpha chimps that are running these giant groups but then I think this technology that it's exposing us is going to give way to something that's even scarier and my my number one fear of the last year has been artificial intelligence oh I'm tremendously troubled by it I'm more scared of it every day every day I wake up thinking are we

sleeping while this thing is about to go live and we literally are in a fucking Terminator movie I think it's both better and worse than that we it's happening already and because it's not robots we don't see it right it's happening in your phone there's a TI that's your yeah and the thing is it's a I it's not a GI right so AG being General okay so the fear the one that we have sentient yeah

yeah that the thing is smart enough to start thinking on its own and that it might come up with its own objectives to be creative it might be creative and either misunder you know the paperclip problem is you tell it to make as many paper clips as possible and it sees your attempt to turn it off or reprogram it as an obstacle to making paper clips and just start liquidating the universe so that's not a malevolent AI That's a confused a I right malevolent AI is also possible but what we've got

is a baby version

the algorithms causing us to become addicted to our phones and to do damage to our lives is a i these are algorithms that are developing I met frankly doesn't even matter whether people are reprogramming them or whether they are reprogramming themselves and it is undoubtedly a mixture what we have is a evolutionary system that the winner will be the site that manages to capture your attention in the face of competitors who are trying to do the same thing and they will build anything and everything into that

algorithm to get you to do it which means there's nothing in your life that sacred right your life can be liquidated to get you addicted to that site on the phone what we have now is a case where the algorithms aren't so good that we can't have this conversation recognize that this is a danger we've created for ourselves and address it we could address it now but if we don't realize that the phone algorithm addiction problem is this is the warning shot this is the place where we get it

a chance to recognize where we're headed and deal with it before it's a GI if we don't do that I don't everybody who's serious and has thought about this question has had the same oh shit rational or conclusion is that we there's no stopping this there's a we can rationally debate how far off it is but once it gets going there's essentially no good there's no good way out so there's no one that's going to agree

stop right now Rises too much competition involved in in terms of the the you have there's so many resources that are on the line so much resources there's so much power there's so much money on the line to see who can come up with the best version of this and do it the quickest and it's this mad race towards the edge of a cliff and no one exactly knows whether or not we're going to be able to use the brakes right and so in some ways I think this is the the ultimate demonstration of

where we are and what we must contemplate in order to save ourselves because if we can agree that the AI problem has the potential to destroy us and that given time it will have the power to destroy us and that we are vague at best on What mechanisms might prevent it from doing so but then we've got this loophole which is well suppose you took 99% of the AI projects and managed to correctly build in some

Rhythm that prevented them from going rogue in one way or the other but somebody else decides not to so you we have to confront this at the level of what is allowed right I don't like hearing myself say that because I hear people turning off on the other end when they hear oh he doesn't want to allow us to innovate but for the survival of the species I think it's imperative you have to hang about a week with no choice I'm so scared that we're caught up in all this other nonsense and we're thinking about so much stupid

that shit and our life like you know whether or not Kim and Kanye stay together and in the middle of all this there's a lab right now and they're connecting these wires and connecting these dots and reprogramming and accelerating the evolution of this thing and it's not going to turn off and that Life as we know it we only have a few years left of this I really feel like we're in a fucking science fiction movie and we're at the beginning of the movie where everything's great right it's all we got two problems we got a lot of dudes out there pension but sand is a

some some dudes are pretty rapey and we got rid of Kevin Spacey got taken out of that movie we're doing pretty good right and then in the meanwhile there's fucking robots that are being built by boss Dynamic that does backflips and they going to be able to think for themselves and they're going to have machine guns for hands right and their bodies going to be filled with bullets what could go wrong it's fucking crazy because it's happening at such an accelerated rate that it's literally what I'll be sitting around I'll be playing with my kids I'll be hanging out and I'll be like fuck are they

making robots right now is that is are we a we like a year away from this being a real problem well this is this is kind of what I'm getting at is that the AI problem in some ways maybe it's good because it's causing us to be able to focus on one of these hazards to us that you can't once you've seen why this is a risk once you've really made eye contact with it you can't talk yourself into why it's safe right because it can't possibly be Ryan if 99% of them are safe

one percent is enough to create the problem so once you've once you've got that information you can then begin to extrapolate to all of the other problems that don't have the same the same Intrigue around them you know there's something Sam Harris makes the point that as you talked about the you know the AI apocalypse it is simultaneously horrifying but kind of fun to get into because you know because it is sort of sci-fi and all but

