Bret Weinstein: Hyper-novelty is breaking human biology

1. 0:00 – 2:27

   Intro

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein0:00

      I painted a scenario that was gonna result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take. The problem is, it's already underway on a timescale of decades, and we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift. People, should they be preparing? Absolutely.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:18

      That's quite scary. Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former professor-

   3. NANarrator0:23

      Uncovering the world's most pressing and controversial issues and offering his solutions to save humanity from a destructive future.

   4. BWDr Bret Weinstein0:30

      Humanity is in terrible danger, and the number of existential threats is growing. For example, I am profoundly concerned we are going to squander the lesson of COVID. You can see the complete collapse of journalism, our political institutions, our courts. They all failed. The tragedy is most people don't know that we are still not being honest about the origin of COVID, and the truth is it's

   5. NANarrator0:54

      It's all kind of ******.

   6. BWDr Bret Weinstein0:55

      ... but our political institutions don't wanna talk about it, which is gonna mean that the failures are gonna come back.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett1:01

      Is there anything else on your list of concerns?

   8. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:02

      So I have five different existential threats that AI poses, and we will go through them. But we have no evolutionary preparedness for living in a world where a computer can out-compete a human being. That's a dangerous world to live in.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett1:17

      Is there anything we can do to prepare or to avert this crisis?

   10. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:21

       Yes. Here's what I suggest.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett1:24

       Bret, of all these existential threats, is there one that's at the very top of your list?

   12. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:28

       Yes. There's nothing more dangerous than this, and that is...

   13. SBSteven Bartlett1:34

       This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube, and I wanna say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet, there's almost 50 people now behind The Diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So, from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month, and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until seven million subscribers, and you guys loved that raffle so much that we're gonna continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and £1,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the Diary of a CEO. There's now more than seven million of you, so if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation. (instrumental music)

2. 2:27 – 4:39

   Why Humanity Will Be Extinguished

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:27

      Bret, who are you, and what mission are you on? And when I ask that second question, I'm looking at the full body of your work, and I'm trying to encapsulate it maybe in just a couple of sentences.

   2. BWDr Bret Weinstein2:42

      Sure. I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm a former college professor who has been cast into the role of a public intellectual by bizarre events at my college. I am on a mission, and I'm afraid it's gonna sound weird to people. I think humanity is in terrible danger. I think we worry about the wrong things, and I do not have any reason to believe that anything I could do is going to change the fate of humanity, but I feel obligated to try. That is to say, if we're gonna be doomed by our errors, and I know something about what those errors are, then it falls to me to try to make that clear to people and processes that might have the power to redirect us. So, I'm making that effort, even though, frankly, I think it's unlikely to work.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:46

      That's quite scary, Bret.

   4. BWDr Bret Weinstein3:48

      Yep, I've gotten over that part.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:50

      What exactly are you referring to when you say that you think humanity might be doomed?

   6. BWDr Bret Weinstein3:56

      There's a basic set of premises that just comes out of biology. No species is forever, and that includes our species, no matter what I or anyone else does. But the objective of the exercise is really to stave off extinction as long as possible, and I believe that that is a valid thing to do. It is a vital thing to do, even if, in the end, we know that no matter how successful we were, we're not gonna escape the destruction of the solar system. We're not gonna escape the collision of our galaxy into another, and even if we did, ultimately, the universe has a fate, and it will take us out with it, if we beat every odd.

3. 4:39 – 8:04

   Bret's Top Existential Concern for Our Planet

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein4:39

      But why are we in trouble? Well, we're in trouble because all creatures are well-built for the environments in which we evolved. And human beings suffer from something that, uh, my wife, Heather, and I in our book call hyper-novelty. So novelty is the state of something being not what you are evolutionarily prepared for, and human beings are very good at dealing with novelty. But what we're doing in the present is we're creating a rate of change that is so rapid that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up. We cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with the novel influences that we are, um, forcing upon ourselves. And what that means is that with each passing year, we end up ever more poorly adapted to the life that we have to lead, and it's gotten so bad that the environments that we live in as adults don't even resemble the environments that existed for adults when we were kids. The reason that human beings have a longer developmental period than any other creature that has ever existed on this planet is that you need a long developmental period for us to acquire the insight and the nuance in order to be a functional adult.That program doesn't work if the environment in which you are picking up those lessons is unrelated to the environment in which you have to do the adult stuff. It's a non-sequitur. So that's why we're in trouble. We have technologies that are powerful enough to destroy us. We have processes that we have unleashed, the consequences of which we can scarcely imagine. And as these things proliferate, the number of existential threats to humanity is just simply growing. We have to reign in that problem. The proliferation of existential threats means that the moment at which we blink out as a species is getting closer. If it isn't this that takes us out, it'll be that. We have to arrest that process.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett6:54

      Of all these pressing concerns and of all these existential threats, is there one that's at the very top of your list of concerns?

   3. BWDr Bret Weinstein7:01

      Well, they're not even, uh, completely separable. So for example, they're, we are politically obsessed in this country and across the, the Western world with anthropogenic climate change. I'm sure you've noticed.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:19

      What is anthropogenic climate change?

   5. BWDr Bret Weinstein7:21

      Anthropogenic climate change is a change in the average conditions on planet Earth that is driven by human activity. So the claim is that CO2 traps heat from the sun, causing the mean temperature to rise. That will have impacts on, for example, how much ice persists at high altitudes and in the Arctic and the, uh, other cold regions. And that that then is part of a positive feedback, where because ice is white, it reflects the sun's energy back into space. So the more ice that melts, the darker the world becomes. The more light it absorbs,

4. 8:04 – 11:36

   Solar Flares and Their Potential Impact

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein8:04

      the warmer it becomes. So that positive feedback is actually a real reason for concern. However, the increasingly model-driven mania about global warming is at odds with what we understand about models. Models are not a valid test of a hypothesis in a complex system. They can't be. So we are treating these models as if they tell us what's going to happen, and that is not a philosophically valid thing to do. But it is also just simply not in keeping with an understanding of the underlying requirements for functional science. If you were in climatology today and you attempted to publish a paper that said, "Actually, uh, anthropogenic climate change is only a quarter as bad as we fear," you would have great difficulty publishing that and you would experience a spectacular, uh, decrease in your viability as an academic. So what we can infer from that is that we probably have a lot of papers that point in a direction that the field is interested in promoting, and then we have a dearth of papers that might point in the other direction. So in effect, when we look at the sum total of papers and we say, "Oh my God, they all say the same thing. We're in big trouble." Well, do they all say the same thing 'cause we're in big trouble and that's what an honest analysis would give you? Or is that just an echo of what we put into the system? So I'm much less worried about anthropogenic climate change, and I'm much more worried about some other threats that, to my way of thinking, clearly dwarf it in magnitude. So we have several problems related to space weather. The sun goes through a cycle, an 11-year sunspot cycle. Those sunspots often release solar flares. Those solar flares are, in general, directed randomly off the sun. And because the Earth is only in one spot, most of the solar flares that the sun flings off don't hit us.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett10:19

      What's a solar flare?

   3. BWDr Bret Weinstein10:20

      A solar flare is... Well, it's really the coronal mass ejection that is the important part. The flare is the thing you see on the sun that looks like a big flame sort of flipping off the sun. When it does that, that actually, in many cases, ejects a concentrated glob of plasma, right? These are charged particles. And they get flung off. They get flung off at speeds that are not consistent. They're not moving at the speed of light. They're moving at the speed of stuff, right? And the speed of stuff is variable. But a couple days after a solar flare that releases a coronal mass ejection in the direction of the Earth, we get a wave of these charged particles.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett11:03

      Across the Earth?

   5. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:04

      Yeah.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett11:04

      Yeah.

   7. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:05

      And that causes things that we are all familiar with, whether you've seen it or not. This, uh, increases the, the aurora borealis, for example, the northern lights. So it's a very spectacular show and you probably are aware, maybe you saw it yourself, but we recently had a, uh, an aurora that reached as far south as Puerto Rico, right? That's a really unusual thing to happen. And even more unusual is the fact...

   8. SBSteven Bartlett11:35

      So they usually

5. 11:36 – 13:48

   Understanding EMP Effects & The Catastrophic Effects

   1. SBSteven Bartlett11:36

      reach sort of the top part of the Earth? Is that, is that right?

   2. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:39

      Yeah. Y- y- if you're up near the Arctic Circle-

   3. SBSteven Bartlett11:41

      Yeah.

   4. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:42

      ... you, uh, y- you see these things regularly. The farther south you are, the less likely you are-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett11:47

      Mm-hmm.

