00:00:36.100Well, let's just for anyone who isn't familiar with the story, which is not many people, of course,
00:00:40.420I mentioned you being chased out of Evergreen College with your wife, Heather, who we've met as well.
00:00:46.920Just remind everybody what happened there, because it's such an important piece of what is happening now
00:00:52.040and where you're coming at the current cultural moment from.
00:00:54.640Well, I have to tell you, this is my least favorite question in the universe, because what happened cannot be summarized simply. But fate has delivered me some good fortune, which is that now Evergreen is happening everywhere. And so people are more familiar with the story because it's now happening to them.
00:01:12.900So for those who don't know it, I would recommend, A, that they check out Mike Naina's documentary on the Evergreen story.
00:01:19.720They could check out Benjamin Boyce's 20-part series on the catastrophe.
00:01:24.780And they could check out Heather and my article in the Washington Examiner.
00:01:28.700But the short version is Evergreen was three years early.
00:01:34.280There was a new president who impaneled a group to fix a largely imaginary racial problem
00:01:43.240at Evergreen, and they created a proposal that would have been fatal to the institution.
00:01:48.900As that proposal was unveiled, I opposed it, which made me public enemy number one, and
00:01:54.800at some point, a protest was formulated and sent to my classroom where 50 students I had
00:02:01.960never met demanded my resignation or my firing. Protests erupted across the campus. They quickly
00:02:09.800turned into riots. The president, in his infinite wisdom, pulled the police out and told them not
00:02:16.540to enforce the law, leaving the campus to literal anarchy. And I was pursued by people who were
00:02:24.840wielding weapons, looking for me specifically. It was a taste of autonomous zones and other
00:02:30.900of these phenomena a bit ahead of the curve. Wow. So you saw this happen three years ago.
00:02:39.660Did you think it was going to spread in quite the way it has done? Or did you think it was going to
00:02:43.280be an isolated incident of madness? I thought it was going to spread exactly the way it has spread.
00:02:50.060The one thing I didn't see was the speed. It happened quicker than I expected. It was like
00:02:55.660it was a built-up kind of pressure in the system that hit a phase transition point, and suddenly
00:03:01.720it was everywhere, where I thought it was going to spread slowly, and, you know, it would take
00:03:06.140five, six, seven years, but it was really like it died down a little bit on college campuses
00:03:12.420over the course of three years, and then, boom, the George Floyd protest caused it to take over
00:03:18.320every institution simultaneously, at least here in the US. And do you think that's partly to do
00:03:23.240with what in our country, certainly lockdowns and people being stuck at home and loss of work and
00:03:29.020loss of kind of sense of the future? People seem to have reacted in that way. Or do you think this
00:03:33.980was always going to happen? Well, you know, I told the Congress it was going to happen when they had
00:03:39.100me testify. You can see in Mike Naina's documentary that I spell out how this was, what I said there
00:03:46.540was that I'm frequently asked about the free speech crisis on college campuses. And every time
00:03:51.940I'm asked, I tell them the same thing, which is this is not about free speech and it's only
00:03:56.620tangentially about college campuses. It will eventually spill out everywhere. There's no
00:04:02.340question that the lockdown and the chaos of 2020 set this in motion differently than it would have
00:04:10.680have occurred otherwise. But the real issue is that there's a kind of game theory that causes
00:04:20.000this thing to spread. And I want to be very careful about using the language of contagion,
00:04:24.740because very often that language is used to break empathy with people. And I do think that these
00:04:30.600protests are motivated by a correct understanding that the system is rigged against average people.
00:04:38.340So the energy that is built up in the system is about something very real. And I don't want to
00:04:43.460discount that. But the belief structure of the movement and the proposals for solutions are
00:04:51.780absolutely insane. They are civilization-destroying ideas, and they are spreading by virtue of a
00:04:59.600discontinuity between what's in the interest of the individual on short-time scales and what's
00:05:05.540in our collective interest on long-time scales. So, in effect, people are solving a personal
00:05:11.500problem by embracing this ideology, which causes the mob to temporarily leave you alone,
00:05:17.660but it empowers the mob to go after the next level. And yeah, I guess the short answer to
00:05:24.540your question is it unfolded a bit differently. It probably unfolded a lot faster, but the
00:05:29.600trajectory was clear from the beginning because, you know, I don't know why this was a surprise
00:05:35.700to anyone, but colleges educate people who then move into the rest of the world. And as they do,
00:05:40.940they carry whatever they learned in their classes with them so if they learned good things that's
00:05:46.500great for us and if they learned absolute nonsense about why things aren't working and they were told
00:05:52.640that there was a simple solution that involved them tearing everything down and utopia arising
00:05:57.200in its wake then they'll tear it down but brett those people who's going to be listening to our
00:06:02.920podcast who may have sort of dimly aware of what's happening in america and all the rest of it
00:06:08.400and the Black Lives Matter movement. Why do you think, and to use the word,
00:06:13.260civilization ending for these ideas? Isn't that just quite a doomsday prediction?
00:06:20.380Well, yes, but when you're headed towards doomsday, you want to make a doomsday prediction.
00:06:24.500That's something I've got some calculations I can show you later about why that's true.
