Joe Rogan Experience #1494 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan 0:00 ... uh, if anybody sounded the alarm that all this madness was gonna come to fruition in the real world, it's you, sir. You w- you were the guy. Like, you were the one who was saying this is, what's happening at Evergreen, and if you don't know, go Google it. Bret Weinstein, Evergreen. And now it spills out into the real world.

Bret Weinstein 0:23 Just like I said it was gonna.

Joe Rogan 0:24 You did.

Bret Weinstein 0:25 I did. I said it-

Joe Rogan 0:26 You did.

Bret Weinstein 0:26 I said it in several different places, and, uh, pretty clearly, you know? It could have been a tiny bit more precision, but it was highly accurate.

Joe Rogan 0:33 You were highly accurate, and, uh, often maligned and mocked.

Bret Weinstein 0:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:38 People didn't think it was a big deal. They think you're ... much ado about nothing. You're making a big deal about some kids that are voicing their opinions on things, but what you recognized early on was that there was an authoritarian aspect of it, a forced compliance aspect of it that's very dangerous.

Bret Weinstein 0:54 Yeah, it's all about force, and, um, you know, I've started to get calls in the last week or two. The people who, um, who mocked me and others, including you, for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses, some of them have started to call and say I got it wrong, what do we do now? And actually, I, I appreciate those, those calls and those contacts, because really, that is the question. So somebody's gotta-

Joe Rogan 1:22 Yes, what do we do now to pull it back?

Bret Weinstein 1:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25 How do you get the genie back in the bottle? Or as Douglas Murray says, "How do you put the brakes on this thing?"

Bret Weinstein 1:29 How do you put the brakes on this thing, indeed. Well, I have to tell you, I'm not optimistic. Um, I think that this is actually, the people who are catching up to the fact that Evergreen has now spilled over into the world, um, have not caught up to the fact that this is, um, unstoppable at this point with the current configuration. The absence of leadership is going to prevent us from doing what we should do, and that means that the next set of predictions are far more dire.

Joe Rogan 1:59 What is your next set of predictions?

Bret Weinstein 2:01 Well, I would say we are headed for a collision course with, with history. I mean, we're really staring at many scenarios that end in some kind of civil war. And while I do think it is still possible to avert that outcome, I don't know the name of the force that gets in its way. That's, it's really troubling.

Joe Rogan 2:27 What do you think these kids want? Not just kids. What do you, what do you think the people that are facilitating chaos, what do you think they want?

Bret Weinstein 2:38 Well, I think there's some danger in c- casting them as one thing-

Joe Rogan 2:42 Right.

Bret Weinstein 2:42 ... because I think we have several things fused together, and that, u- until you understand what has joined forces with what, you're not gonna, there's no way to answer the question.

Joe Rogan 2:52 All right, let's break it down.

Bret Weinstein 2:53 Okay, so one thing that we're seeing is, and we really have to take this back a number of years to understand why it happened, but we are seeing Occupy 2.0.

Joe Rogan 3:04 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 3:04 Now, I participated in Occupy. Originally, Occupy made a lot of sense. It was a complaint about the TARP program and Too Big to Fail and the fact that the American public was, uh, not protected when those who had created the financial collapse were. And that was a legitimate, uh, gripe, and it was also a legitimate gripe at the beginning of the Tea Party movement. Occupy then morphed into a, an anarchist movement that was just simply hostile to civilization, and it became absurd. And so when I say this is Occupy 2.0, this is the anarchist version of Occupy that has now reemerged, and it has fused with Black Lives Matter, which, as I've said lots of different places, if Black Lives Matter just simply meant what those words imply, I'd be on board with it. Um, it doesn't. It means a great deal more than that, and we're beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks, too.

Joe Rogan 3:59 What else do you think it means?

Bret Weinstein 4:01 Well, let's put it this way. For some reason, it means, uh, abolish the police, which is possibly the stupidest proposal I have ever heard, and it's not like we haven't seen what happens when you do that. I've lived it.

Joe Rogan 4:15 Don't you think that that's a, just a fearful response to the obvious police brutality that we saw in Minneapolis? What's the best response? We gotta do something, we need to defund the police, and then everyone's like, "Good job. Great, great first step, at least."

Bret Weinstein 4:29 Well, no.

Joe Rogan 4:30 No?

Bret Weinstein 4:30 It's a dishonest presentation, and I'm concerned that there i- as I've also said in many places, the proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart, and so that is confusing to people, because when you hear folks in the street demanding that we abolish the police, you think, "Well, okay, that's never gonna happen. If it even started to happen, it would be so complex to make it happen that it can't possibly be. They just need to blow off some steam." Nope, that's not right. The fact is, the police, in some places, can effectively be halted in their tracks, and really, if there's one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it's that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we're also seeing in Seattle.

Joe Rogan 5:18 Yeah. Um, the defunding of the police, which is happening in Minneapolis, what are they doing in replacement of the police?

Bret Weinstein 5:29 Well, I don't know, and I will say that the thing that is trotted out as the example that tells us that, defund the police, which doesn't really mean defund the police, it means abolish the police, we are told that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example.

Joe Rogan 5:43 Well, Camden just, they, they, they sort of broke the police down, but then built up a new version of the police, right?

Bret Weinstein 5:50 Yeah, they shifted it to a different jurisdiction, and look, I'm not arguing that we don't need massive police reform, and frankly, I'd be up for a discussion of a total rethink of the way we do policing, but the idea that you could withdraw the police first is...Absolutely insane.

Joe Rogan 6:08 Marc Lamont Hill had a, uh, a w- a very good point about the guy who was killed. What d- what is the gentleman's name that was killed in the drive-in, drive-through, uh, fast food place?

Narrator 6:20 Rashard Brooks.

Joe Rogan 6:20 Rashard?

Narrator 6:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:21 Is that how you say his name? Um, who was just drunk and compliant and peaceful until they were telling him they were going to arrest him. Even said, "Get me an Uber." And what his point was, it was a very good point, why were the police even called for that? This is a non-violent person who just happened to be drunk. Was he doing something he shouldn't have been doing? Yes. But obviously compliant, polite, speaking l- just, like, very reasonably, until it escalated into this tussle and then he lost his life. If they had just had some sort of a program where they could... "We're gonna park your car, sir, or we'll have someone drive your car to your house. We're gonna call you an Uber or we're gonna take you home and we're gonna just write you a ticket and work this out in court. You're not gonna go to jail, you don't have to be arrested, you don't have to be handcuffed, you're not gonna be treated like a monster. You fucked up, you made a mistake, but you're not a bad person. You're not as- a person who's trying to hurt people." The police should be there for r- robbers, murderers, rapists. That's- that's what we need the police for and this is another... n- none of those things. This is just a guy who fucked up and he got drunk and he... an- and then as they were speaking to him, clear, real clear, not a bad guy, like the way he was talking to the cops, just talking to them very reasonably. Even asked for an Uber.

Bret Weinstein 7:44 Well, look, I am no fan of this aggressive style of policing.

Joe Rogan 7:49 No.

Bret Weinstein 7:49 I'm not a fan of the militarization of the police. I've actually... I mean, I've had run-ins with the police. I've been hit twice by cops. So, I- it's not that I-

Joe Rogan 7:56 W- what happened?

Bret Weinstein 7:57 Uh, well, one of these is a long story that goes back to, um, my first research gig in Jamaica and the other one was, uh, I was participating in a protest. I mean, I was very young. I was probably 20, um, and there was a protest about homelessness in Berkeley and frankly, it happened without my awareness that there was gonna be a protest, but I happened to be nearby and I was sympathetic. And so I joined it, and I was coming down the street with the protest and a cop, uh, hit me with a- with a baton.

Joe Rogan 8:25 (scoffs)

Bret Weinstein 8:25 Knocked me down. So anyway, I- I'm no fan of this stuff.