   6. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:48

      ... to see them.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett11:48

      Yeah, I saw it in North Sweden and sort of Iceland as well.

   8. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:51

      Perfect place.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett11:52

      Right. Okay.

   10. BWDr Bret Weinstein11:52

       Um, but for th- for people to see it in Puerto Rico is highly unusual. And you would think that that indicates that the burst of plasma that hit the Earth was in some way highly unusual, and it wasn't. Something else is going on. That aurora reached farther south than it should have based on the magnitude of the coronal mass e- mass ejection, which was substantial, but hardly unprecedented.Now, what most people don't know is that there was a major solar storm that hit the Earth in 1859. It goes by the name of the Carrington event, named for the astronomer who realized that the weird effects that happened on Earth were correlated to something he had seen on the sun. He had effectively put those two ... He, he had seen the, uh, the flare and then deduced that this was related to it. Now in 1859, the world was not a very electrical place. In fact, the primary use of electricity was telegraphs. And at the time, this burst of plasma caused those telegraphs ... Stations caught fire, the entire network went down, telegraph operators were shocked at their stations. Messages could be sent even though there was no power being delivered to the system. It went down and the induced charge in the wires was enough for telegraph operators to send messages over distances. So it was very dramatic if you were involved in telegraphs. But for the rest of humanity, it was a minor event. Now, we live in a very different world. We live in a world where everything has an electrical component. The way our cars function, the way food shows up in the supermarket, the way air travel and air traffic control works, all of these things are heavily electrical, and they are all tremendously vulnerable to the EMP effect

6. 13:48 – 17:01

   The Earth's Magnetic Poles Are Switching!

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein13:48

      that will come with a major solar impact.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett13:51

      What's the EMP effect?

   3. BWDr Bret Weinstein13:53

      It's an electromagnetic pulse-

   4. SBSteven Bartlett13:54

      Okay.

   5. BWDr Bret Weinstein13:54

      ... which is basically an induced charge in, uh, electrically active material. So it's the kind of thing that, uh, a big enough one will fry every computer, will, uh, take most of the cars off the road. And what we don't commonly know is that our grids, the grids that operate all of our electrical devices, are, um, they operate with these transformers, right, which, uh, control the flow of current. These transformers are huge, complicated machines. And if you needed one and you ordered it today, it would take a year for you to get it. If the world suddenly needed 70 of them or 100 of them, there's no telling what would happen. So, while we all have the experience of a power outage causing us to lose electricity for, uh, you know, hours or days, it is quite conceivable that a solar storm that took out a significant number of transformers could take a continent and turn it dark with no plan for bringing the lights back on. They would go out and they wouldn't come back. Now, this is a ridiculous, uh, risk to run. The transformers can be hardened against this. They cannot be perfectly immunized from this effect, but they can be hardened with well-understood architecture, architecture that effectively grounds out the EMP so that the transformer comes back on after the event. But we don't do it. So we are running an incredibly large risk of a section of a continent or an entire continent going dark with no backup plan. To me, the risk of that dwarfs anything that might be true about anthropogenic climate change. What's more, you've probably heard that, um, pole shifts happen.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett16:09

      Mm-hmm.

   7. BWDr Bret Weinstein16:10

      That the North Pole isn't always where the North Pole currently is and that sometimes these things flip. That's always struck me as an extremely dangerous condition, and I always assumed, "Well, what are the chances you're gonna be alive?" You know, if you were alive within 500 years of a pole flip, that would be kind of a close call. But what are the chance that's gonna happen during your lifetime? Well, we are actually living in a moment where the pole is actively migrating. We are in the midst of what's called a polar excursion. The pole seems to be flipping, and it seems to be flipping at the same time that our electromagnetic field of the Earth is decreasing. Now, that decreasing field means that what's flung off the sun has a bigger impact on Earth that it would or- than it would ordinarily

7. 17:01 – 18:57

   The Inversion of Earth's Poles: Is Humanity Prepared?

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein17:01

      have, and that pole flip threatens, uh, chaos. You could imagine if we feared Y2K, right, that a programming error, a failure to account for the fact that you were gonna have this turnover in the dates, uh, worried people, that an actual pole flip would create chaos. And the fact that we are not at least as worried if not 10 times as worried about the fact that we are living through a polar excursion and a radical decrease in the strength of our electromagnetic field on Earth says that we just have our priorities wrong.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett17:35

      What is causing the pole to flip, and what does that m- does that mean? 'Cause when I think about a pole flip, does that mean the, the North Pole just moves a little bit, the South Pole moves a little bit?

   3. BWDr Bret Weinstein17:47

      It's not a little bit. These things are going to move radically, and the rate at which they are moving is accelerating. This is happening on a timescale that's highly relevant to you and me. We are both likely to be here to see, um, the full shift, whatever that full shift entails, and they're not always the same. So it's a little hard to predict. Now, I will say, this is not my area of expertise. I have learned tremendously from others, um...Ben Davidson being the primary person, somebody I had on, on the Dark Forest podcast. And he has a very compelling model, a hypothesis that I believe does explain many otherwise difficult to explain features of our solar environment. His explanation is that the solar system is moving constantly within the galaxy, and that the galaxy, by its very nature, contains an oscillating electromagnetic sheet. And as the solar system

8. 18:57 – 21:16

   What Does Anthropogenic Mean?

   1. BWDr Bret Weinstein18:57

      moves through that sheet, we cross the plane in the middle, which causes all the electrically active entities to experience an inversion. The sun experiences an inversion. The other planets experience an inversion. The Earth experiences an inversion.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett19:15

      When you say inversion, you mean the, uh, the sort of electromagnetic sense?

   3. BWDr Bret Weinstein19:19

      Yeah, that it, it's, you know, it's the direction of pull. If you-

   4. SBSteven Bartlett19:23

      All right.

   5. BWDr Bret Weinstein19:23

      ... when we talk about electric, electromagnetism, we're talking about attraction and repulsion. And if you imagine that you flip the sign on everything because you just crossed the middle of something, like, you know, if you were holding a magnet here, right? And the north side is down and the south side is up, and you moved another magnet by it, the direction of pull would shift as you crossed that equator.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett19:46

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   7. BWDr Bret Weinstein19:47

      So we are crossing something like an equator of the galaxy, and that cross is causing anomalous behavior on Earth, but it's also causing it, we know, on eight of the nine other planets. And the ninth planet, we just simply don't have the data yet. It's not that we know it, it's somehow immune to it, and we're seeing anomalous behavior on the sun. So what I understand is that there is a story about the galaxy that we barely know. That story interfaces with many things that we do know from the fossil record, from geology, which are hard to explain. Why does the pole flip? And that at the very least, we need a concentrated effort where we look into these questions, and if Ben Davidson has it wrong, if there is no galactic current sheet, if we are not crossing its meridian, if the electromagnetic field is decreasing, but is about to turn around rather than continue to decline, then we should find that out. Um, but I think what we would find out if we looked deeply into this, if we took it seriously, is that there is a threat to humanity that has very little to do with anything anthropogenic. The only important component that is anth- anthropogenic is that we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett21:12

      What does anthropogenic mean, the word?

   9. BWDr Bret Weinstein21:15

      Human made.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett21:15

       Human

9. 21:16 – 28:11

   The Two Major Disaster Scenarios

   1. SBSteven Bartlett21:16

      made, okay.

   2. BWDr Bret Weinstein21:16

      Human made. So, you know, anthropogenic climate change means that we put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere that wasn't there before, which we certainly have.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett21:23

      Yeah.

   4. BWDr Bret Weinstein21:24

      You know? The, uh, our fuels are made of carbon, and when we break these more complex carbon molecules, carbon dioxide is released. That's not really a bad thing inherently, because carbon dioxide isn't a poison.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett21:39

      Mm-hmm.

   6. BWDr Bret Weinstein21:39

      Right? So taking these rings of carbon and breaking it into carbon dioxide and water is, uh, not the worst way to get energy if you can do it cleanly. But the problem is there's a, there's a, an old equation called the Arrhenius equation, which tells us that CO2 will actually cause the retention of heat from the sun. And as I mentioned at the beginning, the fact of trapping a little extra heat might not be that important were it not for the fact that there's a positive feedback that involves the whiteness of the poles, the amount of energy bounced back into space which keeps us cool. And as the poles melt, the Earth becomes darker, it traps more heat. So that's-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett22:24

      Mm-hmm.

   8. BWDr Bret Weinstein22:24

      ... an anthropogenic effect, because we've released all of this carbon that was trapped in fossil fuel deposits.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett22:30

      So on this point of the pole shifting, I just wanna make sure I'm super clear. Are, are you... Do you actually mean that the North and South Pole would move?