00:06:30.060But no, it's actually pretty simple. So what we have is a horizontal
00:06:35.200revolution taking place in the US. And, you know, it's not just the US, you can see it across the
00:06:41.640English speaking world and in some ways across Western civilization. But this horizontal revolution
00:06:48.780is basically infused into everything by virtue of largely millennials who have learned critical
00:06:56.020theory and its downstream consequences in college and elsewhere. They've carried it quietly with
00:07:03.040them when they were low down on the ladder inside of these institutions. And then suddenly they get
00:07:09.960the sense that they are demographically empowered to bring about this utopian change. And so they've
00:07:16.960each gone after the power structures inside their institutions. That means, at least in the US at
00:07:22.720the moment, we have a problem everywhere simultaneously, right? We're seeing evidence
00:07:28.140of this in the federal government. We're seeing evidence of this in every single tech company.
00:07:33.040We're seeing evidence of it in every college.
00:07:35.840And the fact that I'm saying every should tell you something, right?
00:07:39.280If this were simply very popular, if it were 70% of institutions, well, that would leave
00:07:44.620us some sort of foothold because that would mean that the 30% of institutions that weren't
00:07:48.640affected would have some hope of rebooting the structure.
00:07:52.440But because it's every college and every company, we don't have anything with which
00:07:58.760to retain our sanity or our capacity to navigate. Now, that could simply be a threat to the US.
00:08:08.080And it could be that the US was going to hobble itself by embracing this nonsense. And, you know,
00:08:14.280if your engineering school embraces the idea that, you know, logic is a European kind of
00:08:22.160oppression that has been imposed on the rest of the world, which is literally something that is
00:08:26.440being suggested here. If our engineering schools do that, they will empower the engineering schools
00:08:32.960elsewhere in the world to take over because, of course, the bridge is built by people who don't
00:08:37.180think such things will be stronger and last longer. But think now, if the U.S. does this,
00:08:43.540if we hobble ourselves, that leaves an incredible power vacuum internationally. Who is likely to
00:08:50.200fill it yeah all right so my point is how is this a threat to western civilization very simply right
00:08:57.860you've got a effectively monopolar world and the thing that constitutes the organizing structure
00:09:05.640of that world you know corrupt and broken as it is but nonetheless an organizing structure
00:09:10.240that holds liberty as a high value that thing is now engaged in some kind of ritual suicide
00:09:15.880Right. And I've tried to make this point to people for some time now when people criticize the U.S. and they're right to. The U.S. isn't perfect. Of course it's not. But, you know, the vacuum that can be created by undermining the United States is going to be filled by someone, either the Chinese or the Russians or someone who comes from one of those countries.
00:09:34.540I can tell you that's not going to be a pretty place. But are you perhaps reassured by the events
00:09:40.840of recent days, Brett, with resignation of Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan from the New York Times?
00:09:46.680It seems that people are prepared now to call out some of this stuff, to go against the Harper's
00:09:52.460letter, for example. Are these steps that are likely to make a significant impact, or is it just
00:09:57.700the protestations of the doomed few. Wow. It's hard for me to imagine why Barry Weiss's
00:10:04.960resignation and the Harper's letter would represent reason for hope. I mean, I do think
00:10:10.340there's reason for hope, but it's going to be a needle that we're going to have to thread.
00:10:13.480In effect, what we have is evidence that the battle that has gone on at the New York Times
00:10:20.120has been lost. And I have to say, as much as I don't want to challenge the Harper's letter,
00:10:26.360I have lots of friends who signed it. I think it was more or less a disaster and not because of the backlash that it got, but because of what it represented. So I saw that letter as an attempt by people who suddenly became aware of the hazard that we face to carve out a deal.
00:10:45.960They effectively had a kind of immunity and they've lost it. And they seem to have attempted to resurrect it. But in so doing, many of our most important voices, people who have been very careful and courageous in challenging this ideology, were dragged into a letter that fused them together with people who actually hadn't seen it and had been part of the problem.
00:11:13.300And then a lot of other people were excluded from the letter by design, which means that the letter divided the small but cogent coalition that has been fighting against this all along.
00:11:28.600The letter took great pains, for example, to portray the censorious instinct as a feature of the right that we are just beginning to see on the left, which that's not the way recent history looks here, right?
00:11:41.360Many of our best defenders have actually come from the right. And I can say that personally,
00:11:45.760because I was somebody who received that defense. Many of the people who showed up on my behalf
00:11:50.480were from the right. And, you know, to portray the right as the problem is just simply
00:11:56.740misunderstanding where we are. Yeah, there did seem to be a lot of this sort of, well,
00:12:01.280Trump's evil, but here's my opinion about other stuff in that letter. Go ahead, Francis.
00:12:05.580No, I was just going to say how refreshing it is to have you asking a silly question instead of me.