Joe Rogan 8:28 Right.

Bret Weinstein 8:28 I'm not defending it. But that's not what this movement is really about, and even if it is to the extent that it is what this movement is really about, it doesn't deal with the root cause. We're dealing with a symptom and it's not a symptom that you can treat in isolation.

Joe Rogan 8:43 Well, I had Jocko Willink on the podcast on Monday, and he had a great point. Obviously, Jocko was a Navy SEAL commander and worked with, uh, the Navy SEALS to create programs for training. And what he said is that these cops have the- the minimal amount of training. It's a- the tiniest amount of training and then they send them on the street. He goes, "20% of their time should be spent training." 20%. It should be s- de-escalation drills, simulation drills, g- educating them on how to communicate with people in various situations, educating them as h- if one cop is in a confrontation with someone, the next cop should step in and say, "Let's- let's just calm down. Mike, why don't you go- go, uh, deal with this over there and I'm gonna handle this. And, uh, sir, let's- let's, uh, let's take this from scratch. Like, let's work- let's work this out." And that having higher qualified police officers, better trained police officers, more- well, better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this. And these people are... They're- they're, you know, nobody wants to be a cop right now, so who's doing this, right? Who- who's s- the new generation from now out, when- when people sign up to be a police officer, who's gonna do this? This- it's a... You have a few that are gonna answer that call because they feel like it's a- they have a duty, but you're gonna have a lot of people that just, they can't get other jobs and so they choose that and maybe they're not the cream of the crop. And-

Bret Weinstein 10:08 And so-

Joe Rogan 10:08 ... that's very bad for people with guns that tell other people what to do.

Bret Weinstein 10:12 I- I hear two things in what you're saying, and one of them I- I fully agree with. Um, the implication of what you just said is that less funding isn't the solution. If anything, more funding is so that we get be- better qualified people and then we-

Joe Rogan 10:22 Better training.

Bret Weinstein 10:23 ... train them, right? We get people who are better suited to the job in the first place and then we train them better so they know what to do. And I agree with that. The part that I'm worried about is that I also, I think I hear you grasping at straws, and frankly, they're familiar. I hear everybody grasping at straws here, and what I think is not getting said is that brutal policing is a feature, not a bug. All right? This is part of a system that is about something else. And to the extent that I think we can all recognize that there is something absolutely organic about the anger that has caused people to spill into the streets in large numbers, that anger is the result of a process that does not begin with policing. It begins with economic phenomena and political phenomena. And one of the things that spooks me is this movement, in part because it is leaderless and I would argue rudderless, it is not correctly addressing the actual problem. It is lashing out at things that it can see. It's lashing out-

Joe Rogan 11:25 Mm.

Bret Weinstein 11:25 ... at anecdotes. But the only solution here, the only proper solution that actually saves the republic is a solution that addresses the core problem.

Joe Rogan 11:36 Economic despair, communities that are filled with crime and violence and gangs, and the people that come out of these communities with very little hope and all the models that they operate under, the- what- what they model themselves on is what they see around them, which is all this crime, and they- they don't have this s- sense that there's a very clear path out of this.

Bret Weinstein 11:58 Well, let's, um... I- I wanna step back to something that will sound too remote to be useful, but I'm sure it isn't. I would claim that this actually goes back to a shift in the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration.During the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party effectively switched. It took up the Republican Party's business model, moving away from defending the interests of common people as its, uh, reason for gaining power, and that created a problem. So during the Clinton administration, we saw, uh, the end to aid with family- uh, to families with dependent children. We saw NAFTA. We saw basically an abandonment of the core raison d'être for the Democratic Party. Now, the Republican Party, at that point, was the party of business, but that doesn't really mean the party of business. What the Republican Party was, was the party of well-established large businesses, which frequently meant, as it was catering to their interest, that it was preventing small businesses from rising up that would threaten its constituents. Now, the Democrats took up this model. They went into influence peddling as well during the Clinton administration, and they became the party of other businesses. So now you have two parties that are basically dealing with competing business interests vying for power. But what that does is it excludes the interests of regular folks, and so regular folks have been getting the shaft ever since. Nobody is representing their interests. They're getting wise to it, and they're feeling the effects on the street. They are feeling the system is rigged. It's rigged against them. It's not even evenly rigged against them. So, you know, in Black communities, there's a perception it's specifically rigged against us and you know what? It is. But the way it is, is very subtle, right? It's not a matter of racism being ubiquitous, you know, inside every white head. It's not like that. It's- this has very little to do with modern racism, but what it has to do with is a property of our system. So, you know, um, there's a cybernetic principle. The purpose of a system is what it does. It means that, don't listen to what somebody says that the system is for. Look at what it accomplishes. That's what it's for.

Joe Rogan 14:11 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 14:11 And our system basically has two things that it accomplishes. Um, it basically keeps real change from happening, and the reason it keeps real change from happening is because people who are winning in the present system will continue to win if the system continues to do what it does, and they may lose if the system changes and starts doing something else. So, it creates what I would argue is a kind of organic conservatism. Those with power don't want change because it threatens them. And the other thing that our system does is it reproduces present, uh, patterns of distribution into the future. And what that means is racism that has almost died out is still alive and well in a sense, because all you have to do is take people who are born into a neighborhood that is, uh, devoid of opportunity and continue that pattern. If no opportunity shows up, then people who were oppressed are now going to continue to be oppressed. And so it feels personal, but it isn't. It's just reproducing an existing pattern.

Joe Rogan 15:16 And a lot of that emanates from these communities that have been disenfranchised and economically distraught from slavery, like literally from that... where we're dealing with the echoes of slavery, and it doesn't get addressed. And when people do bring it up and they start talking about reparations, people roll their eyes and people go, "Oh, that was so long ago." But the results of that are still alive today in the South. They're st- still alive today in many communities that were redlined, uh, as recently as the 1960s, right?

Bret Weinstein 15:48 That's exactly right. And so it- we basically have set ourselves up for a confused response because there is a subtlety, the fact that ancient racism, people who are dead, their racism still haunts us today through mechanisms of the reproduction of patterns of distribution. And mind you, when people hear distribution, they freak out because they think you're talking about wealth. I'm not talking about wealth. And we can talk about why I wouldn't bother, but what we're talking about is opportunity. Opportunity has been hoarded. It has been concentrated in some zip codes and almost totally excluded from other zip codes. And so you're right. The, uh, patterns of slavery moved into Jim Crow, and now they've moved into a phase where they are very subtly infused in- into our system. And so it is causing people to have the sense that there is an enemy and it is out to get me when it's not exactly an enemy that's out to get you. It's a pattern, right?

Joe Rogan 16:47 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 16:47 It's a pattern that definitely needs to be addressed. And so the natural place would have been the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party, because it has taken up with big business, is not going to do it, even though it would be a winning political strategy. The Democratic Party is more interested in serving the political- the, um, economic interests of its actual constituents than it is serving the interests of its nominal constituents. And so why are you seeing something that looks, uh, like a communist revolution beginning in the streets? For the natural reason, which is that people are feeling excluded from, uh, from their share. And they are being excluded. But this revolution that is beginning in our streets is no more coherent or desirable than, you know, than Maoism. And it's going to be brutal in- in the Maoist way or possibly the way that it unfolded in the French Revolution or maybe it'll be some, you know, unique version and it'll get its own name. But if we want the republic to survive, we're going to have to prevent this from happening, and because it's a leaderless movement, who do you even talk to? Who do you reason with?