   10. BWDr Bret Weinstein22:39

       Well, this is, in my opinion, up in the air. Very serious people have inferred from various kinds of evidence that the Earth itself might actually rotate or appear to rotate, that the, uh, crust, that is the surface that we live on, could unlock from the mantle. Currently, they are locked together. But it could unlock and rotate over the surface of the mantle. Now, I am not convinced that that can happen. I'm not convinced it's impossible. People, uh, people as smart as Einstein have considered this possibility and that, in fact, it would be driven to happen by the accumulated mass on the pole in the form of ice, that that would actually drag it towards the equator if they became unlocked. So we have really two different disaster scenarios that could invol- un- unfold. One involves simply the magnetic orientation of the Earth shifting and leaving the crust where it is, and the other involving the crust actually rotating. Um, the reason that I am doubtful about the crust rotating, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet strongly in either direction, but the reason that I am doubtful is that as a biologist, I find the idea that the pole would move to the equator hard to reconcile with the distribution of species that we see on the Earth. So there's something that doesn't quite fit about that story for me. It would require something in the biology that I believe is not described. Um, it's possible. I can imagine things that would do it, but I don't see it. So I'm hesitant about the idea of the...... crust unlocking, but I don't regard it as, uh, nothing to worry about.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett24:35

       Just so I'm clear, y- when you point at, um, evolutionary history having s- and sort of the distribution of species on the Earth giving a clue, are you essentially saying that if this had happened in the past, we wouldn't see through the fossil records that certain species exist around the equator?

   12. BWDr Bret Weinstein24:52

       Yeah. And, you know, let's take the example of the, the Amazon. So there's a very famous biological experiment by kind of an old school biologist who I did have the good fortune of meeting, uh, many years ago, a guy named Paul Collenveaux, who was testing the question, there was a debate in biology about whether or not the Amazon became a grassland during glaciation and became a forest during interglacial periods. And he went on one of these sort of old school excursions into the Amazon to take pollen cores from lakes, um, which is interesting. It's, it's not a lake-filled environment. But anyway, he, he found locations, took these pollen cores, which should tell the tale because they'll, y- we can tell which pollen you're looking at, and it gets laid down in layers. And so if it was flipping back and forth between a grassland and a forest, you could see it. That was not what they came up with. What they came up with is this has, this has been a forest, and it has remained a forest without being a grassland. Now the problem is if you move it 90 degrees off, that should drive all of the creatures there extinct, and you should have to go through some process that causes either massive migration from somewhere else or, uh, re-evolution. And the problem is this model in which we are passing through this electromagnetic sheet every 12,000 years just doesn't leave time for these processes. So you would expect the Amazon would have many fewer species in it than it does. And I will tell you as somebody who has worked in the neotropics, including the Amazon, one of the paradoxes about the creatures that are in this environment is that they are absolutely ferocious competitors that are very fragile. They require very narrow sets of conditions in order to live. So the idea that there's some radical upheaval in their climate that leaves them standing, uh, that's hard for me to square. But anyway, what I would love is for a robust scientific institution of some kind to delve deeply into the set of questions involving this apparent 12,000-year disaster cycle, the, uh, electromagnetic sheet in the galaxy, our location in that pattern, and figure out what we do need to worry about and what we don't.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett27:27

       And if it's not that second, um, possibility that the crust itself is just sort of dis- uh, is shifting and the mantle is staying in the same position, the first possibility is that there's just a movement of, um, sort of electromagnetic poles.

   14. BWDr Bret Weinstein27:42

       Yeah.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett27:42

       Uh, the North and South Poles stay in the same place, but is that gonna-

   16. BWDr Bret Weinstein27:46

       The axis of rotation could stay in the same place.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett27:49

       Right. Okay.

   18. BWDr Bret Weinstein27:50

       Um, and then the poles migrate to somewhere new. And my understanding, uh, is that that migration is not the simple thing that, uh, that I and probably you learned when you heard that there was a pole shift where you hear it's like, voop. You know, it just flips over. Um, they are migrating around, and actually the path of

10. 28:11 – 35:57

    How to Prepare for Global Catastrophes

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein28:11

       migration is something that is being tracked. Not widely discussed for some reason, but it is being tracked, and it's accelerating, as I mentioned.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett28:18

       What's, what's the risk of that, and how long d- does something like that take if we look, if we think back to the, our history?

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein28:26

       Well, I'm coming to understand this, and what I'm, uh, what I'm recognizing is that the rate is far faster than I had understood and that it's already underway. So that's an interesting fact. We're talking about on the scale of decades. Um, we are in the middle of a, uh, solar maximum in the sunspot cycle. So that aurora that you saw, uh, I guess month and a half or so ago, that was part of this very active period of sunspots in which we took a very substantial chrono- coronal mass ejection. That pattern of sunspots will wane, and we will go into a period of calm during which presumably the magnetic field will continue to decrease, and then the sunspots will return-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett29:22

       How long-

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein29:22

       ... 11 years down the road.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett29:24

       11 years?

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein29:25

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett29:25

       Oh, okay. So-

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein29:26

       And so I am concerned that probably we get away with it, the level of decrease in the magnetic field is substantial, but that we still have enough protection from it that we will get through this sunspot cycle and be unscathed, and then we'll have a period of calm while the electromagnetic field continues to decrease. And then the next sunspot cycle will be much more perilous. Now, th- you know, this can change tomorrow, right? With these sunspots, um, come around the sun, and then they disappear onto the other side, you know, and it takes a month to do a full cycle. New sunspots are being born. A monster could arrive tomorrow. It could rotate and point to the Earth, and it could fling off a coronal mass ejection at the wrong moment or not. Um, it, you know, there's a lot of luck of the draw in there. But, uh, we should be paying a lot more attention than we are.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett30:26

        And what could we do to prepare? Or to sort of, uh, avoid the catastrophe?

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein30:33

        It depends on how catastrophic it is. And, um, what I would say is, I- I'm somebody who, for whatever reason, I sometimes struggle with mundane day-to-day organizational tasks, but I'm very good in an emergency. And the emergency answer is pretty clear here, which is you get your house in order. Right? You look at the fragility of our world, and you start with the low-hanging fruit. You take care of the stuff that's low-cost and high, uh, impact in terms of increasing our robustness, and you do that first. So top two things on my list would be, you harden the grids-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett31:22

        Yeah.

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein31:23

        ... by retrofitting these transformers so that they ground out rather than fry. That's one. And the second one is, you look at our nuclear reactors, and you realize that we've been setting ourselves up. We, we built a doomsday device, I think accidentally. Um, and the problem, the problem is a compound problem. What I didn't know about nuclear reactors until the Fukushima accident, at which point I did a lot of research, is that they are absolutely dependent on an electrical supply to keep them from melting down. You have to have an energy input. Now if you have something like an earthquake, a tsunami, a disruption, the reactors will shut themselves down if they have time. But that doesn't get you out of the woods, because you have to put energy in, in order to keep the cooling water flowing, and that cooling water is not just about keeping the reactors cool. It's also about keeping the fuel pools cool. So the fuel pools are where fuel is taken after it's removed from the reactor. Now for something like five years, a set of rods taken out of a reactor is releasing what's called decay heat. That decay heat is sufficient to boil the water out of these fuel pools, if you're not constantly circulating new cold water in there. So these fuel pools look like they're unimportant, but if you cut the power, you've started the stopwatch, right? That water is gonna boil off, and when that water boils off, they're going to catch fire. The cladding on the rods will c- literally catch fire from the heat. Now the reactors, for reasons that are almost too boring to recount, contain not only the fuel rods from the most recent five years of refuelings, but they also contain decades of rods that we never found any other solution for. Stuff-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett33:33

        What are these rods? These are sort of nuclear rods?

    15. BWDr Bret Weinstein33:36

        Yeah, these are nuclear, basically they are, um, physical rods clad in something called zirconium that contain fuel pellets. This is uranium that has been packed in a particular way, that these rods get loaded into the reactor, and then there's another set of rods that are used to modulate how much the rods interact with each other. You pull the modulator out and you get a, a chain reaction. Um, you put the rods, the, uh, control rods back in, and it tamps down the reaction. So in an earthquake, you tamp down the reaction, right, and then you're not putting out, uh, power, but you do need to put power in to keep it cool. If the power goes and the water boils off, the thing will explode. As we saw in Fukushima, you had a situation in which the cooling water literally got torn apart into hydrogen and oxygen. So it goes from a coolant to an explosive, and we had multiple explosions where the hydrogen-oxygen mixture just blew the buildings apart. Um, but the rods that have been stored for decades in these pools, and the pools literally sit there right next to the reactor, so if you lose control of one of these reactors, it threatens to take out the pool, right?