00:12:09.960i'm absolutely delighted that is very unusual i agree with you but but here's the thing brett i
00:12:17.100remember talking to you and we sort of both identified really as disaffected lefties and
00:12:21.740heather in particular your college professors i'm a former teacher isn't this the fault of
00:12:27.680capitalism in that it has presented young people with this economic system which no longer works
00:12:33.560for them capitalism does not work for millennials and it does not work for the generation that came
00:12:38.460after them so can we blame young people for going you know what we need a new system because i'm
00:12:43.720excluded from it yeah we can't blame young people for registering that the system is rigged against
00:12:50.760them and demanding that that be fixed and i don't you know i really don't think most of the people
00:12:56.620involved in this protest have any idea what they're signing up for they are they are reacting
00:13:01.260predictably to a system that has frozen them out of the well-being that they helped to create or
00:13:07.200could create if only there was a place for them in society that made sense. So the anger is
00:13:14.440generated by something very real. I'm hesitant to say it's capitalism because it's very hard to say
00:13:19.940what that means. I think there are things that markets do that no other structure can do better
00:13:26.240and that for those things, we need to use markets. And there are other things that markets shouldn't
00:13:30.880be allowed to touch. And we have now reflexively just thrown markets at everything as the solution
00:13:36.080to every problem. And it has caused a kind of amplifier of inequality that couldn't possibly
00:13:46.280have led anywhere else. But the answer isn't simple. Were there a leadership structure in
00:13:55.080the movement, we could have that dialogue. And perhaps the movement could be brought to some
00:14:00.500kind of useful place where we could actually finally challenge the things that are so structurally
00:14:05.920broken about our system. But without leadership, basically every bad idea gets incorporated. It's
00:14:12.380like, you know, a brainstorming session in which there's no ability to say, no, that doesn't make
00:14:16.500sense. And that couldn't be a greater hazard, especially with the amount of power that the
00:14:22.800game theory provides this movement. And to your point about disaffected lefties and all,
00:14:29.920I still regard myself not only as a liberal and a progressive, but I regard myself as a radical.
00:14:37.480I haven't changed my political position because the reality of where we are hasn't been altered
00:14:42.880by this. What has changed is the recognition of others who see themselves on the left,
00:14:49.920of who their allies might be. So in some sense, when I listen to the mainstream left or even the
00:14:56.540radical left, I don't recognize anything they're saying as useful in the current context. So
00:15:02.580when I say I'm a radical, what I mean is I actually think we need radical change in order
00:15:08.120to survive, that we have run off the end of the tape and the processes that we were using to make
00:15:13.160sense and to figure out how to navigate have now created an existential threat, or they've created
00:15:19.340a mode that generates new existential threats so regularly that we won't go on very long this way,
00:15:24.940therefore we have to fix that but the solutions i hear coming out of the the modern left at least
00:15:31.540here in the u.s are all backwards looking and none of them stand a chance of solving the problem
00:15:36.660so the thing that troubles me with it brett and that worries me in the context of you saying this
00:15:41.800is civilization ending is that uh it's what happens to the people who dissent against some
00:15:47.620of those very bad ideas that are being suggested people talk about cancel culture but i mean it's
00:15:53.480not the first time this has happened in history where people who objected to very bad ideas were
00:15:58.760punished for for speaking their mind and anyone who understands that history would would kind of
00:16:04.560see where this is going does that is that a big part of what troubles you oh yeah i think um it
00:16:11.160well first of all i should say because we tend to focus on what's active we are seeing a picture in
00:16:18.980which the failure mode that we are headed for is this ever expanding power of this mind-numbing
00:16:27.420nominally left-wing movement. But that mind-numbing left-wing movement is going to back
00:16:34.680the right wing into a corner. And the problem is the thing that these two entities are going to
00:16:40.860agree on is that the way to look at the problems of civilization is race versus race. And so my
00:16:47.360My biggest concern is not that the left wins this and suddenly it's Maoist China.
00:16:52.660It's that we are in some battle between becoming Maoist China and some kind of return to a race first view of America, which is frankly the uninvention of America.
00:17:04.660If we are one thing, it is a structure designed to neutralize these population against population dynamics so that we can prosper together.
00:17:13.780And the uninvention of that is really unthinkable.
00:17:16.540and why has the left been infected with these bad ideas because everybody drink please my
00:17:23.160mother's from venezuela i've seen this happen in venezuela and you know chavez get elected
00:17:30.180everybody goes this is a brand new dawn it goes well you know everybody on the left lots of people
00:17:35.220prominent germanists thinkers bernie sanders said this is the future it collapses it implodes
00:17:40.720it's now got a larger migrant population than syria and they don't seem to want to admit that
00:17:46.400it's just a bad idea? Well, the problem is that there's, I think, a very simple answer to that
00:17:53.720question, but it takes a few hours of background work in order to see why it's clear, right? So,
00:18:00.340in essence, some version of communism or socialism arises in the mind when you see
00:18:08.760runaway inequality that is generated by a system with markets in the wrong place.
00:18:14.740so the fact that people naturally land on this formulation that if only we could do x
00:18:23.000then our problems would be solved fails to understand why x is unstable right so x is
00:18:29.640unstable for reasons that inside of my discipline evolutionary biology we would call the group
00:18:35.920selection fallacy the group selection fallacy says that the the central concept of communism
00:18:42.420from each according to his ability to each according to his need will not work because
00:18:47.620we are wired not to do it, right? Because anybody who opts out of that system outperforms anybody who
00:18:53.860opts in. So the short answer is if you institute that system, you will have to institute something
00:19:01.540authoritarian and draconian with it in order to make it work so that you can restructure people's
00:19:06.120incentives so that they do not respond to the fact that they would be better off opting out.
00:19:10.760So in essence, the economic formulation has to come with something unacceptable that descends into some dystopia or other by virtue of the underlying game theory.
00:19:25.080That doesn't mean that to somebody who knows little of game theory that it doesn't seem intuitively like the obvious answer.