Joe Rogan 17:56 Yeah, that's what's fascinating about it, right? Because it's emerging not just in America, but it's also in England and it's in all parts of the world, people are protesting. And in many ways, I think that's- it's probably because, love it or hate it, America sort of takes the cultural lead for the world in a lot of ways, uh, when it comes to, uh, movements and particularly art and-... and, and, you know, expression. And I see this leaderless movement, and it, it seems so attractive to young people that do feel disenfranchised by the system. So, I, I watch them. I mean, I've seen so many videos of these people out there screaming and cheering and chanting, and they feel like they're a part of something, right? And they are, right? But what is that thing that they're a part of? Like, what's the end goal? That doesn't seem to have been really clear. Espe- like, there's kids out in, uh, they were out in, um, Woodland Hills, out there, chanting, "No justice, no peace." And I'm like, "W- uh, okay, what justice are you talking about? Are you talking about George Floyd?" Well, that, in that case, it seems like that guy's gonna go to jail for the rest of his life. And I, I don't know if that's justice or not. That police department has been disbanded. I don't know if that's justice or not. But what is justice and what is peace? It's just a slogan, but they feel good saying it. "No justice, no peace." But what ... I don't know what you're saying. But you feel very passionate about what you're saying. And I gr- I think if you pulled one of those kids aside and said, "What's your message and what are you trying to do?" I think a lot of them would have nothing to say. And that's what's, that's very concerning to me. I'm very concerned about that because it seems like they're very enthusiastic and passionate about an invisible enemy. An e- an enemy that they can't, they can't put on a scale. They can't tangibly describe it in a way that I, I understand it completely. It just seems like the structure of things, they feel like is, is unjust.

Bret Weinstein 20:03 It is, unfortunately, a zombified collective fighting a boogeyman that they have invented, which again, doesn't mean that their frustration is not about something very real that does require a solution. But to the extent that these people have de-individuated and they've become a true mob, and they are pushing policies that make no sense and endanger us all. I mean, there is no neighborhood in the US that is going to be safer for the absence of the police. And it really doesn't even matter how corrupt the police are. The absence of the police is going to create a power vacuum, and we're gonna get warlords, as we're already seeing in miniature in Seattle, as we already saw at Evergreen.

Joe Rogan 20:44 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 20:45 So, it's not a coherent proposal. But, uh, I have a concern that the reason that this is leaderless is, that something, uh, that I think is unrelated, I really think it's unintentional, but there is something about the way that influence happens in this era that has taken all of the would-be leaders and it has trapped them in the gig economy. And so, we have a lot of people who would be in an excellent position to steer this justifiable anger at an enemy that is actually worth attacking, to curb the violence and to make this a, a moment of useful and necessary change. I would argue overdue change. But those people are, instead of being leaders, what they are is influencers. And influencers don't have the kind of power necessary to shape a movement, and they don't have the position to negotiate on its behalf, and this is very dangerous.

Joe Rogan 21:46 W- where do you think this escalates to? Do you have a, a map in your mind of where the territory is?

Bret Weinstein 21:54 Yeah. I mean, I would say there are several ways it could go. But unfortunately, the dynamics look almost unresolvable if somebody does not speak for the movement. And with it being unresolvable, you've got a conflict between rural people and urban people. You have a conflict between, um, Blacks and those who are self-declared allies, and ally doesn't really mean ally, but, uh, foot soldiers on behalf of this movement and people who won't go along with it. And w- what I'm trying to raise people's awareness of right now is that there's something in us, being raised in the US, there's something in us that thinks that The Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here, that what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here-

Joe Rogan 22:52 Mm.

Bret Weinstein 22:52 ... that Nazi Germany cannot happen here.

Joe Rogan 22:54 Right.

Bret Weinstein 22:55 Um, and, you know, the Soviet Union couldn't happen here. I don't know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don't think it's impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure, it is the Constitution, which I would argue is showing its age. But nonetheless, the values that America aspires to, the reason that the world does pay attention to us and still, even with all of our brokenness, allows us to lead it, that reason is that the values that were described were honorable, even if they, even if we didn't meet them. But what we aspired to be was great. And, uh, I, you know, I resent Trump's, uh, Make America Great Again because there are populations for whom it has simply never been great, right? So I, I think that last A in MAGA is just a finger in the eye for people, and it was designed to be. But the structure, what it aspires to be is great and heading in the direction in which it could be great for everybody

Bret Weinstein 23:56 is obviously the right thing to do. But what we are now doing, and the thing that troubles me most about this movement, is that if you listen to it closely, and I have listened to it very closely, it is explicitly about disassembling the very things that make the West marvelous, right? It is anti-science, right? It does not want policy based on science. In fact, you want-

Joe Rogan 24:19 How so?

Bret Weinstein 24:21 Well, I mean-You saw last week, presumably, that it got, uh, Nature, the journal, Nature, Science Magazine, uh, CalTech. It got all of these, uh, just absolutely top level scientific institutions to broadcast the hashtag shutdownSTEM.

Joe Rogan 24:40 What?

Bret Weinstein 24:41 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:42 No. I'm not aware of this at all.

Bret Weinstein 24:43 Oh. Well, and this is another thing, we're losing our minds because to me, the idea that you would be unaware of this is hard to imagine because it was so-

Joe Rogan 24:52 There's too much going on.

Bret Weinstein 24:53 It was so thoroughly all over my feed though-

Joe Rogan 24:55 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 24:55 ... but I'm discovering this, there's stuff absent from my feed too that I should know about, and I'm finding the same thing. So-

Joe Rogan 25:01 Well, here's the thing-

Bret Weinstein 25:02 Yeah?

Joe Rogan 25:02 ... I don't read my feed.

Bret Weinstein 25:03 Well, you don't read your Twitter feed, but you're plugged into enough people. You have enough-

Joe Rogan 25:06 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 25:06 ... conversations in this room.

Joe Rogan 25:08 Things have to be, like, almost nuclear before I'm paying attention to them these days, just for my own personal sanity.

Bret Weinstein 25:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:14 I, I, I've stepped away from almost all social media other than posting.

Bret Weinstein 25:19 Yeah. It's actually, uh, uh... If I can say something perfectly weird. I don't really aspire to great wealth. I never have, but there is part of me that wants to be wealthy enough that I can afford to ignore my feeds.

Joe Rogan 25:33 (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 25:33 Right?

Joe Rogan 25:34 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 25:34 I can't now. I have to be-

Joe Rogan 25:35 Right.

Bret Weinstein 25:35 ... plugged in. But, um, but anyway, the, uh, the thing that, that's really concerning here, and I, you know, I, I don't want this podcast to be all about concern. There's-

Joe Rogan 25:43 Here it is, "Thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism in STEM. More than 5,000 scientists and two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the day to address racial inequalities in S- in science. The strike follows two weeks of demonstrations spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white police officer..." Um, "People on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag shutdownacademia-"

Bret Weinstein 26:11 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:11 "...shutdownSTEM, and strikeforblacklives." Shutdownacademia is terrifying. ShutdownSTEM is equally terrifying. But I mean, like, what takes its place? What do you expect?

Bret Weinstein 26:23 Well-

Joe Rogan 26:24 If you shut down academia, like, what do they, what are they saying when they say systemic racism in STEM? What does it mean? It's representation in terms of, like, the... Like, what are they saying?

Bret Weinstein 26:35 So, this is so sad because truly, if you, if you really wanted to, uh, to raise Black people out of the quagmire, the economic quagmire they find themselves in, if you wanted to do it en masse, you would arm them with the most powerful tools. Right? The most powerful tool, and the tool that is best positioned to address biases, especially subtle biases, is science. That's the, that's what the scientific method does. That's, it's one reason for existing, is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is wrong. Right? It takes your biases and forces you to see what's wrong with them. That's what science is for. Now, the reason that this movement is attacking STEM has to do with the connection of this movement to critical theory. And critical theory didn't come from the sciences. The word theory is basically, uh, pilfered. Right? It's being used in a most ironic fashion. Critical theory is a narrative that's now becoming a religious movement, and it is anti-STEM on the basis that it claims that STEM itself, science itself, is racist inherently.