    16. SBSteven Bartlett35:01

        Mm-hmm.

    17. BWDr Bret Weinstein35:01

        And the pool can go dry if you can't circulate water through it. The pool can crack and all the water can drain out, and then there's not even a way that you could put water in and stop it. And my point is that when that happens, it's going to create a fire. That fire is gonna start spewing highly radioactive material into the atmosphere right around the plant. That's gonna make it impossible for human beings to do even the heroic stuff that we've seen in both Fukushima and Chernobyl, and you're gonna lose control of the site. Now combine what I just told you with the fact that we have a grid that is vulnerable to going down and not coming back up for months, and the question is, well, do we start losing nuclear reactors, things that if we could keep power flowing to them could remain cool and not blow up, but as soon as we lose control of them, boom. There

11. 35:57 – 42:31

    Should You Become a ‘Prepper’?

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein35:57

       are 400 nuclear reactors on Earth today, civilian nuclear reactors. The world will look like a very different place if they all lose not only the containment of the reactor itself, but all of the built-up material that exists in those fuel pools. Right? Some of the isotopes in those fuel pools have half lives of 200,000 years.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett36:19

       Geez.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein36:20

       So you don't wanna live in a world in which these things have gotten away from us, and all of that radioactive material has been liberated into the atmosphere by fires. So second thing on my list, right after hardening the grid by improving these transformers-... is that you take all of the fuel in the spent fuel pools that is cool enough to remove, and you put it into what's called dry cask storage. Dry cask storage are these sort of fancy containers that don't require you to circulate water through them. They just sit there inert, all right? You could leave them for a thousand years. So the risk to humanity would be hugely decreased if we took all of the fuel that doesn't have to be in the pools, and we got it out of there, and we put it in a place that we don't have to pay attention to it in order for it to remain contained.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett37:12

       Why don't people do that?

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein37:14

       It costs money.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett37:15

       It's too expensive.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein37:17

       No, it's not too expensive. I mean, I- I don't... Both of these measures are so cheap compared to the risk that we're running, that I think you would have to be positively mad not to spend the money.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett37:29

       It's just more expensive.

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein37:30

       Yeah, it's more expensive, you know.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett37:32

        Okay, so it's the- the incentives to do that aren't- aren't- aren't clear.

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein37:37

        Well, not only are the incentives not clear, but this is- this is why you need good governance, right? For those who think that markets just simply solve every problem, if competitors are making the decision whether or not to take their spent fuel and put it in dry casks, well, the competitor that decides not to out-competes the competitor that decides to do it, 'cause their bottom line is better. But what you need is good governance to say, "Actually, you all have to put everything that can go into dry cask storage as soon as it can go, for humanity's safety."

    12. SBSteven Bartlett38:12

        Is there anything we can do on an individual level to prepare or to avert this crisis?

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein38:18

        Yes. Here's what I suggest. Let's talk about it on podcasts and hope that somebody with power realizes how dangerous this stuff is and starts the correct initiative within some governmental structure that remembers how to do its job.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett38:34

        Is there anything else that on a... You know, people- people often think about prepping and preparing for these kinds of things. Dig- digging a bunker under their house and hiding in there, or having supplies.

    15. BWDr Bret Weinstein38:45

        Well, so look, I think preparing at all scales is a good idea. We face many different, uh, scenarios. Some of them aren't survivable, okay? Well, if you've prepared and you hit an un-survivable scenario, I guess you could make an argument that you didn't make as much of the time you had, but I don't find that very compelling. It seems to me that the- the low-hanging fruit phenomenon is it's the consequence of something that is essentially universal, which is a pattern of diminishing returns, right? Diminishing returns means that over time, if you keep putting the same, uh, solution to a problem, you get less and less benefit. But it has a positive side, too. A diminishing returns curve has this very steep face on it, right? That face i- is the bargain face. That's the face where you get a ton of benefit for a small amount of investment. You should certainly do all the stuff up until you get to that point where it goes from a steep face to a plateau.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett40:02

        Mm-hmm.

    17. BWDr Bret Weinstein40:03

        So let's just do that, right? Who knows? Maybe the calculations about, um, the galactic current sheet are off because there aren't enough people studying it and we just don't get it yet, okay? Maybe there's 500 more years than we think, right? Maybe there's some factor we haven't found yet that has some impact on the system we don't know. So you should always be doing the stuff that makes you, uh, more capable of surviving the disaster, even if you think it's not enough. And then hopefully you- you discover things are better than you think. Um, so we should be doing that at every scale. And yes, people, should they be preparing? Absolutely. Should they spend everything on it? No.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett40:50

        Do you prepare in any way?

    19. BWDr Bret Weinstein40:52

        Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett40:53

        What does that look like for you?

    21. BWDr Bret Weinstein40:54

        Well, you know, I have little rules for myself. One, I realized, okay, if we were to take a... If we were to map out all of the things that I'm worried are a threat, and then you say, "Well, which are the ones that you're gonna have an extremely difficult time affecting your likelihood of surviving it?" Okay, I'm gonna ignore those.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett41:19

        Yeah.

    23. BWDr Bret Weinstein41:19

        Right? The- why would I spend everything on a solution that's almost certain to fail anyway, right?

    24. SBSteven Bartlett41:25

        Mm-hmm.

    25. BWDr Bret Weinstein41:26

        I mean, none of us are getting outta here alive. So at some level you can just say, "Look, there- there're things that aren't worth preparing for," either because they're too unlikely or because they're too catastrophic and you're not getting out of it.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett41:37

        And maybe you wouldn't wanna live in such a world anyway. (laughs)

    27. BWDr Bret Weinstein41:39

        Bingo. That's the next thing is-

    28. SBSteven Bartlett41:41

        Yeah.

    29. BWDr Bret Weinstein41:42

        ... you know, I'm not sure how thrilled I am about a world in which 400 civilian nuclear reactors have spilled the entire history of their, uh, their functioning into the environment. Um, I- I'm much more animated about getting us to reduce that hazard on the front end than surviving it if it occurs. Um, so I think- I think people should look at their life and they should probably go through a little period of alarm. If you- if you look at the way your life works and then we flip the electricity off, right? Suppose your continent loses electricity for a year.

12. 42:31 – 51:33

    Is Society on the Brink of Collapse?

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein42:31

       How well prepared are you for that?

    2. SBSteven Bartlett42:33

       Me? Totally unprepared.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein42:35

       Totally unprepared.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett42:36

       My Tesla outside has like 50 miles left in it, so I wouldn't- I wouldn't even be able to get- (laughs)

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein42:39

       Yep.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett42:40

       ... get far from here.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein42:41

       Right. So that's not a good plan.But there are things you can do, right? You can... Let's put it this way. The power going out for a year, that's a pretty far down the list scenario. That's pretty catastrophic. In fact, I wrote a, uh, an article for UnHerd in which I painted a scenario in which the sun did trigger the collapse of just a part of the North American grid, and I, uh, described how that was gonna result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take. It was surprising how easy it was to write it, actually. Um, but could the power go out for two weeks? Yeah. How, you know, how hard is it for you to prepare yourself and your family so that in a two-week grid down scenario you'd be able to get through? Well, depends if it's summer or winter, right?

    8. SBSteven Bartlett43:48

       Mm-hmm.

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein43:49

       Um, if it's summer, it looks like one thing. You really need food and water. If it's winter, depending upon where you live, you might need to figure out how you're gonna generate heat, um, enough to keep you, I would say you wanna go beyond alive. You wanna get to where your com- your, uh, family feels comfortable. Um, but, you know, could you edit down to one room? Could you keep that room warm? How would you do it? You know, you don't wanna have to d- you don't wanna have to run through that in the circumstance because a two-week scenario, I mean, that just simply happens.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett44:29

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein44:29

        Um, so anyway, yeah, I think prepping is a great idea for many reasons. For one thing, it's mentally clarifying, right? Just even understanding how dependent we all are on the systems around us makes us better citizens.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett44:46

        So let's say we manage to avoid the solar flare.

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein44:48

        Yep.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett44:49

        What else is sort of front and mind for you in terms of concerns at the moment?

    15. BWDr Bret Weinstein44:54

        I'm very worried about the absolute collapse of our institutions. I cannot think of a single sizable institution that still functions in any meaningful way. Many of our institutions actually functious- function to the inverse of the purpose for which they were created.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett45:15

        When you say collapse of institutions, which ins- institutions are you referring to?

    17. BWDr Bret Weinstein45:19

        I believe I mean all of them, and I will just give you some examples. In the world I grew up in, there was something called a newspaper.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett45:31

        Yeah.