00:19:31.440and that is a battle we are going to keep fighting until we can figure out how to convey
00:19:37.900you can't solve this problem with that solution because it it won't last right even if you could
00:19:44.620make it happen it will either evolve into something else or descend into madness and
00:19:48.720there's nothing you can do about that so you need a better answer hi guys and welcome to my brand
00:19:57.940new gaff. Some of you will have noticed it looks incredibly different. That's right. Palacio del
00:20:03.840Passione is no more. I got evicted last week, so I'm crashing on my friend's floor or as it's
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00:22:32.440So before we get into your political solution, which we'll talk about,
00:22:38.000you describe yourself as a radical progressive, right?
00:22:42.020So what is the credible left-wing solution to the problem of runaway inequality
00:22:48.880that you talk about if it's not socialism, if it's not communism of the type that Francis was
00:22:54.700talking about? Well, you know, I think the American founders had a lot of it right. And the fact that
00:23:03.280we are now running into the contradictions that emerged in that constitutional context
00:23:07.880doesn't invalidate the correctness of the values that they spelled out and the basics of the
00:23:13.940mechanism. In other words, in the US and in other parts of the world as well, the key issue is one
00:23:21.840of the corruption of a democratic structure. So our republic now functions predatorily with
00:23:29.520respect to the population. Policy is either, it is indifferent to the well-being of people. And
00:23:37.180And what that generally means is that where the interests of large corporations, for example, diverge from the interests of the population, which isn't always, but when they diverge, the corporations always win.
00:23:50.040And so that has, A, given people the sense that the nature of governance is inherently malignant, so they have stopped participating in it in large numbers.
00:24:00.960But if you were to remove the corrupting elements, the things that have handed power all to one side, then actually democracy is not a bad way to deal with this issue.
00:24:13.500That people, to the extent that they can understand what their interests are, will tend to support them.
00:24:18.300And it is the corruption that makes that dysfunctional.
00:24:23.100That said, we do need to upgrade our structure.
00:24:26.860we need to upgrade it because the people who wrote our founding documents didn't know anything about
00:24:33.180evolutionary dynamics they didn't know about game theory they'd never seen a chainsaw or a train or
00:24:38.560you know they couldn't have conceived of a nuclear reactor or of a process that could alter the
00:24:44.200chemistry of the atmosphere enough to change how much energy we trap from the sun so the structure
00:24:50.460has to be updated for modern realities and that is that is absolutely doable but not until you get
00:24:57.880the corruption out of the way and because of this corruption that you're talking about i presume is
00:25:02.400what is crony capitalism essentially whereby you know it's people you know corruption between
00:25:08.520lobbyists and government and essentially people's uh best interest not being represented
00:25:15.640which makes people disengaged from the system well you know we can focus on the details and
00:25:22.620there are a dozen mechanisms through which the water gets through the cracks but
00:25:27.160the the larger issue is if you don't understand how evolution works and then you don't understand
00:25:34.180therefore that when you're setting up a system you're really setting up an ecosystem in which
00:25:38.960corruption will evolve right no matter what system you set up to the extent that there's some loophole
00:25:44.680that allows some entity to get in to shift policy in its direction in order to enrich and empower
00:25:51.040itself, that loophole will be enlarged and ultimately it will be the system. And that's
00:25:55.580where we are. It's happened. And what it really takes is a systems kind of thinking that will
00:26:01.620allow us to frustrate the very process that causes corruption to evolve and spread and
00:26:07.720discover new opportunities. Well, Brett is masterfully setting up himself for the opportunity
00:26:12.760to talk about his political solution brett you've done you've made it impossible for us to break out
00:26:18.360of this paradigm so just go ahead hit us with it okay um so yes this is um the plan is called unity
00:26:24.9002020 and i don't um know how familiar familiar you are with what takes place um narratively in
00:26:33.400our system every four years but what we have is a system in which um change that is to say
00:26:41.200meaningful change that might actually stand a chance of confronting the corruption is frustrated
00:26:47.900at the primaries. That is to say, sometimes we have candidates who actually would be interested
00:26:53.180in fixing the system. They are frozen out in the primaries. We are delivered something
00:26:58.100either disappointing or false in the general election. And then we have a kind of incoherent
00:27:04.060conversation over it. But those of us who for decades have looked at the system and said,
00:27:09.420none of these solutions, neither the red solution or the blue solution, actually is going to change
00:27:14.720anything going forward. We have to break out of it. We are immediately confronted with the lesser
00:27:20.360evil paradox. If you vote for something other than the major party candidates, you are voting
00:27:26.540for something that will draw votes away from whichever of those major party candidates is
00:27:31.280closer to your own position and empower the one farther away. So your friends are constantly
00:27:36.240telling you, don't do that. If you vote for something outside of the duopoly, you're going
00:27:42.040to empower the greater evil, and then this is going to be your fault. Now, there's always been
00:27:46.480something wrong with this logic. If, for example, Ralph Nader won a single vote and the Democrats
00:27:53.560lost by one vote, we would blame Ralph Nader for spoiling the election, when in fact the answer is
00:27:59.300how come you didn't represent the people and therefore win in a landslide? That's the fault
00:28:03.940of the Democrats. That's not Ralph Nader's fault. But nonetheless, the social phenomenon of being
00:28:09.680told that the lesser evil is your moral imperative because empowering the greater evil is unthinkable.
00:28:16.380And if you can find your way out of that little trap, then you're told, well, yes, maybe in an
00:28:20.200ordinary year. But this time, the Supreme Court has gotten critical. And if you vote for the
00:28:25.180greater evil, you're going to ruin the country for decades to come by virtue of the fact that
00:28:29.620the Supreme Court is an appointment for life. Okay. So Unity 2020 is a structural plan to beat
00:28:36.840the lesser evil paradox. And the idea, it's not a political plan, it's an apolitical plan.