Joe Rogan 27:47 What do they mean when they s- when they're saying critical theory?

Bret Weinstein 27:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:50 What does that encompass?

Bret Weinstein 27:51 Well, my understanding is that critical theory was born as an honorable investigation of biases that exist inside of our court system, racial biases, and that it has now morphed into something that its originators don't recognize and don't respect, that it has become basically... I mean, you know, you've, you've had, uh, Jordan Peterson on your podcast many times, once with me. And, you know, he, what he talks about with respect to these, these are cultural Marxists and they are wielding this postmodern doctrine. What he's talking about is critical theory. All right? Critical theory is basically a, um, a Trojan horse that exists in academic departments that are dedicated to its study, and what it does is it un-invents progress in other fields. And that's a very, um, uninteresting process when it's hiding away in some corner of your university where you don't have to listen to it. But what has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public. And the nonsense that you hear about shutting down academia, shutting down STEM, abolishing the police, all of this is standard fare in those phony departments.

Joe Rogan 29:03 When you say, "un-invents progress"-

Bret Weinstein 29:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:06 ... what do you mean by that?

Bret Weinstein 29:07 Well, I mean that we have a system, and, you know, I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody, but we have a system that accomplishes a great deal. And this style of thought that all of these departments that end in theory, um, that don't actually function by normal rules of logic or the scientific process, these things are an attack. They're like an autoimmune disease of the academic culture. And by and large, the scientific part of the academy keeps its head down and it stays away from people who believe in this stuff and it tries to do its work. Um, but what has happened is that the dynamics, the demographics have changed such that these departments which weren't taken seriously by the sciences are now dictating terms to the sciences, which couldn't possibly be more dangerous. Because to the extent that, uh, the, the argument more or less is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of those who are currently successful, and that that bias is actually preventing people who are not succeeding under current conditions from getting there, and therefore, um, we need to hobble these disciplines to level the playing field. Well, imagine...... that America surrendered its advantage in the sciences in order to, um ... even if you could level the playing field inside of the US by doing that, which you can't, but even if you could, this would so hobble us in the world that it would be an insane, uh, policy to pursue.

Joe Rogan 30:46 Is there any debate going on about this? Uh, uh, c- clearly what they're saying is if you're looking at the vast majority of the scientists they represent, what, I mean, what is it? Europe- European Jews are a lot of them. There's a lot of various people of European ancestry, uh, Asian folks, less African Americans, less Africans. So they're saying that because of this, this is clear, this is clear evidence of racism.

Bret Weinstein 31:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:15 What is-

Bret Weinstein 31:16 Which is total nonsense.

Joe Rogan 31:18 What is it evidence of?

Bret Weinstein 31:19 Um, it is ... Well, it's evidence of a number of things. And, you know, I find myself, uh, in two places on a lot of these arguments. On the one hand, somehow I'm sitting here on your podcast defending academia, when on any normal day, I would be telling you academia was so incredibly broken, and science has been so incredible- incredibly corrupted by its contact with the market, that we have to fix these things, because that is in and of itself a threat, you know-

Joe Rogan 31:44 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 31:44 ... to the West. Here, I find myself saying, "Wait a second. These people are actually telling you what they think. They think science is the enemy, and instead of democratizing the tools of science and giving them to the people who need them most, they want to end science." So, the problems are several. Unfortunately, they're not tremendously interesting. They're sort of dry, inside-baseball stuff.

Joe Rogan 32:06 But we- I think we have to cover them though, just to sort of take the legs out from under this racism argument-

Bret Weinstein 32:11 Sure.

Joe Rogan 32:11 ... when it comes to representation.

Bret Weinstein 32:13 Sure. So first of all, let me just say, academia is tremendously liberal, and that ... Uh, I mean that in both senses. Let's take the honorable part of it, right? Inside of a university, there is every desire to bring people who do not look like the old White guys that have done so much of the past work in science. There is a desire to, uh, to broaden, you know. So, it is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them and then, you know, behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color. It's not like that. Okay? There is a desire to have those people show up, uh, and get the job, because for one thing, it takes the pressure off. To the extent that departments don't look like the demographics of the country in which these departments are housed, you know, that raises questions. And so there's a desire to bring in anybody who, um, makes it clear that that's not going on. However, let's say that you were, uh, you were Black and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you, and you made it. Let's say that, um, you know, you, you had people who, uh, said wise things to you, and they got you to focus on the right stuff, and you managed to dodge the stuff that captures so many, and you made it, right? Let's say y- you got into Harvard. You got a, a really good quality degree in a, in a, in a proper science. Well, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to go into academia? That would be insane, because I don't know what the numbers are. I don't know what fraction of people who get PhDs actually get the job that they've trained for, but it's tiny. It is-

Joe Rogan 33:56 Is it really?

Bret Weinstein 33:57 That would be like one in 20.

Joe Rogan 33:58 Really?

Bret Weinstein 33:59 Yeah. S-

Joe Rogan 34:00 Because there's only so many positions, and every year you're graduating hundreds and hundreds of people with those degrees.

Bret Weinstein 34:07 Well, but there's also a very good reason for this. I mean, it's a terrible reason, but there's a very easily comprehended reason. So universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead, uh, the grants. So if you get a million-dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory, that is to say proper scientific theoreticians like me, and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments, because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so, uh, expensive to do the work of the university. And the way you do that is you bring them on as graduate students, and you pay them, uh, an appalling wage. You claim, you claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students. And they, they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university for incredibly, uh, l- low amounts of money. They live under poor conditions, and increasingly, uh, they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university in order that the people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job, and it's a racket.

Joe Rogan 35:49 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 35:50 So in that-

Joe Rogan 35:51 Oh. See, I wasn't aware of that at all. I didn't know how it works.

Bret Weinstein 35:53 Yeah. It's a racket. And, and the person you should talk to, the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother.

Joe Rogan 35:59 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 36:00 Um, so what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running. That in effect- effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market to drive the wages down. But all of these things mean that if you are coming from circumstances that have, uh...... been challenging and you make it, you don't want to go to graduate school in the sciences because it's a dumb move. You're going to take having gotten your head above water, and then you're going to voluntarily drown.

Joe Rogan 36:39 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 36:39 That doesn't make any sense. You're much better off, even as bad as, you know, being a doctor has become, it used to be a great job, now it's kind of a sucky job, but you're better off doing that because at least it's a job. You'll pay off your loans. You know, you'll make it. And so basically, what we see is that there are lots of reasons that a rational person, uh, from certain demographics is less likely to go into the sciences. That's not racism in the sciences. It's again one of these echoes of a past, uh, racism or a past indifference that is having huge impacts on the present.

Joe Rogan 37:14 Mm-hmm. Okay. Um, so these people that want to... that- that- that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it, what do they propose? Like, what- what do they propose in replacement of STEM and academia?

Bret Weinstein 37:32 So I- I... What they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it. I- I will, I will answer your question-

Joe Rogan 37:43 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 37:43 ... but I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous.

Joe Rogan 37:46 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 37:46 And the only reason that I am so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly, and I watched this happen at Evergreen.

Joe Rogan 37:52 You've talked to them direct- directly, so you know this is actually what they want?

Bret Weinstein 37:55 Well, I can't say they, because-

Joe Rogan 37:57 You're right.

Bret Weinstein 37:57 ... undoubtedly there's variations.

Joe Rogan 37:59 Gross generalizations, yeah.

Bret Weinstein 37:59 But I can say that, to the extent that I've actually had these conversations with people, I was left completely shocked by... You know, there was an- there was an example at Evergreen where, uh, we were in a faculty meeting, and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the enlightenment, but on the idea of enlightenment. And I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty, and somebody was actually saying out loud that enlightenment was a problem, and nobody in the room said anything.

Joe Rogan 38:48 What did they mean by enlightenment is a problem?