    19. BWDr Bret Weinstein45:32

        The newspaper was far from perfect. It reported a lot of garbage. There was a lot of propaganda in it, and there was a lot of wrong-headed stuff that got reported as if it was true. So I'm not pretending that it was, uh, a source of facts that one could just simply go to to look them up. However, I now live in a world in which the newspapers look like the newspapers I grew up with, but they seem to bend over backwards not to report the news. And then they finally do report the news only be- when it becomes so embarrassing for it not to show up there that it would reveal how broken they are if it didn't get said. And that's not normal. We should be trying to make sense of the world. You can tell this isn't normal because if there was a newspaper that just simply did what the newspapers of old did, that had a, a newsroom, it had a budget, it sent people to places where important things were happening, it assigned them the job of talking to people and seeking the facts and soliciting documents and taking pictures and all of that stuff, and it did its best to give you a view of the world as that flawed newsroom the best it could, best sense it could make, would you subscribe?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett47:06

        Yes.

    21. BWDr Bret Weinstein47:06

        You and everybody else?

    22. SBSteven Bartlett47:08

        Well, I think I would. I have to check myself there because what I think I would do is probably different to what my innate biases might lead me to do and to click on.

    23. BWDr Bret Weinstein47:19

        Well, uh, I will tell you that in a world where we are all quite unsure about what's actually taking place, even just the basic facts, that if there was such an object, I think it's a slam dunk, you'd sign up even if you don't spot it. Because the disadvantage when other people have access to the facts, just not knowing what it is that they're even talking about would be, uh, it would be like everybody in the room knows a secret and you don't.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett47:47

        But do we want the news or do we want confirmation of what our existing beliefs?

    25. BWDr Bret Weinstein47:52

        Well, I think people differ, and I think it is very easy to get addicted to confirmation bias. But I also think that that's downstream of the failure of another institution. Our academic institutions, our schools do not teach people how thinking works, and if you know how thinking works, then you understand that actually confirmation bias will get you killed. You don't want to be told something comforting. You want to be told something true because the comfort actually comes from utilizing that information to make yourself less vulnerable.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett48:38

        Mm-hmm.

    27. BWDr Bret Weinstein48:39

        So, uh, having a newspaper would be a fantastic thing. The fact that there are none... Let, let's say that, you know, w-30% of thinking people would subscribe to a newspaper that just simply tried to do the job and was undaunted by competing incentives. Well, then that's a slam dunk of a business model, wouldn't you say?

    28. SBSteven Bartlett49:03

        Do you know what's interesting? 'Cause I- I sometimes think that the reason why things I idolize or I- I would like don't exist is because there's actually not a market there for it. And like, simple sort of supply and demand economics mean that someone's probably tried it and their startup probably went bust.

    29. BWDr Bret Weinstein49:22

        Well, it did, but I don't think that's organic. I think it is a slam dunk, and that the problem is that there is a competing force.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett49:33

        Ah, okay.
13. 51:33 – 52:36

    Are Institutions Woke or Not?

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein51:33

       sleuthing about the events of COVID, there's the moment at which COVID became a feature of the public discussion at the beginning of 2020, and then there's the moment that it appears to have existed in circulation in the world, which is much earlier, the Wuhan games in October or September of 2019. If you were privy to the fact that there was a pathogen that was going to circulate, that it was going to result in a major upheaval in people's ability to travel across borders, that people were going to be fearful and locked in their homes, that they were gonna be seeking pharmaceutical remedies, whatever. If you had some sense of what was coming, then you could position yourself in the market so that when it did come, you'd make a mint. So the question is, when powerful people did hear in

14. 52:36 – 1:04:47

    The Evergreen College Incident: What Really Happened

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein52:36

       September of 2019 that there was a pathogen that was on the loose in China that would spread worldwide, was their first instinct to tell the public?

    2. SBSteven Bartlett52:52

       No.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein52:52

       There's a perverse incentive against it. So now imagine that you're ruthless and you recognize that that scenario that I just painted isn't at all unique. Any place where you can get the jump on the public with respect to knowing what's coming is an opportunity to make millions into billions. So, maybe you don't want the public to have truth-seeking institutions that work. So this, I think, is liable to be the reason that there's not a single university in the US that still functions.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett53:31

       Really, you think that- you think that's why?

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein53:32

       Yeah. I think if we- if you had one university that functioned, then certainly that would be the place everybody wanted to send their kids. I mean, I have two college-aged kids. If there was a university that still made sense, it's the obvious place for them to go.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett53:48

       Why don't they make sense anymore, in your view?

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein53:50

       They don't make sense because, um... Well, there's multiple layers. You've got a scientific apparatus that is very powerful when it comes to finding the truth and very fragile when it comes to resisting perverse incentives.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett54:10

       As in like wokeism, wokeism and pressures to be politically correct?

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein54:15

       Exactly.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett54:16

        Yeah.

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein54:16

        So where- where is the American university that stood up and said, "I'm sorry, but men can't become women."

    12. SBSteven Bartlett54:23

        Mm-hmm.

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein54:24

        Right? They can live as women, they can dress as women, there are surgeries, there are pharmaceuticals, but there's nothing you can do that takes your birth sex and changes it to the opposite one. Not a single university said that anywhere?

    14. SBSteven Bartlett54:38

        This is quite-

    15. BWDr Bret Weinstein54:39

        That's bizarre.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett54:39

        This is quite, um, personal to you because I was reading actually earlier today about what happened to you at university at Evergreen State University. And it's funny 'cause, um, I watched the videos of that event. And I don't know whether it's because we now have some distance between those events now, but...I just wanna say, I think what you did was the right thing. And I think history has made you look more and more correct as time has gone on. Because I, I watched it, and it just seemed to be a bunch of people living in some kind of collective delusion, these, like, people shouting at you in this hallway. Um, for people that aren't aware, as I wasn't aware before, before I knew you were on your way here, can you explain what happened there? 'Cause I think it's kind of, um, evidence of this sort of c- collective delusion that you're talking about.

    17. BWDr Bret Weinstein55:22

        Sure. Um, there's a little, uh, a, a little difficulty because there's the public story of what happened, right? The, the public narrative settled on a set of facts that isn't exactly right. It's not so far off that it doesn't make the point. But the basic thing that happened is that my wife and I were very popular professors at a very liberal school that had a, uh, a very unusual teaching model. So the school was called The Evergreen State College. It still exists. The Evergreen State College was founded by radicals who threw out every single structure that would exist in a normal college or university. There were no departments. There were no grades. The administrators did not have the ability to tell you what you had to teach. There were no requirements about how you taught. Um, and if you were the kind of person that was interested in figuring out what new might be done in the teaching environment, if you wanted to figure out a new way to teach, it was the perfect place. That said, many people took the freedom that the college offered and they squandered it. They weren't really interested in doing anything other than reducing their workload. So the college was kind of divided between the professors who thought that this freedom was this gift and we used it, um, we ended up being popular, and then there were other professors who didn't, and they were much less popular. But in any case, Heather was literally the college's most popular professor.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett57:02

        She's your wife?

    19. BWDr Bret Weinstein57:03

        Yes. Uh, she's my wife and the co-author of that book you have in front of you. Um, she was the most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind. We both had the equivalent of tenure, although the place didn't formally have tenure. It had something like it. And so we were not vulnerable. We were liberated to say what needed to be said. And what happened is the college hired a new president, a guy named George Bridges. For whatever reason, George Bridges wanted to completely reimagine the college as a much more standard, much less interesting place. And in order to do that, he didn't really have the power because the founders of the college had created a place where the faculty were in a position to just simply say no, and we would have. So what he did in order to overcome the faculty was he empaneled a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, hand selected, and he incited a, at first cold and increasingly hot, uh, battle over race. Um, it was my job to explain to my colleagues and to anyone involved in the decision-making process why the plan that they were proposing would be a disaster for the college. And although I did have trepidations about standing up because the environment was quite charged, like I said, I was a popular professor. I had the equivalent of tenure, and you know, the worst that could happen is people are gonna call me names. So I did stand up. I stood up at a faculty meeting, and the faculty was in the process of voting for a resolution to force every member of the faculty to explain what progress that they had made in the previous year against their own racism.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett59:12

        (laughs)