00:28:44.760It's a non-ideological plan. It is this. We draft two candidates, one from the left and one from
00:28:52.180the right. And these candidates need to have three characteristics. They need to be courageous,
00:28:56.580They need to be capable and they need to be patriotic. We draft them together under an
00:29:01.560agreement that when elected, they will govern as a team. That is to say, they will consult on
00:29:07.520everything. The president and vice president will have symmetrical power and only in the case where
00:29:13.040there's no time for consultation or if they really cannot reach agreement on what's in the interests
00:29:17.800of the public, does the president's decision rise above that of the vice president. And then after
00:29:25.700four years, the positions would reverse. I think I forgot to mention that the team would have its
00:29:31.640positions on the ticket chosen by coin flip in the first round. So what this does is it creates a
00:29:39.080ticket that is A, obligated to the interests of the American public first. We are picking people
00:29:45.540who are above politics. And it tends to drain support away from both the major party candidates,
00:29:53.400thereby structurally avoiding, empowering whatever you think the greater evil might be.
00:29:59.020And then we've built in a fail safe, which is as the election approaches, if the ticket cannot win,
00:30:03.740we pull the plug and the election reverts to its prior state and we go forward that way. So
00:30:08.860in this way, those who will come at anything like this and they will say,
00:30:13.980we've heard this before. It's a third party run. It empowers the greater evil. No, thank you. We
00:30:19.060can say, no, no, no, no. It's not a third party and it doesn't empower the greater evil. And
00:30:23.220we've built in a failsafe. So that means you can afford to entertain this and socially you might
00:30:29.820even survive doing so. Go ahead. I mean, it's a great idea and already I'm on board. How do we
00:30:39.800don't have a vote in America? I heard him say he's on board, which I assume means that you will get
00:30:47.420citizenship in time for the election, if possible. Yeah, using my Venezuelan nationality,
00:30:53.280because we're very popular over there. Oh, yes. But how are you going to implement this idea?
00:31:00.660Well, you know, it's very simple, actually. We have things catch on all the time, right? We've
00:31:06.500seen civilization revolutionized multiple times in recent decades by various things. And it reveals
00:31:13.500that actually, especially in the age of the internet, ideas can simply catch on and spread
00:31:19.180like wildfire. And frankly, if you look at the demographics of the electorate, our system isn't
00:31:27.620popular with anybody. There's nobody who wants to elect Joe Biden. I don't even think Joe Biden
00:31:32.460wants to elect Joe Biden, right? And, you know, similarly with Donald Trump, everybody who's
00:31:37.740thinking about these issues knows that something disastrous has happened that has left us with no
00:31:44.620viable choice at a moment when we've never needed leadership more. I mean, in the current era,
00:31:50.540just look at what has happened with COVID-19 in the US. We've absolutely botched the lockdown.
00:31:56.460Why do we botch it? Well, in large measure, because it was politicized. So you need to
00:32:01.740have leadership at this moment. The parties have announced that they are not interested in
00:32:05.540leadership. The Democratic Party is flirting with cynically embracing this movement in our streets
00:32:11.860in order to retain or to gain power. And in so doing, it's going to create a racial nightmare
00:32:18.860in the US, one that we were rapidly moving away from since the civil rights movement.
00:32:24.040So there's no other answer to the extent that everybody who can sit calmly for five minutes
00:32:30.800and think about the fact that there's no good solution that comes out of voting for either of
00:32:34.880the major party candidates, what other opportunity is there? Now, the hope is that if people can
00:32:40.220escape this mind-numbing logic that tells them you can't entertain anything that hasn't been
00:32:45.460presented to you by the major parties, if we can get people to see past that thing,
00:32:50.560then this idea is intuitive, it's constitutional, and hopefully it spreads to the point that
00:32:56.280it can simply function. Isn't part of the problem with politics, Brett,
00:33:00.680tribalism in that you get people like in this country who vote conservatives always vote
00:33:06.700conservative doesn't matter how terrible the candidate is same with labor and same with
00:33:11.820democrat and republican well okay yes tribalism is infused into our system and i'm not even going
00:33:19.000to say it's inherently bad the tribalism that we have is terrible and it's going to destroy us but
00:33:24.360there's a kind of tribalism that can function well and i would just simply say look if you're
00:33:29.640focused on the U.S. and how power is distributed in the U.S., but you're ignoring the fact that
00:33:35.600a race war in the U.S. would result in potentially China having the top spot in the global power
00:33:44.600dynamic, then you're missing the point. I mean, for one thing, we have a situation in China in
00:33:50.680which we have something that, I mean, really the closest parallel is something like Nazi Germany,
00:33:57.780where the Communist Party has imprisoned apparently millions of people belonging to
00:34:04.140a couple of ethnic minorities. They are harvesting organs. I mean, this is insane.
00:34:09.140You want to create a power vacuum where that entity is suddenly without challenge on the
00:34:14.680international stage? That's ludicrous. That's not a blow against racism. That's a blow for racism.
00:34:20.600So I don't – you know, look, if there was a good answer and it didn't involve me working 18 hours a day trying to capture people's imaginations so that they can free themselves from this idiotic system that we've set up, I would embrace it.