Bret Weinstein 38:50 Well, so here's- here's what I say to- to people who ask me about this, students in particular. Um, the enlightenment was a European project, right? It definitely had a light skin tone, right? It was, it was European men. It was not a Jewish project. But I am not embarrassed about taking the tools of the enlightenment and wielding. They don't belong to Europe, right?

Joe Rogan 39:22 Right. They're human.

Bret Weinstein 39:23 They're human tools. They were a discovery in Europe, and arguably the discovery in Europe happened because of unfair exclusion of other people. But at some level, who the fuck cares?

Joe Rogan 39:33 Right.

Bret Weinstein 39:33 These are the most powerful tools ever. And you- you can't un-invent them. The thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible.

Joe Rogan 39:42 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 39:43 But if you're in critical theory, first of all, if you end up in critical theory, any one of these fields, women's studies, queer studies, whatever it is, you have already foregone this option. You don't end up in critical theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect, you have people who don't stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider because they wouldn't go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.

Joe Rogan 40:13 So l- l- let's take a side step here. Um, critical theory. When you're talking about gender studies or queer studies or... w- why do you think those are not valid avenues for- for people to pursue?

Bret Weinstein 40:27 Well, because the method is nonexistent. If you were to do these things properly, you would study them with the tools of STEM, right? But we know from... We know that's not what goes on inside of these departments. And we also know that the product doesn't add up from the point of view of science. You can't take the claim, for example, that, uh, uh, if a man decides that he is a woman, then he is a woman. That's not a valid claim. It just doesn't stand up. And you can't claim that sex is a spectrum either. That claim doesn't stand up. These are empty. And we could have a discussion about what we are to do in light of the part of gender that is flexible, but we're not having that conversation because we've got an ultimatum on the table.

Joe Rogan 41:17 Hmm. Right.

Bret Weinstein 41:17 Either you agree sex is a spectrum or you're the enemy.

Joe Rogan 41:21 Right.

Bret Weinstein 41:22 So all I would say is just empirically this is what happens. Now, I will also say, uh, one of the most telling incidents that happened during the Evergreen riots is now finally, it's been covered by PBS, I've talked about it on my podcast. A student of Heather and mine, um, an excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half Black. Her mom is Afro-Caribbean. She was known to be my student and Heather's student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened. And what I'm telling you is-

Joe Rogan 42:13 What did they say when they say, "You're a race traitor for studying science"? What- what's- what specific discipline?

Bret Weinstein 42:21 Well, she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me.

Joe Rogan 42:24 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 42:25 And...

Joe Rogan 42:26 And they said you were a race traitor for studying evolutionary biology because?

Bret Weinstein 42:31 Because science is racist.

Joe Rogan 42:34 Yo.

Bret Weinstein 42:36 It's nonsense. And I, I hear you trying to parse it as if it makes sense. And I think the point is-

Joe Rogan 42:41 I just don't understand as a person who spent three years barely paying attention in college, I don't know how it got to that. I don't know how that becomes an actual course. I don't know how that gets funded. I don't know how that, you can get a degree from that.

Bret Weinstein 42:55 Well, so what I've heard of late, um, and I'm ... It may be James Lindsay who is the originator of, of this phraseology, but there's a term, racism of the gaps. And racism of the gaps is a reference to the god of the gaps hypothesis. Anything we can't explain in science is explained by God, which is obviously-

Joe Rogan 43:14 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 43:14 ... nonsense. But racism of the gaps is any place where, that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism. So if we see-

Joe Rogan 43:25 Hmm.

Bret Weinstein 43:25 ... an absence of Black people in math, obviously the answer is racism.

Joe Rogan 43:30 Do they apply that in areas where Black people excel?

Bret Weinstein 43:35 No. Because this is a self-serving, uh, modality.

Joe Rogan 43:39 Like hip-hop.

Bret Weinstein 43:40 Right. And so, l- let's go back to Odette for a second. Trying to parse what they're saying as if it has content, logical content, is a mistake.

Joe Rogan 43:50 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 43:51 Trying to parse it as a tactical move makes a lot of sense.

Joe Rogan 43:55 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 43:55 Let's imagine that Odette was not the courageous person that she is, and that she had caved, right? Imagine you're cornered, you know, y- y- y- you're alone. You've got a mob that's actually physically confronting you for studying science. If she was not a person of strong character, she might have signed up with them. If she had signed up with them, then A, now they have a potentially powerful ally, right? A Black person, former student of ... Or, at that point, I guess, current student of Heather and mine, who would say, "Yes. In fact, science is racist. Evolutionary biology particularly so. I was in that class," yada, yada, yada.

Joe Rogan 44:33 And people are easily influenced, and that-

Bret Weinstein 44:36 Many people.

Joe Rogan 44:36 ... being bullied by that would, would probably cause a lot of people to cave into that and give into that just for conformity, just so that people accept them.

Bret Weinstein 44:44 Yes. And so, thank goodness that Odette is somebody who is of incredibly strong character, who really got the message of evolutionary biology very deeply, and there's nothing that they could have said or threatened her with that would have caused her to make the move that they wanted her to make. But processing it tactically is important. What they're doing is tactical, and what they did with Shut Down STEM, tactical. They were proving their power, right? They were able to get the most important scientific institutions to broadcast a demand to shut down STEM. That's an amazing level of power.

Joe Rogan 45:18 And actual scientists that are in disciplines that are legit, like evolutionary biology, went along with them?

Bret Weinstein 45:28 Well, you know, I contacted Richard Dawkins as this was happening.

Joe Rogan 45:31 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 45:32 Because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested, you know, h- he hadn't made a statement, and I thought it would be powerful him to d- for him to do it. He was totally unaware it was going on.

Joe Rogan 45:41 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 45:41 Right? So you have the most important institutions broadcasting this thing. Something about our environment is not calling it to the attention of people who might be in a position to say something. And, uh, the whole thing is, uh, it's setting us up. We're in, we're in tremendous danger.

Joe Rogan 45:58 And what, what do you think their motivation is?

Bret Weinstein 46:02 Power.

Joe Rogan 46:02 Power.

Bret Weinstein 46:03 Well, again, we have to be careful about they.

Joe Rogan 46:03 So what happens if they get through? They shut down STEM. Then what do they do? How do ... You know, do they, are they thinking this far ahead? They're not playing this long game.

Bret Weinstein 46:14 Um, okay. Uh, I would just r- ... I would tell people who aren't aware of me and what I think and believe, that I am very progressive. I am very interested in making a fair system. That is a-

Joe Rogan 46:29 As am I. As am I.

Bret Weinstein 46:30 I, I n- ... I know you, I know you are. So what I'm about to say sounds like one of those right-wing crazy things.

Joe Rogan 46:38 Uh-oh.

Bret Weinstein 46:39 What they want ... Well, imagine the following. Look, first of all, let's talk about reparations for a second.

Joe Rogan 46:44 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 46:45 Okay? I am not a fan of the idea of reparations. I think it would be a terrible failure. It would be a disaster. But I do believe that something of very substantial magnitude is justified. I just don't think reparations is the answer.

Joe Rogan 46:59 I completely agree.

Bret Weinstein 46:59 Okay.

Joe Rogan 47:00 I think reform, in terms of communities, I think, uh, spending massive amounts of money to rebuild communities and give people hope.

Bret Weinstein 47:08 Yes. Uh-

Joe Rogan 47:09 E- economic opportunities.

Bret Weinstein 47:10 Massive investment-

Joe Rogan 47:11 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:12 ... in communities that have been systematically frozen out.

Joe Rogan 47:14 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:14 And I would put, uh, I would put American Blacks and American Indians at the top of the list-

Joe Rogan 47:19 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:19 ... because I believe they have a special claim, is that-

Joe Rogan 47:21 Is parti- ... And Native Americans are particularly distraught because they've been th- th- subjugated to this weird position when they're stuck on these reservations.