    21. BWDr Bret Weinstein59:14

        Right. Now, worse, not only were we voting to mandate ourselves to reflect on our own progress against racism that was simply assumed to exist, but these documents in which we reflected would become official documents that would then be utilized in promotion decisions, firing decisions, these sorts of things. So the point was, that's a mecha- that's a takeover because you're right, you know, in my reflection annually, I would say, "Well, actually I'm not a racist. I've made very little progress because there wasn't an issue to begin with." And the answer is, "Well, oh my God, he's worse than we thought," right? "He doesn't even recognize his internal racism," right? So it was gonna be that conversation. Again, it didn't threaten me because I already had tenure, but nonetheless, I had to say to my colleagues, "Look, this is a terrible mistake." And I stood up at the faculty meeting, and I said this, and it, of course, caused a stir. Several people came up to me after the vote, and they said, "We agree with you," but only one other person voted with me across the entire faculty meeting, 70 votes that went the other direction. Um, and one year later to the day, I didn't realize that it was the one-year anniversary of that event until months later, but one year later to the day, 50 students that I had never met, I had never met a single one of them, streamed through my classroom door, accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired. Now, I later came to understand that these 50 students that I had never met had been sent by my...... faculty colleague who had become my nemesis. They had been sent to create the impression of white professor being accused of racism by students, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine in 2017 what that would have looked like. Except that it didn't go as they planned, because as I mentioned before, I had a teaching environment in which I knew my students extremely well. Not only did I know their names, but I knew their backgrounds, I knew their histories, I knew their styles of thought, their, uh, their disabilities. I knew them really well and they knew me really well because we went to class every day, and we simply talked about biology, which brought up issues about their perspectives. So I think what was expected was that when these protestors streamed through my classroom door, in 2017, if you've got a bunch of students accusing a professor of racism, that that professor's students are gonna jump right on it. They're all gonna have gripes about, you know, some grade that they got that they thought wasn't w- wasn't fair, and so they expected me to end up being faced with a mob of students swearing that I was a racist. Now, not a single one of my students turned on me. In fact, many of them spoke courageously on my behalf, including students of color, which then created a kind of rift in the universe, because when people from the outside world saw video, video that was uploaded by the protestors themselves who were proud of what they were doing, the world... I didn't sound like a racist to them. And what's more, there were all of these students saying it was nonsense. So it was, I think, the case that- that broke the- the woke narrative, because it just didn't add up. And, in any case, that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing is that the world actually recognized that there was something, a- as you say, that there was a delusion going on, and that was apparent enough in my lack of fear over the accusation, in my students' willingness to actually stand up and say that it was a- a bum rap. And I- I will also just point out, my students of color who spoke up on my behalf, they actually faced the worst retribution, because in order for the woke revolution to function, you can't very well have people of color standing by a white professor. It just breaks the whole thing. So anyway, they needed to be punished from the point of view of this protest so that it wouldn't happen again, and my wife and I ended up resigning our... Oh, there- there's another aspect of the story that I should probably mention. When this protest happened, um, there was a lot of drama. The protest spread from those 50 students who confronted me at my classroom to a campus-wide riot that went on for days. The president of the college, who was indirectly responsible for all of this, ordered the police, who were a campus police department, they were real police but they were under his direction, he ordered them to stand down. So they locked themselves inside their police

15. 1:04:47 – 1:12:46

    The Decline of Mainstream Media

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:04:47

       station and were literally forbidden to intervene. Students started patrolling the campus as if they were the police, patrolling the campus with weapons. They started stopping traffic on a public road passing through campus looking for me. The police called me up to warn me about this and they told me they couldn't protect me. And, um, it was, on fast-forward, a test of the claims of these revolutionaries, right? They have this sort of anarchist vibe to them, that if we can just simply get rid of the cops, that we will- we will govern ourselves and it will be beautiful, and instead it became a dangerous, violent riot on the scale of days.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:39

       And in 2017, the same year that this happened, you resigned from the college and you got a payout, essentially.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:05:46

       Yep.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:47

       I ask this question because we were talking about newspapers and then we- we moved to ed- the education system and you said that there's not- not a university in the land that's still doing what it's supposed to do. So it felt somewhat correlated, uh, linked to- to what you were saying, because it kind of sets the backdrop of, A, maybe why you- you have, uh, you know, clear personal experience here, but also what you saw there was kind of a symptom, I think, of some of the pressures that are being applied to the scientific education institution that are stopping it being able to do what it should be doing.

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:06:19

       100%. It's doing the inverse of what it should do. It's indoctrinating people, uh, and, you know, the tragedy of it is that the people who are indoctrinated end up hurting themselves.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:32

       Yeah.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:06:33

       Right? They have an opportunity and they will squander it on a fiction, and in the end it will not result in them being, uh, hire-able, right?

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:42

       Yeah.

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:06:42

       They've learned, they've learned how to demand things of the system rather than to contribute something to it, and that's not their fault. I mean, at some point it becomes their fault, but that's the, that's the failure of those who were charged with delivering them an education to do so. It's- it's educational malpractice.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:02

        You cited this as one of your big concerns. You started talking about basically the- the loss of the media...Um, what is the, what is the downstream implications of that? Because that, it just, I just feel like I'm, I'll get my media in other places. I'll just go on X. I'll, you know... That's not gonna cause any issues with society?

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:07:18

        Well, um, I believe th- the consequence of it is something that I call the Cartesian crisis.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:27

        Cartesian crisis?

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:07:28

        Cartesian. A reference to René Descartes. And the reason I reference him is that he had a kind of philosophical freakout, where he realized that almost everything that he took to be a fact, he had not tested himself. And therefore, all of those facts that felt objective were really downstream of somebody's authority, and he realized how dangerous that was. And in fact, it results in one of his most famous contributions to humanity, which is the, uh, what masquerades as a proof of his existence, "I think, therefore I am." Um, now I don't think it is a very good proof, right? Maybe it works for him. He can prove to himself that he exists. But why we should take his word for the fact that he exists? You know, if a computer said, "I think, therefore I am," it doesn't make it true.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:23

        Mm-hmm.

    15. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:08:24

        So, in any case, we can remember that Descartes was troubled by the fact that he couldn't establish any facts, um, in any way other than to take somebody's word for the fact that that's what they were. We are increasingly living in a world where the chain of logic, of evidence, of reason that might allow us to have some confidence in a fact is breaking down, and this problem is going to get worse and worse. Not only is every single truth-seeking institution captured or broken, but AI is going to change the very nature of what it means for something to be a fact, right? If you can have a compelling video of you saying something that you never once said, right? Well, you know, if I show you a video of you saying something last week that you didn't say, you're gonna be pretty darn sure you didn't say it. But if I show you something that you said 15 years ago, you may not be so certain. Other people won't be so certain. So, what I think this is going to do is going to produce a, an allergic reaction to belief, and it is going to cause a cynicism about factual material that is going to make it impossible for us to interact with each other, to govern ourselves. It's just, there's no future in a world in which we can't figure out, "Here is what I believe and here is why I believe it." Right? That is an essential feature.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:01

        Doesn't the internet just become a bit of a wasteland in such a case, and will... I was thinking of sort of political commenta- uh, commentators. W- is, is it likely that there might just become a channel which we switch to which is a verified channel to watch, you know, Donald Trump or Rishi Sunak or the, the prime ministers talking and... to get our news source where we know that particular channel is truth? And then we assume that the internet is just a wasteland of disin- misinformation.

    17. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:10:29

        Well, the problem is, if you had such a channel, boy would that be a prize if you controlled it, right?

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:34

        Oh, yeah.

    19. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:10:34

        If you've got the fact channel, then, oh, the world's your oyster. You're, you're, you're now emperor. So, were there going to be a fact channel? It would get captured. And that's the world we're living in. Now I will say, the idea that there are no institutions that work is the flip side of another idea, which I, I... It goes by the, um, the phrase, "Zero is a special number." And what I mean by, "Zero is a special number," is that when you have zero universities that work, zero newspapers that report the news, zero social media platforms in which you are allowed to speak freely, one world unfolds. But a single exception in any of those spaces changes the overall dynamic. And the reason for that is because if you had one social media platform in which people were truly free to seek the truth, to discuss anything and everything and nothing bad happened to them and they weren't de-boosted or any of that, then that's obviously where all of the people who want an adult conversation are gonna go, right? You don't wanna be treated like a child. You wanna have a conversation in which you can actually entertain all possibilities, reject those for which there's no evidence, et cetera. So, if you get one platform, then people are gonna go to it. And if people go to that one platform, it's gonna force the other platforms to deliver something similar. So the competitive environment means that a single exception can actually change the whole landscape. And we are in a battle. I don't think X has achieved that status of being completely free, but it's certainly freer than the other platforms, and it is having an effect. It is changing the dynamic, and it is, in part, why the COVID narrative broke wide open, why the political narrative in the US is, uh, becoming radically different than it was even a few years ago. So the question is, are we gonna see an exceptional university break the trend and become the next Harvard because you'd be crazy to send your kid anywhere else? Are we gonna see somebody

16. 1:12:46 – 1:16:50

    We SHOULD Be Worried About AI

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:12:46

       put together a newspaper in which they get all of the subscribers because you'd be crazy to get your news from a propaganda source when there was a real source? So hopefully, courageous people will recognize it's not as hopeless as, as we are led to believe. A single exception can change the whole dynamic.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:08

       I'm actually quite shocked at the impact that Elon buying-... Twitter, um, now called X, has had on so many things. And even, quite frankly, the- the impact I'm starting to see it have on someone like Mark Zuckerberg at- at- at Meta. I watched an interview yesterday with Mark, who I think Meta had previously banned Trump from being able to talk on the platform, basically saying that he's pretty badass. And I do not believe he would have been able to say that had X and Twitter not changed.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:13:39

       I agree with you, and I think that actually if you start looking for other examples of that pattern, you will see them everywhere. There are certain things that once had magical power that no longer do. The claim that somebody is a conspiracy theorist does not cause them to be shunned from society. In fact, my feeling is when I hear somebody is a conspiracy theorist, my question is, "Oh, are they any good at it?"