00:34:37.460I would love to sign on to something else and say Unity 2020 was a cool plan.
00:34:46.060So I don't know what else there is to do except say, well, it's safe.
00:34:52.760Why not see if we can go the distance and join up and talk to some other people?
00:34:57.380brett i i don't want to skip over something because you've used you know terms like civil
00:35:03.460war race war kind of almost as a matter of fact in the course of this conversation
00:35:08.340i mean are you saying that that's where this is headed you know when i hear myself say something
00:35:16.140like that i i wonder is this a dream am i having a nightmare is that what's going on
00:35:20.720But no, I mean, it's this is just it's it's factual, right? We have every institution in the country and it's really every institution broadcasting the same crazy message. And the message is so wrong. It doesn't even add up superficially, right? Communism adds up superficially. It doesn't work because of group selection problems. But but it's at least a sensible idea at one level.
00:35:47.760the idea that white supremacy is simultaneously incurable it has to be incurable because if it
00:35:56.300wasn't incurable we'd have to ask who has it and who doesn't right so the only way we can say hey
00:36:01.080all white people have white supremacy built into them is to say it's incurable but then to say well
00:36:05.680because it's incurable it's everywhere and that means that we have to fight it well you've just
00:36:10.940told us it can't be fought. So, you know, one step into the logic here, we discover there is no
00:36:17.880logic here. But at the same time, the underlying logic, the game theory says, well, here's how
00:36:24.600we're going to battle this out. We're going to figure out how many intersectional points you
00:36:28.280have, and that's going to dictate how much of the redistribution of well-being and power is going to
00:36:33.380go in your direction. That means that everybody who's on the losing side of that can calculate
00:36:37.860that they are, how are they not going to align, right? We have something like 70% of Americans
00:36:44.840are white and they're being told that they have a defect that cannot be cured. There's nothing
00:36:49.960that they can say or do that actually makes them okay. How is that not going to create a coalition
00:36:56.860that sees race as the issue and that fights back? So we can say, are you catastrophizing by saying
00:37:04.960that this is going to end in some kind of a civil war. I just don't understand what people think
00:37:10.240the alternative is. There's no way that you can set that dynamic in motion and have it march this
00:37:15.940rapidly towards a group that large and not cause them to coalesce in self-defense. We have to stop
00:37:22.580that. It's like, it's kind of like, I feel like, like, like night follows day and BLM follows
00:37:29.480evergreen. This is what you're talking about. This is the next step. And I agree with you. I mean,
00:37:34.100i think if if this continues and if we don't challenge i mean obviously you've come up with
00:37:40.680a political solution i think there's got to be something at the level of culture that
00:37:44.060that that can be reversed as well and what that is i don't know do you well i mean that's the
00:37:51.020irony is that the solution at the cultural level is at least the direction in which it lies is
00:37:57.640straightforward because we have lots of people who do think very carefully about these issues
00:38:02.440We have lots of people who are not signing up for this woke ideology who are aware that we have a massive disparity problem with respect to things like well-being and power, and they're concerned about it.
00:38:14.620But something about the modern era has relegated those people to the role of influencer rather than leader, and I think this is one of the critical problems.
00:38:24.060I mean, myself included, right? What I am now doing with Dark Horse Podcast is a matter of
00:38:30.680trying to get people to listen rather than there being some structure in which the people who know
00:38:35.640what's going on can navigate on all of our behalf. So yeah, it's a tough puzzle, but I think the
00:38:44.680solution involves taking the elements of a prior system that worked and pointing them at the
00:38:50.880problems that we never solved. That's really the solution. And we talk a lot about the gap
00:38:57.600between rich and poor and all the rest of it. And then we have the problem of automation and
00:39:04.100how many people are going to be left without a job. And also as well, what is going to happen
00:39:09.300to those people who don't have employment and the anger that's going to emanate because of it?
00:39:14.700I absolutely agree. It ought to be a top priority. This is the reason that Andrew Yang's
00:39:20.520candidacy took off. And it's also the reason that so many obstacles were put in his way,
00:39:26.560because he actually was interested in solving that problem. And the duopoly doesn't want the
00:39:32.360problem solved because it's not suffering in the same way. And in some sense, it's a feature,
00:39:38.140not a bug. So yeah, we have to confront that. We don't have a choice but to solve the problem.
00:39:45.200And this time we could solve it. I don't want to say completely because there will always be noise in the system. There will always be bad luck. But the bad luck needs to be randomly distributed with respect to things like race and sex. Right. To the extent that the bad luck is predictably distributed to some populations and not others. It's not luck.