Bret Weinstein 47:28 So, uh, we'll come back to this in a second maybe.

Joe Rogan 47:31 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bret Weinstein 47:31 But, um, I think that there's something very special that happened with Blacks and with Indians.

Joe Rogan 47:35 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:35 And they're not ... It's not exactly alike, but it has to do with their different origin stories.

Joe Rogan 47:39 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:39 That these two populations, uh, uh, have, um, both suffered a, a, a parallel, uh ... I don't even know what to call it. An obstacle-

Joe Rogan 47:48 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:48 ... that is, that doesn't, that makes them unlike, um, uh-

Joe Rogan 47:51 Anyone else.

Bret Weinstein 47:51 ... other Americans.

Joe Rogan 47:52 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 47:53 Yes. So, not in favor of reparations, but I would be in favor of something that did the job that reparations are imagined to do. Okay. What this movement is, is an attempt to create a slant in every single interaction that does the job of reparations. It's reparations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in every room, in every institution, in every context, right? Now, that will be the un-invention of America. It is, in some weird sense, a mirror for the America that Blacks and Indians have faced. They have faced an America in which everything was slanted against them. It has grown less so-But again, we have the echoes of that deeply slanted America that, uh, are broadcast into the present, uh, at a high level of intensity. Um, but you cannot do reparations inside of every institution, every hour, every discussion. That is not a plausible plan. Even people who support the idea of monetary reparations as a solution, if they understood the dynamics of trying to infuse it into every interaction, there is no way it could possibly work. And it invalidates all of the most important principles on which America runs. So, we are really talking about un-inventing America and substituting a reparations program for it, which it, it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard. And think, think for a second, if you're trying to imagine what the hell I'm talking about-

Joe Rogan 49:33 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 49:33 ... imagine the courts, right? Now, there is a problem, there's a process called jury nullification. And Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what it has to do with race as we have. Because effectively, you can instantly create a situation in which the law doesn't apply to certain folks because of the color of their skin, right? That would be an advantage. You could argue that it was compensatory for years of being on the other end of that deal, but it cannot be made to function. But the other thing is also possible, right? You can, uh, not only have the law not apply to people on the basis that they have a skin color that suggests they've had a, a raw deal, but you can also make the law apply to people because of their skin color. We can have show trials, right? I was effectively exposed to the equivalent of a show trial at Evergreen, right? I was convicted of racism, and it happened that, for various reasons, I knew damn well that the charge was completely empty based on my history as a human being. And so, I felt I could stand up to it and withstand it. And I guess in a way, I did. On the other hand, my wife and I were driven out of the college, so yes, I survived it, but, um, I didn't survive it intact, right? I made it somewhere else. But that show trial mentality, I mean, it would be a perfect fit for the, uh, the Maoist part of this, of this movement's ethos. I mean, we're already seeing struggle sessions, people being forced to admit things that aren't true, right?

Joe Rogan 51:15 Do you think part of the, part of the influence of this is that we, uh, particularly, uh, white Americans realize that there's a significant difference, there's a significant disparity between opportunity that people in these disenfranchised communities of color have versus us? There's a difference. And so when someone from these, uh, critical theory disciplines... Should I even say discipline? Some-

Bret Weinstein 51:47 Lack of discipline.

Joe Rogan 51:48 When they, uh, promote this, uh, people that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country, that there is a situation in this country, and to voice any sort of disagreement with this movement that seems to represent the idea that there is a problem, you, you become a part of, of racism. So, in order to stand out as not being racist, you are literally abandoning the ideas of science. You're abandoning all this just so that you don't get labeled on the wrong side of history.

Bret Weinstein 52:27 Yes. And, uh, I was alerted to something a few days ago that I was not aware of, uh, which is, this is gonna sound far afield, but what I ran into was somebody describing what had happened to American POWs in the Korean War, uh, who were being administered by the Chinese. And the Chinese had a very sophisticated, um, mechanism for basically brainwashing. And the mechanism was something that I have seen in this movement, but didn't understand had a formal history. One always imagines brainwashing to be this very aggressive, um, thing, but the incrementalness of the move that was arranged for these POWs was the key feature. So, the first thing that apparently POWs were asked to do was to write essays, and it was really important that they write it rather than just say it. Um, but that they write essays on topics that any reasonable person would think was fair, like America is not perfect, right? You could write that essay. I can write that essay. There's no moral compromise in it, right?

Joe Rogan 53:36 Right.

Bret Weinstein 53:36 I can write that essay. Um, or the other example was, um, you know, unemployment is not a problem under communism. Well, okay, that doesn't strike me as a bridge too far. Communism has lots of problems, but maybe that's not one of them. So, people were marched from these very tiny concessions where really the concession was just, "You're gonna write what I tell you."

Joe Rogan 53:58 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 53:58 Right? Rather than any part of the content to an absolutely massive shift in their understanding. And along the way, they were, for example, induced to, um, to write more substantial concessions with some very tiny reward, like a piece of fruit or something, something that's actually desirable, and if things are scarce, you can understand wanting it, but it's not such a big concession that you can say to yourself, "Oh, yeah. I said something I didn't believe because I got a lot out of it." So you actually talk yourself into imagining that you really do believe the thing you wrote. You must.

Joe Rogan 54:33 Hm.

Bret Weinstein 54:33 Otherwise, you wouldn't have written it. So what I'm seeing is all sorts of excellent people making the first concessions onto or the first steps onto the slippery slope, and it's spooking the hell out of me.So, you know, I, I must say, I saw-

Joe Rogan 54:51 (coughs)

Bret Weinstein 54:52 I saw Dave Chappelle's 8:46 thing and like you, I thought, "Wow, do I get what he's saying." On the other hand, I really thought he got it wrong.

Joe Rogan 55:02 What'd you think he got wrong?

Bret Weinstein 55:04 Well, what he effectively said, what he effectively suggested was that he was on board with the movement, and it was clear that this was based on his massive frustration at how deaf the White population has been to Black suffering, which I agree with. I think the White population has been largely deaf, at least in recent decades. Um, but I don't know how much he knows about what the movement actually is and what it wants. In other words, I, I have the m- maximum respect for Dave Chappelle. I have for a very long time. I think he's tremendously insightful. But I don't know, I mean, I think he's got the same problem tuning into the world that everybody else does, which is he gets some slice that's fed to him, or maybe like you, he is not tuned into these things, and so he gets whatever crosses the, um, the threshold some other way. And maybe he's not seeing that this movement is A, spouting nonsense about getting rid of science, and he's not seeing that it's behaving in a Maoist way, and he is seeing the videos that we all see that suggest to us that there is a very serious problem with race-based police brutality. And the problem with that, of course, is that you can't do that analysis with anecdotes, no matter-

Joe Rogan 56:27 Is it-

Bret Weinstein 56:27 ... how egregious they seem.

Joe Rogan 56:28 Is it weird to connect all those things together, though? When you're saying the movement, if this movement doesn't have any leaders and you're talking about police brutality, but you're also talking about Maoist ideology that weasels its way into academia, is that really the same thing? Is it all one thing?

Bret Weinstein 56:45 Well, I don't, you know, I mean, I-

Joe Rogan 56:46 Multi-headed hydra?

Bret Weinstein 56:48 I don't think it is one thing, but I think it's like a coalition of things.