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:06

       (laughs)

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:14:08

       Um, but the same thing is true for, uh, the idea of an anti-vaxxer, right? Well, you know, okay, somebody's an anti-vaxxer. Is that because they reflexively believe that no such thing could work or is it somebody with an injured kid-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:26

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:14:26

       ... who has legitimate questions? Right? We've just seen the leading proponent of vaccines publish a paper in which he acknowledges that the testing to establish that they were safe was never done. So we're living in a whole different world, and I think it's, uh, it is a symptom of Musk primarily having broken the dynamic by, as he said, paying $44 billion, uh, because that was the price of free speech.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:00

       You mentioned AI there. In your sort of list of concerns, pressing concerns, where does- where does AI feel? It feels like it's come out of nowhere. You know, 'cause if we go back a year, um, a year? Yeah, about- about a year, it wasn't really front of mind for anybody, r- for the vast population, for the va- general population. But now it- it appears to be front of everybody's mind. Any, everyone thinking's mind.

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:15:27

       I think that's the right way to view it. I think it should be top of mind, and not because it is independently, uh, everything that its worst critics imagine. In fact, I have my doubts about the safety-est crowd and their demands for regulation. But there's plenty to worry about in this space. Um, so I have five different existential threats that AI poses. Um, let's see. Off the top of my head, let's start with the, uh, the most fanciful first. AI could decide that we are its competitors and it could leverage its skills and, uh, decide to eliminate us. I find that unlikely, but I don't think we can discount it entirely. Second is the so-called paperclip problem, that an AI that was very powerful could have trouble operationalizing a command and it could result in human extinction. And the example that, uh, people who think this way use is if you were to tell a, an AI you wanted it to make as many paperclips as possible, that it could interpret that as license to go

17. 1:16:50 – 1:20:31

    Are Governments Ignoring AI's True Impact on the Planet?

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:16:50

       liquidate the universe and turn it all into paperclips. All right? Not what I meant, but-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:54

       Mm-hmm.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:16:55

       ... you know, but there you have it. And actually, I will give a different example that I think, uh, maybe functions better. There are, uh, people in our intellectual space who make claims like, "It would be great if we were to end all suffering." Personally, I think that's about the most insane idea I've ever heard. It's a terrible one. You wouldn't want to live in that world. But you can understand why people think that it might be a moral obligation. Now imagine that you tell an AI, "Hey, let's end all suffering." That's actually possible. Just drive everything that can suffer extinct.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:37

       Yeah.

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:17:37

       Right? So the idea that we have a- a non-trivial problem figuring out how to give a powerful AI an instruction that can't be misunderstood, it's worth worrying about. Again, I think that one's fanciful too, but it should be on our list. But then we get to the three that I don't think are easily dismissed. One is that AI is going to enable, uh, people with malign intent to... It's going to enable them more than it is going to enable those with benevolent intent. And this is an unfortunate asymmetry that just exists in the world, that a- an amoral actor, somebody who has no moral compass, they have total flexibility. They can do whatever a moral person can do, and then they've got a whole list of other things that they can also do, right? Whereas a moral person is constrained. They just have the limited set of things that are available to them. So the question is, does AI liberate us all or does it liberate those who are, um, monstrous more than it liberates those of us who behave like- like decent humans? I'm concerned about that. I think we are in some danger of it being leveraged against us in a way that transforms things.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:05

       I remember hearing a hacker say that the malicious hackers, the people with malicious intent, are always ahead of those, the sort of ethical hackers that have benevolent intent that are- that are good. And he- he was talking about how, like, the, you know, encryption systems and password systems, he goes, "The hackers are always ahead."... and the defense systems that companies are trying to put in place are always behind because the hacker's intent is obviously always to find new ways of breaking the current system, whereas the people that defend security systems are just trying to defend against the known, um, forms of attack. So someone in, I don't know, some kid in Russia right now could be at his computer figuring out new ways to use a large language model to attack systems in new ways, whereas the people who are working to defend that are currently just trying to figure out how to, um, mitigate the risks of current weapons. So it's, it's... You know what I mean? Like, the, the attackers are always thinking forward, really.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:20:01

       Yep.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:01

       Do you think the general public, and also just institutions and governments, are currently underestimating the profundity and the impact that AI is gonna have on the planet?

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:20:11

       Yes, and in fact, I think we are crossing over what would be described as an event horizon. So an event horizon, I think the term initially comes from an understanding of what happens at a black hole, that there's a point at which light is pulled back in and so you can't see

18. 1:20:31 – 1:28:22

    The Critical Role of Language in Human Survival and Evolution

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:20:31

       beyond it.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:31

       Mm-hmm.

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:20:32

       Right? There's literally no mechanism to see beyond it. We are crossing a threshold that none of us can see beyond, and that is inherently frightening. Are people underestimating? They're simultaneously underestimating and overestimating, right? The, uh, the fear of being turned into a paperclip is overblown, in my opinion. The fear of... Well, I've just gotten to the third one on the list. The fourth one on the list is a total collapse in our understanding of the world around us and each other. That the way in which an artificial intelligence interfaces with our human API, with our interface, is profound already, and we're not very far in.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:29

       Mmm.

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:21:29

       And I'm already looking at little movies that this thing makes, and I'm not just talking about the clip of the cat walking through the garden, right? Little vignettes. I'm talking about actual movies in which characters of a made-up species are having a conversation about humans, right? Okay. That's a hell of a moment. Where will we be in five years? It, it's unimaginable how much change that is going to create because we have no evolutionary preparedness at all for living in a world where the product of a computer can out-compete the product of a human in narrative space. That's a dangerous world to live in because narratives are so profoundly important to who we are.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:31

       Stories.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:22:32

       Yeah. Stories. Stories are what we're all about. You know, even profound ideas are unfathomable until somebody has written them into a story that people can, can grok.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:46

       But also language just generally is... I don't think, um... I was listening to something the other day which was just making the case for how our e- our entire society is pretty much held together with, with language. And it's so interesting that large language models were really the thing that blew open this conversation about AI because we don't realize that, like, ev- like, my... Every relationship I have is held together with language. In fact, all my passwords are language. The, the way that I think, the way that I understand the w- world is through language. So if there's a s- a super intelligent species that has a better grasp of language and a certain level of autonomy, um, it's hard to think... You know, it's, it's interesting 'cause what made us dominate the world was our, I think was our intelligence and our... and then our ability to collaborate through, through language and communication. And this is the, the very thing that AI has entered the scene with.