00:40:05.940brett i was going to ask you something that we often get asked and i i as someone who recognizes
00:40:13.660you're very careful very intelligent and very sensible and you know knowing having met you and
00:40:19.380heard you speak i know that you're someone i i would kind of describe you as a healer
00:40:23.920as a kind of entity right um and we get a lot of people saying to us well you know you guys are
00:40:29.880interviewing people you are speaking out you are you're being influencers which is you know not
00:40:34.640the ideal, I hear you, but nonetheless, what do I do as an ordinary person? Because if I speak out
00:40:41.000at work, I'm going to be fired tomorrow. If I challenge some aspect of this ideology or I teach
00:40:47.720my kids not to buy into it, they're going to get problems at school. What do ordinary people do
00:40:53.820about this? Because I see so much of that, people just not knowing how to respond and I don't know
00:40:58.480what to tell them either. So this is a great question. It is one with a, it doesn't have a
00:41:06.520wonderful answer. It has an answer that I think is compelling, but it involves swallowing a bitter
00:41:13.520pill. The game theory underneath what we are facing, and I don't just mean the movement,
00:41:19.780but the larger game theory surrounding the way governance works, the way sense-making works,
00:41:24.720all of these things, has created chaos. We are basically decohering. The incoherence of the
00:41:33.420system is eventually going to result in a catastrophic mistake. And we've seen hints
00:41:38.100of that many, many times now, but we haven't seen anything that is catastrophic at the level of
00:41:44.100civilization itself. The solution involves recognizing that your individual
00:41:51.000well-being is what you are wired to be focused on, but that your individual well-being is
00:41:58.640actually subordinate in a logical way to the persistence of the structures on which you
00:42:04.500depend. So if we keep pursuing, how do I get through next week at the expense of how do we
00:42:10.300get through next year or next decade, we will not get through next year or next decade.
00:42:15.300There has to be a willingness to frankly place that puzzle in front of people so that they understand that ultimately we have to keep an eye on this longer term, larger scale thing or it's going to erase any protection you manage to arrange for yourself.
00:42:33.200So, you know, I don't know how useful my story is.
00:42:41.000We have no job security, but we're doing all right.
00:42:45.300And so the point is that was a trade. And what we got in exchange for that trade was the ability to speak plainly about what's taking place and to bring the expertise that we have from evolutionary biology to venues where actually that's the important set of questions in terms of how you build a system that doesn't suffer these flaws.
00:43:07.140so was it worth it yeah i think it was worth it i think that even though you know one bad tweet
00:43:16.240and i could be unable to figure out how i'm going to provide health care for my kids five years from
00:43:23.720now but the ability to speak plainly about what is taking place is essential and i think you guys
00:43:32.400are doing this. I think you are being courageous and it's unfortunate that we're stuck in the
00:43:37.320influencer role, but maybe the model is this. I'm an influencer, but Unity 2020 is actually
00:43:44.720not an influencer plan. It's actually a structural plan. So the question is, what can you do to step
00:43:52.280out of the influencer layer where you're simply, you know, a talking head trying to capture the
00:43:58.080attention of people honorably, but nonetheless to capture their attention to actually doing
00:44:02.760something that meaningfully alters the way the system functions. All right, but let me just
00:44:07.380challenge you on that somewhat, Brett. Are you not being kind of communistic about it in that
00:44:13.320you're denying human biology and psychology and demand, well, not demand, you're not demanding,
00:44:18.020but in saying to people, put your interests behind the interest of the whole because 10 years down
00:44:24.680the line those interests will be your interest are you are you not denying it i i deny your
00:44:31.020accusation but i love the question because it's the right question here's the here's the difference
00:44:37.460first of all let me just make a weird point a body like a human body is communist it functions
00:44:45.960exactly as the communist plan would have it your liver and your heart agree on the distribution
00:44:51.960of resources, irrespective of which one is in the losing position and which one is generating.
00:44:57.460So the point is there's something about certain structures in which something like communism can
00:45:02.980work and other structures where it cannot. Now, what I am advocating is not that you
00:45:09.460become altruistic and thereby sacrifice in favor of others. What I'm advocating is that you
00:45:17.420recognize that your long-term interest, and by you, I don't necessarily mean you the individual,
00:45:23.380but I mean you and all of your descendants, which is after all what you're built to care about,
00:45:27.860that that depends on a certain amount of personal sacrifice now. That is not a contradiction.
00:45:36.160That biologically makes a great deal of sense, and we see creatures do this all the time. So,
00:45:40.900in essence, the point, I mean, you've landed on it exactly. You have to be able to tell
00:45:47.840the difference between a claim that does not add up and is not supported by the game theory and a
00:45:53.180very similar sounding claim that does because the underlying dynamics are different. And that's
00:46:00.500what I'm saying. I'm saying that altruism doesn't work, but ultra enlightened self-interest does.
00:46:07.540and this is ultra enlightened self-interest we are about to destroy the ship on which our life
00:46:12.300depends and brett what would you say to a young person you know who wants to change the world
00:46:18.380and believes in this ideology and it's like look racism exists you know there's lots of stats that
00:46:24.340can be used to you know to back up this fact or the fact you know the gap between rich and poor
00:46:28.340is getting ever wider we need drastic action now social justice is what's needed i would say i
00:46:36.220agree with them, but the problem is that you smuggle something in under the label of social
00:46:41.300justice that isn't social justice. It's injustice. And so, in essence, I would say, slow down.
00:46:49.220Figure out what parts of what you're saying are dead certain and which parts are a black box that
00:46:54.640you don't know the contents of. And figure out what it is that you can say going forward that
00:47:00.300doesn't contain the possibility for, let's say, a Trojan horse, right? Once you understand there
00:47:06.580is something structurally wrong, it does result in massive inequity, and that inequity has to
00:47:12.740be solved or else we're constantly going to be facing, you know, a looming French revolution.