Joe Rogan 56:52 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 56:53 And I think each of those things is comprehensible, you know, in isolation. And we can understand what happens when you fuse them together. And all I can say is, we did see this in miniature at Evergreen and people did say, "You're making too much out of it." And they were wrong. And-

Joe Rogan 57:13 But you saw it on the ground. The problem with seeing it from a distance is you can mi- minimize many things when you're... yo- you don't experience the emotions, you don't see the fear, you don't see people running through the parking lot with baseball bats looking for you, like they were doing. You know, it's a different thing when you're actually there and you realize that this mass hysteria does lead to pretty despicable acts, and that there is sort of a mob mentality that op- that grips people, and it allows people to be capable of some pretty heinous shit. And what we see here in America is such a combination of factors, right? You have COVID, which shuts everything down, so people are stuck at home for all these months. Then, you have this George Floyd thing, which is one of the worst cases of police brutality I've ever seen, because it was so torturous. The i- I mean, if you really know how long eight minutes and 46 seconds is with someone leaning on your neck, you would know how fucking horrific that is.

Bret Weinstein 58:13 Um-

Joe Rogan 58:14 And then, you have the looting.

Bret Weinstein 58:16 Yes.

Joe Rogan 58:16 And then, you have the mass movement of, uh, y- all these people taking to the streets saying, "We've got to change things. We know things are wrong." And on top of that, you have looting. And on top of that, you have businesses failing because of the looting. You have chaos, people getting their lives destroyed. You have so many things happening all together at once. They call it a, a movement. They don't... It's like, one of the things we were talking about with Black, with, uh, excuse me, Occupy Wall Street back in the day was we were saying, "They don't seem to know exactly what's going on, but it's like the immune system surrounding something that's wrong." Like, it's like something's going on here, like all these white blood cells are flooding into this area. I forget who made that analogy. It might have been me. It was so long ago. But we're like, they don't necessarily know what to do or what it is, but they want to camp out around that area and figure out what the fuck's going on.

Bret Weinstein 59:04 Yeah. And I, you know, like I said, at, at first, I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it.

Joe Rogan 59:09 (laughs)

Bret Weinstein 59:09 And, you know, I even thought the leaderlessness of it was great for two weeks, and then it became very, very stupid. But, um, yeah, it, it is an immune reaction, and that's a normal part of history. You know? And revolutions are not started by a bunch of intellectuals who have some idea what system they want to correct.

Joe Rogan 59:30 Right.

Bret Weinstein 59:30 It's people who are, are fed up. And so that's what Dave Chappelle was responding to, and I totally get it. But the problem is, we are all in danger of being marched in the direction of things that are anti-American, that are in fact anti-Black, because we are trying to s- to, to grant the right concessions on the right points, and it's a, it's a case in which you can't track what's really happening, uh, well enough to do it surgically.

Bret Weinstein 1:00:01 So I, I really... I'm so afraid to actually go down this next road, but you raised the case of, you know, George Floyd and what we saw on that tape. I want you to think about the question of what you actually saw on that tape and what it actually tells you, what you actually know, and what you don't know. I'm worried... Look, best possible thing from the point of view of the well-being of the world would be that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder and he is convicted of murder and he is sentenced for the maximum allowable time. That would be the best thing for us.

Joe Rogan 1:00:37 Agrees.

Bret Weinstein 1:00:38 I'm not sure that that's actually what is supposed to happen.

Joe Rogan 1:00:42 Why is that?

Bret Weinstein 1:00:44 Okay. The question is-

Joe Rogan 1:00:48 (sniffs) .

Bret Weinstein 1:00:48 Did you witness a murder? Are you sure you saw a murder?

Joe Rogan 1:00:52 What do you mean by that?

Bret Weinstein 1:00:53 Well, murder is a crime.

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:00:56 Okay. Presumably ... There was a lot of complaint about the fact that Chauvin wasn't charged with first-degree murder, right? But he didn't ap- ... W- what story would make it sensible that he wanted to kill George Floyd, that that was his purpose? Would-

Joe Rogan 1:01:10 Well, you know, do you know that he knew him? You know he knew him in advance and that they had had words, and they had, they had had problems when they worked together because Derek Chauvin was a shithead to customers, and he was, uh, v- violent to customers.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:24 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:01:24 And he and George Floyd worked as bouncers in the same establishment.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:28 Yep. And-

Joe Rogan 1:01:28 That's the, the, the, that's the, the word.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:31 Well, from the point of view of the wellbeing of the world and from-

Joe Rogan 1:01:34 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:34 ... the point of view of us all processing this-

Joe Rogan 1:01:36 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:36 ... in some sense, I mean, w- you know, with the understanding that there is nothing that could possibly happen in an-

Joe Rogan 1:01:41 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:41 ... investigation or in a court that's gonna bring George Floyd back.

Joe Rogan 1:01:45 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:45 Okay? So with that in mind, the best thing that could happen is that he is actually guilty of something egregious. He's charged with it. He's convicted, and-

Joe Rogan 1:01:53 Right. But what makes-

Bret Weinstein 1:01:54 ... we can do away with it.

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 ... you think that it's not murder? This is what's confusing to me.

Bret Weinstein 1:01:56 Oh, I'm not saying it isn't murder. It may well be murder, but I'm saying that what we saw doesn't tell us that it was murder.

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 Why is that?

Bret Weinstein 1:02:02 Okay. So there are several things about what we saw, what we didn't see but now know, and things that are possible.

Joe Rogan 1:02:11 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 1:02:12 Okay? One thing is that it appears that George Floyd was complaining that he could not breathe before he was on the ground, okay, that he may have been having a heart attack before he was on the ground. Now, again, even if that's true, I would think he obviously was deserving of immediate medical attention. And so I am not arguing that it would not be criminal if he was dying of a heart attack and that's ultimately what killed him.

Joe Rogan 1:02:40 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:02:40 But what I'm saying is that were it the case that he was having a heart attack, he had, uh, apparently methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system at the time, were it the case that he was having a heart attack-

Joe Rogan 1:02:51 Wait, you mean you say in his system, is it, was it just because he tested positive for it, or was it active in his system? Was it something that he had taken fairly recently, but the effects of it were no longer active?

Bret Weinstein 1:03:03 Uh, I'm not an expert, and maybe, uh, I misunderstood what I read, but I thought that these things were recently in his system rather than just detected at trace levels.

Joe Rogan 1:03:12 I don't know.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:13 I don't know either. So let's, let's leave a ... so again-

Joe Rogan 1:03:15 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:15 ... uh, I am not rooting-

Joe Rogan 1:03:19 I understand what you're saying.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:19 ... for him to be-

Joe Rogan 1:03:20 The reason why I bring that up is coming from someone who works very closely with the UFC and USADA. One of the things that I'm finding out is that their methods of detection now are insanely sensitive, and you can detect enti- i- incredibly small, non-psychoactive amounts months and months and months after use.

Bret Weinstein 1:03:42 Okay, well, then it's obviously not relevant. The possibility that he was having a heart attack is clearly relevant.

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 It's possible. I mean, if he did say, "He can't breathe," it also could be that he was struggling-

Bret Weinstein 1:03:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:54 ... and that there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe, but ...

Bret Weinstein 1:03:57 Or that reports that he said he couldn't breathe before he was on the ground are erroneous. That's also possible.

Joe Rogan 1:04:01 It could be a lie. You, when you look at what that man did, when you look at what Derek did to George Floyd with his knee on that man's neck, I could 100% kill a man that way.

Bret Weinstein 1:04:12 Well, okay, so here's the problem, okay? Apparently, that technique is a technique that is authorized by the police department in question under some circumstances, and apparently, those circumstances were present. In other words, um, it may be that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department-

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 Needs to radically changed.

Bret Weinstein 1:04:38 No, it may be that the policy killed George Floyd-

Joe Rogan 1:04:41 Because the policy-

Bret Weinstein 1:04:42 ... through Derek Chauvin.

Joe Rogan 1:04:42 ... allowed him to do that?

Bret Weinstein 1:04:44 Yeah, well, maybe it even required him to do it, I don't know. But-

Joe Rogan 1:04:47 But the guy wasn't resisting. That's the problem. When he's on the ground, he's just got his knee on the guy's neck.