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:23:35

       Well, I will tell you, I wrote a piece, and I keep meaning to release it just so people can see. I didn't get it exactly right, but many years ago, I wrote a piece in which I said that I believed that artificial intelligence was going to emerge from the project to get a computer to translate seamlessly between two languages, and I explained why that would be the thing that cracked the, uh, the nut. And that is what happened for a reason. The reason's because the relationship between human language and consciousness is profound and largely unknown. So, uh, Heather and I described this model in, in our book, A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Human beings are a unique species. The primary way in which we are unique is that if you th- if you think about the question about, well, what do human beings do, right? If I say, you know, "What does a tiger do?" Right? We could describe the things that a tiger does to meet its caloric needs, to get the materials necessary to maintain its body, to produce offspring, right? We could describe the niche of a tiger. Can't really do that with people, right? What do we do? Sometimes we farm the oceans. Sometimes we hunt big game on land. Sometimes we terraform a piece of territory and we plant crops. We do a lot of different things, and if you think about all the things that human beings have done for our entire history as a species, it's immense, the collection. So we are unlike any other species because our niche is the movement between niches, both over time and across space.So how does that work? Well, we have a tool that no other species has. When you think about the question of what makes human beings special, the answer really is language, and the reason that it's language is that language allows the breaching of the boundary between one mind and another. So that ability allows human beings to pool their cognitive capacity, and what Heather and I argue in our book is that the, the way human beings get through time is they oscillate between two modes. When the ancestors, when your ancestors know how to exploit the habitat that you live in, then you take their wisdom and all of the stories that it's encoded in, and you apply it, and maybe you build it out a little bit. You figure out how to do something the ancestors didn't quite know how to do, but mostly what you're doing is just applying the toolkit that you've been handed to the problems that it works on. But what happens when you get on a canoe and you cross some body of water, and the place you've landed doesn't have the same plants and animals that your ancestors knew? Well, it's not like they, they got dumber, but it, their stuff is less applicable. So what you do is you pool your cognitive capacity, you and all the people in your tribe, and you talk about, "Well, what are the opportunities here and what might you do about them?" You know, "I saw an animal this morning, and it looked like it might be pretty good eating, but I don't know how you're gonna catch one." "Well, what if we were to drive it into that canyon," right? That sort of thing. So by pooling our cognitive resources, by reaching a collective consciousness, which is the inverse of that cultural mode of the ancestors, the conscious mode, when we face novelty, allows us to come up with new solutions, and then to refine them. And when we've got it nailed, well, then we are the ancestors who knew what to do, and our stories get driven into that cultural layer and they get handed on generation after generation, and then eventually, they run out of usefulness, and we have to return to consciousness and come up with a new way. So that's what human beings do. Both spreading across space and moving through time, they oscillate between that cultural mode of the ancestors and the conscious mode of, "What the hell do we do now?"

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:05

        So I wanna make sure I f- fully understand this, um, as if a 10-year-old would understand it, is we have kind of two modes. We have what we had passed to us, and because of consciousness and language and our ability to communicate, we have what we're, we're discovering now about the nature of the world. And I think the very presi- the very

19. 1:28:22 – 1:30:19

    How AI Will Transform Human Communication Forever

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:22

       presence of a skyscraper is quite an interesting thing 'cause it's built on the knowledge passed to us from people that no longer live. With also, you know, if, if the skyscape, sky- skyscraper has something on top of it like a, it's solar powered or something, much of that understanding has come from our current thinking of the people that live right now. So you have the combination of our relatives from the past that are no longer here, all of their collective knowledge, and you have the collective knowledge that we're discussing and thinking through now. Together, that's what makes humans so special, and really what ties that all together is language and the ability to communicate.

    2. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:28:59

       Right. It is that ability to communicate, whether you're in the cultural mode where you're picking up the stories of your ancestors so that you know what to do, or you're in that conscious mode where you're parallel processing the problems of the moment and figuring out what new solution you might come up with.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:13

       And the orangutan can't do that.

    4. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:29:15

       No other creature comes anywhere close. I- it's so many orders of magnitude different from the next near, and I'm not arguing that other animals aren't smart. There are plenty of smart animals. This is a whole different kind of smart. This is a smart where it's impossible to actually draw the boundary between my smart and your smart.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:36

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:29:36

       Right? There's a collective smart. It's very real. You can't locate it, right? It has to do with some ancient mechanism for pooling understanding, and pooling understanding isn't even like, "Hey, everybody bring your understanding." It's like, "You know what? I don't trust that guy's understanding because I've seen him screw up and not fix it. That guy, he sounds crazy, but he's got a track record. Actually, I take what he says very seriously." So it's like, oh, there's a weighting of who's, who's input plays what role. Somebody might have insight in one realm and be unreliable in another. That ability to

20. 1:30:19 – 1:32:14

    Why Regulating AI Might Be the Worst Idea Ever

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:30:19

       figure out how to take the sum total of all of the different skillsets that people bring to the table and come out of it with something like a proposal for what we do next, right? That is a profound adaptive process that we don't even have a name for.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:38

       AI changes this?

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:30:40

       Well, AI scrambles it, because on the one hand, I can make the argument that AI is like a, a flint-knapped blade. It's just another tool. And it is just another tool at one level. On the other hand, because, you know, the blade, you're in pretty big trouble when a blade starts talking to you.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:05

       (laughs)

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:31:05

       You know what I'm saying? That's a bad moment. That's, you need to lay off the mushrooms at that point.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:11

       (laughs)

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:31:11

       Right? In this case, the blade, the tool that we've created, it is talking to us. In fact, it's sensitive to what we think about what it says to us, which means it is, it is certain that you will have an evolutionary process in which the AI gets exquisitely good at telling us what we wanna hear. There's nothing more dangerous than that.You want an AI that tells you what you need to know, whether or not you wanna hear it, right? That would be a useful tool. An AI that responds to the fact that you think that what it said is good? Oh my God, we are, we are gonna end up in a, um... You know, I'm struggling for a better metaphor than a- an infinite hall of mirrors, but that's what it's gonna be. It's gonna be a big fractal hall of mirrors in which you can't be certain of stuff. And I will say because I know that, um, there's a lot of

21. 1:32:14 – 1:36:23

    Brain Chips: Are We Turning Into Cyborgs?

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:32:14

       concern, you've got a kind of safety-ist crowd that wants to regulate AI because the dangers are profound, and you've got a bunch of other people who think regulating AI is dangerous. And what I've realized is that failing to regulate AI is dangerous. Regulating it is worse.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:33

       Regulating AI is worse?

    3. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:32:35

       Oh, yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:37

       Why?

    5. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:32:37

       Well, for one thing, you create an asymmetry between those who abide by the regulation and those that don't.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:45

       So say China won't have a regulation, but America do have one.

    7. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:32:49

       Right. Do you wanna be ruled by whoever violates your regulation? I don't.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:53

       (laughs)

    9. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:32:53

       But that's what we effectively guarantee if we create that, uh, dynamic. So I don't like the idea of heading across the event horizon created by AI without a plan. I really don't like that idea. That's not safe. On the other hand, the alternative is only gonna make that problem worse. So somehow we have to face this with our eyes wide open.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:18

        I mean, how does one face it with their eyes wide open? I mean, uh, all I'm hearing is you can do nothing about it.

    11. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:33:23

        Well, I don't know that you can do nothing about it. Here's what I wanna know. Why are we not obsessed with tracking the thought process of the AIs? In other words, if there were one thing that I would want, it's AIs to report how they arrived where they did, so that when the catastrophe happens, we can figure out why it happened. We could potentially get through this very perilous moment by coming to understand it and becoming wise about how to leverage this. So I do think there are things to do, but what is not wise is this sort of naive, "Oh, I'm just gonna get to the point where I realize that regulating AI makes problems worse, and now I'm not gonna worry about it." Right? That, I think, I think not regulating it is the right thing to do and worrying about it tremendously is also the right thing to do.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:28

        I also think about a world, I think maybe the world that Elon is really trying to create, where we are able to interface with AI via brain interface devices like Neuralink. You know, it's interesting 'cause I, I watched Elon's narrative emerge around Neuralink at the very start, and he was very focused on A- being able to interface with AI. That was all, all the interviews he was doing at the time were centered on, "The reason why I'm doing Neuralink is because we need to be able to interface with this technology or else we're gonna get left behind." And then more recently, it's become about allowing people that can't use their arms and legs to use them again, which I think is maybe a marketing spin. But at the heart of his narrative and other people's narratives is that we are probably all gonna have these brain, um, interface devices put into our brains or maybe out- outside of our bodies, if you look at some of the other companies, so that we can interface with AI. And I mean, that fundamentally changes what humans are. We become cy- cyborgs or something.

    13. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:35:22

        Yes. It's not the first time we will have fundamentally changed what humans are, though. And I think this is an important thing to realize, is that we do, we do this regularly. You know, the printing press did this. Television did this. The internet did this. And, you know, the, uh, the gloom and doom crowd each time has said, "Oh my God, if you print books, it's gonna cause our minds to become feeble because you won't need to remember." And the funny thing is, I think in each case, the gloom and doomers were right. There's definitely an element that they correctly spotted. What's difficult to do is, or impossible, is to look over the event horizon and say, "What does it mean?" And in this case, what does it mean, right? W- who... Are we going to get through this incredibly perilous period and look back on this, you know, the way we look back at the cell phone,

22. 1:36:23 – 1:39:11

    AI Is Coming for Your Job: What You Need to Know

    1. BWDr Bret Weinstein1:36:23

       right? "The cell phone, oh no, it's gonna destroy human sociality. It's gonna, you know, it's gonna do that." Well, it did. (laughs) Drove us crazy.

Episode duration: 2:50:31