00:47:18.980So, all right, the problem has to be addressed, but how do you address it? Well, you would want
00:47:24.200to understand what its nature was, how we got here, where the failures of our current structure
00:47:28.800are and you would want to figure out how to patch those things or to update the structure so that it
00:47:35.100doesn't fail in the same way and you know if you do that you will frankly discover what the next
00:47:39.460failure mode is but as with all prototyping those failures should get smaller and smaller with each
00:47:45.600iteration ultimately you'll have a structure in which you can tolerate the uh the noise in the
00:47:51.180system and basically you're not going to get a hundred percent justice you're not going to get
00:47:56.380100% safety, but you might be able to get 80% of everything. And if you had a system that delivered
00:48:01.44080% on every value that you held dear, that'd be pretty darn good. And that brings me very neatly
00:48:07.540to the question that I wanted to ask you, Brett. Do you think with social media the way that it is
00:48:13.500and with our brains the way that they are, we are actually capable now of ingesting that message
00:48:20.480that you've just elaborated, which is you're not going to get everything that you want?
00:48:26.380Yes, I know. I know that we can get there. Now, you've asked, again, an excellent question,
00:48:34.200which is, are the forces that allow us to see things like this capable of overwhelming the
00:48:40.240forces that try to disrupt our seeing things like this? And, you know, we don't all have to see it.
00:48:46.020Enough of us have to see it that we can actually navigate. That's the question, right? It's not
00:48:50.240like every kid on TikTok has to become a theoretician. But the fact is, we are told
00:48:59.380that people are foolish. We are told that they have short attention spans. We're told that they
00:49:06.200are tribal. However, we have lots of evidence that when they are delivered high quality choices,
00:49:12.160when they are delivered content that allows us to test those ideas, they don't turn out to be that
00:49:16.860way, right? Short attention spans do not match with the fact that Joe Rogan several times a week
00:49:22.960delivers us a three-hour podcast with people across the analytical spectrum, the political
00:49:28.920spectrum, and people follow these things and they talk about them. So long-form podcasting
00:49:34.600tells us that the public isn't what we thought it was. The series that we see generated on
00:49:42.080television now on Netflix and HBO and all these very complex narrative arcs. These are things
00:49:47.660that people actually invest in, right? That's inconsistent with what I was told about the fact
00:49:52.080that people needed to see, you know, a 30-minute sitcom and, you know, they couldn't handle
00:49:58.620anything more complex than that. So we see that. We also see, you know, IDW-style conversations
00:50:06.160creating incredible interest. Watching 3,000 people for two consecutive nights watch Sam
00:50:14.060Harris and Jordan Peterson fight over the nature of truth as if they were watching the coolest
00:50:18.760rock band ever. I mean, that tells you there's a great hunger for anybody who can figure out how
00:50:24.380to make sense in this era. People are rooting for this stuff. They want it. So I think I would just
00:50:30.280trust in the fact that if you deliver them high quality stuff they will level up and in fact you
00:50:36.520know your podcast too right you're doing this right here we'd like to think so but my point
00:50:41.920was more about social media brett in the sand you know our mutual friend james lindsey was talking
00:50:46.580about this uh recently about how the nature of particularly twitter but but anything like that
00:50:53.680really where yes people will watch a trigonometry with brett weinstein but but way more people will
00:51:01.460see a two-second clip of brett weinstein being called racist and not analyze it critically and
00:51:08.040and operate on that basis too it's a great question but here's the thing at the beginning
00:51:14.640that's what i saw right i saw that over time the allegations have dropped away people tired
00:51:23.660They stopped playing those cards and they even started paying attention to the fact that what brought me to their attention actually didn't have a lot to do with the important part of the message that I have to deliver.
00:51:36.340So in essence, the stuff that I was teaching in my classes that my students were benefiting from and that made them fiercely loyal and want to study more of it, those things are now spreading into the world by virtue of the fact that there was some process that overwhelmed the reflexive process you're describing.
00:51:56.620So I'm not saying it isn't there, but I'm saying that if you empower other dynamics, they overwhelm that dynamic. And, you know, look, I think sense making is on the ropes, but it's not dead. And there are certainly places where we see it winning. So greater, better sense making is the thing that we need to amplify. And that results in the positive change that we need.
00:52:18.620But don't social media companies also have to take responsibility for amplifying voices that are divisive, destructive, and all the rest of it, because they're the tweets or the posts, whatever, that get the most engagement?
00:52:33.760Well, in effect, they do this to themselves. By deciding that they are going to edit, they then set the impossible problem of what are they going to edit for.
00:52:46.420And so, for example, at the point that they come up with the insane idea that they're going to tell us which factual claims are accurate, which politicians are lying, they sow the seeds of their own undoing.
00:53:00.340Because how do you tell the difference between something that is backwards and wrong and something that is so novel and ahead of its time that it sounds backwards and wrong, right?
00:53:13.860So either we're going to frustrate the process of progress by deciding that anything that's really far ahead of its time is going to be just relegated to the same realm as all the crackpot stuff, or we're going to recognize nobody has the formula for spotting the great thing hidden amongst the kooks, right?
00:53:32.440So these platforms have to get over themselves.
00:53:37.180They have to recognize they can't do the job that they ideally think they want to.
00:53:40.540It looks good on a whiteboard, but it doesn't work in practice.
00:53:43.860It results in all kinds of injustice and insanity. And, you know, look, there's a reason that free speech has the role that it does in the public imagination. And it's because although most of what free speech allows, most of the stuff that actually needs to be defended under that banner is noxious, it is the banner that protects the really important ideas that need to be protected in order that we ultimately get to hear them.
00:54:13.540Right. So if Galileo comes back, he shouldn't get banned off Twitter, which likely would happen at this point.