but the whole landscape that we have built right our socio-political landscape was built by people who had never heard of Darwinism there was no Darwinism they didn't know and so they built a bunch of ecosystems in which stuff evolves and they didn't know to worry about it so the AI problem is a very concentrated version of a very general problem which is if you build a habitat and you install into it those features which cause evolution

to occur it will occur and what it will create is entirely a question of what the niches look like that you have left open so we are living that we are suffering the consequence of an economic environment that is evolutionary that creates giant rent-seeking monsters who are liquidating our well-being and putting it into their bank accounts we've created a political apparatus that has the same characteristics and now we're facing a robot version that actually

actually has the potential to very rapidly push us over the cliff my my real issue with this and this is something that I've been battling again with for a couple years now is that this is what we do and it's one of the reasons why we're so fascinated with technological innovation and mean that literally we are the caterpillar that is becoming the electronic butterfly and we don't realize it while we're doing it and we're so obsessed with the newest latest greatest phone that really doesn't change your life at all like I got this new iPhone it's pretty it's great

do the same shit I did on my old iPhone but I was so pumped to get it man but you're in some ways facilitating the evolution of this technology that ultimately lead if you follow it to an end point it's going to lead to something very very bizarre I mean if your Ray Kurzweil you think it's going to be wonderful and you going to be able to download your brain into a computer but if you were a lot of other people you think it's an absolutely terrifying thing that's going to eventually lead to us being irrelevant and this is unnecessary so like

we won't have time to go very far into it but we have an alternative and I think it does look a little bit like Lars Anderson with his fancy archery you know which is we are just on the cusp of understanding enough about what a human being is and how it functions for asked to actually take control of our structure and to turn it to our to basically creating a stable non utopian

abundant system in other words the stuff that we are all pursuing right you got your first smartphone and it changed everything and it was marvelous and then your second one didn't change that much in your third one was no big deal and your fourth one is barely a blip right that thing that we are pursuing the well-being that we felt the burst of when we got our first our first smartphones that thing can be made to the system can be made such

such that we are constantly getting the signals of well-being and the Liberty to do things that are of consequence in other words it is not beyond our current understanding to build a system that instead of getting you to innovate something having a huge burst of dopamine and then it wears out and you're constantly looking for the next one it is possible to build a system that

is structured such that your intuitive interaction with it is healthy so that you are feeling about that is something I want to engage with that is something I don't feel like engaging with actually leads you correctly through it and that would free your mind to think about interesting things rather than thinking about you know which news magazine is the least fake right so

architecting A system that is that understands what a human being is that understands we are not built to be happy and therefore pursuing happiness as if we were built to be happy is a hazard we should be pursuing something else and we should recognize that happiness is a carrot on a stick that that Evolution built into us in order to get us to pursue objectives which were not stable well-being they were

really the spread of our genomes which you can attach to technology this Pursuit of Happiness is the pursuit of material material possessions and we've we facilitate that with these advertisements that make every new thing look like this is the one that's going to take me over the top I'm going to finally reach the promised land well we technology is one thing really we are built to pursue something that economists called growth but I would say human beings like all

all creatures are built to detect opportunities that they can capitalize on and those opportunities can look like various different things it can look like a bunch of you know for some creature foraging it can be some food that it happens on to for a population of humans that can be a new continent that's a huge opportunity for human beings it can also be a new technology that takes whatever opportunity you have and make allows you to do more with it but we are wired to search for those things

and the pursuit of those things has produced a great many marvellous Innovations and discoveries but the fact that we do not understand that we are mindlessly pursuing these things even when they are not available causes us to do all sorts of harm to ourselves so understanding these things as we finally are beginning to we could build a civilization that did not leave us on the hedonic treadmill pursuing happiness which cannot possibly be

be reached but would allow us to be fulfilled and to to utilize the amazing brain capacity that Evolution has given us for something that's actually worthy of it Bret Weinstein on that note let's wrap this bitch up all right thank you sir I really appreciate it thank you so much a lot of fun and I hope I hope someone can actually do this I hope it can be done awesome thank you thank you very much all right thank you Brett Weinstein on Twitter and you don't have those other things don't use those other terrible technology I'm not all right

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done we did it thank you for tuning in appreciate you and we'll talk to you soon bye bye