Bret Weinstein 1:04:53 I-

Joe Rogan 1:04:53 Did you, you watch the whole video?

Bret Weinstein 1:04:54 I did watch the whole video.

Joe Rogan 1:04:55 There's another problem with the way he did it, with the, there's a, uh, a drain there. You see that cement drain? And his neck is laying-

Bret Weinstein 1:05:02 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:05:02 ... on the edge of the cement drain. That, that, it's like a bone. When you choke man-

Bret Weinstein 1:05:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:07 ... you, you, you don't use the meaty part of your body. You use the bone. And that's essentially, that divot, that, that drain is laying right where his neck is. I don't know if he placed him there on purpose-

Bret Weinstein 1:05:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:18 ... but I wouldn't doubt it.

Bret Weinstein 1:05:19 Well, I'm not saying Derek Chauvin didn't kill George Floyd. I'm not saying it wasn't racially motivated. I am not saying that this wasn't murder in the first degree based on prior interactions. I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is that we don't know, in the public, based on what we have seen-

Joe Rogan 1:05:36 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:05:36 ... we don't know this to have been-

Joe Rogan 1:05:38 Murder.

Bret Weinstein 1:05:38 ... murder because if this was Derek Chauvin, uh, being a dick and using the policy of the police department and being indifferent to its effect, then that is for a court to decide whether or not it is murder. In other words, if he was-

Joe Rogan 1:05:57 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:05:58 ... doing the policy as the policy is laid out based on the criteria that would trigger the policy.

Joe Rogan 1:06:02 Have you read any of this?

Bret Weinstein 1:06:04 What do you mean?

Joe Rogan 1:06:05 About the policies? The-

Bret Weinstein 1:06:06 I have, I read a bit, but-

Joe Rogan 1:06:07 What have you read?

Bret Weinstein 1:06:09 Uh, I read-

Joe Rogan 1:06:09 What did it say?

Bret Weinstein 1:06:10 It said ... I'm going to struggle for the words (laughs) that the acronym stands for. There is a, uh, a situation called EXDS, uh, extreme ... boy, I don't have it. Uh, maybe Jamie can find it.

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 1:06:30 But again, the real point here is not that he is innocent. I don't believe him to be innocent.

Joe Rogan 1:06:38 I understand.

Bret Weinstein 1:06:38 My real point is that we are all acting as if we have seen with our own eyes something that is unambiguously murder.And I don't believe that we saw that. I believe we saw something that may well have been murder and may well not have been murder, and that the way that we determine whether it is murder is in a courtroom with due process, and-

Joe Rogan 1:06:57 Well, isn't it through autopsies? 'Cause independent autopsies did find that asphix- asphyxiation and the cut off of the blood supply to the brain were responsible for his death. Now, there was a police department autopsy that was refuted by two individual-

Bret Weinstein 1:07:13 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:13 ... independent attorney, independent, uh, examiners.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:15 You know what you need?

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 What?

Bret Weinstein 1:07:17 You need a court.

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 You need a court-

Bret Weinstein 1:07:18 You need a court-

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 ... to examine the evidence.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:19 ... in which, you need a court to examine the evidence, and you need it to be done in front of a jury that is-

Joe Rogan 1:07:23 Mm-hmm.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:23 ... free to decide either way. And here-

Joe Rogan 1:07:25 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:25 ... here is what I'm really concerned about. Because we all think we saw a murder, right? We think it's unambiguous. We think it's open and shut.

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:35 The entire case is going to unfold in that context, right? And if he is exonerated, we are going to assume that this is a miscarriage of justice.

Joe Rogan 1:07:45 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:07:46 Right? Which means, I mean, put yourself in the position of a member of the jury. If you don't think this was murder, you may well be the person who stands in the way of a judgment and causes who knows what to erupt. This is, we're talking about-

Joe Rogan 1:08:04 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:04 ... R- Rodney King times a thousand.

Joe Rogan 1:08:06 Times a million.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:07 Times a million.

Joe Rogan 1:08:08 Particularly if you look at what happened just from the reaction to this one murder.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:12 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:12 I mean, we've seen cops murder people, and we've seen, um, um, a minimal reaction by the public, just protests and people get angry. This erupted around the world.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:23 Nobody, nobody anticipated this or saw that.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:26 But it speaks to the powder keg of circumstances that we were talking about, all this different packed dynamite of COVID, the lockdown, financial distraught.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:35 But can we agree that it could be that his being found not guilty would set in motion-

Joe Rogan 1:08:44 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:44 ... events that could be right up to-

Joe Rogan 1:08:45 Catastrophic.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:45 ... Civil War, catastrophic.

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 Yeah.

Bret Weinstein 1:08:47 So if that is the case, what I believe is likely to happen is that he's likely to be convicted irrespective of the evidence. He's gonna be sacrificed, right?

Joe Rogan 1:08:59 And you agree that that might be for the best of everybody?

Bret Weinstein 1:09:02 W- Well, what I wanna point out is that we don't behave that way. We don't behave that way. The most, the, the center of what we are as Americans is a country in which you are entitled to due process in a court of law, that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we are gonna start sacrificing people because there is a mob in the street threatening to turn the place upside down, then, uh, I mean, you know what that is, right? That's the un-invention of America. And, you know, you can't use the term lynching for it because of the racial connotations of that term, but if we are talking about sacrificing individuals because a mob has decided that they are guilty, then we aren't America anymore.

Joe Rogan 1:09:55 I think when you look at the spectrum of probability, if you had a pie of is he guilty of murder, did he murder him by leaning on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds or did he not, I would say did he not is so small, you would have to have a fucking magnifying glass to look at it. If I, I, um, I'm an expert on choking people. You know, I, I understand what happens to the brain when you cut off the blood supply. I've had it done to me. What that guy is doing is torture. And I think I could, I know I could kill a man that way. I know I could.

Bret Weinstein 1:10:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:32 If I, if I decided to lean on someone's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds with all of my weight, that's a dead person. There's no way you're gonna survive.

Bret Weinstein 1:10:41 All right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:41 If your neck, one side of your neck is on the concrete and the other side is 200 pounds of my body all focused on my knee, and I'm balancing my, my weight on your neck, you're a dead man.

Bret Weinstein 1:10:53 Okay. So, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:10:55 But that's what we saw, right?

Bret Weinstein 1:10:56 Well, I, I-

Joe Rogan 1:10:57 I know what you're saying, that maybe he also had a heart attack, but the idea that those two are not related seems to me to be outside of the realm of possibility.

Bret Weinstein 1:11:05 So I wanna, I wanna make a trade with you.

Joe Rogan 1:11:06 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 1:11:07 Okay? I absolutely hope that you're right. Okay? I hope this is clear. But in exchange for that, I want the agreement that the American thing to do is to convict him by the evidence in a court of law, and if the evidence is not sufficiently compelling, that's not what's supposed to happen, that that would be un-American for that to be the way he was convicted.

Joe Rogan 1:11:32 I agree, and we are convicting him in the court of public opinion, but we're doing it based on a video of a man putting all his weight on this guy's neck for eight minutes and 40... That, I mean, when you roll in jujitsu class, generally a roll is between five minutes, maybe 10 minutes or something like that, and the idea of a man being on my neck the entire time is fucking terrifying.

Bret Weinstein 1:11:55 Oh, I believe I saw a tremendous miscarriage of justice. What I don't know and what I don't think any of us understand is, what is the policy? Did he exceed the policy?

Joe Rogan 1:12:06 Yeah, I think we need to know.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:06 Did he enact the policy?

Joe Rogan 1:12:07 I, I just can't imagine-

Bret Weinstein 1:12:08 What is the-

Joe Rogan 1:12:08 ... any cop would think that that was the way to do it. It's one thing if someone is resisting arrest and they're very dangerous and you're, you're handcuffing them and you put your knee on your neck, on their neck to hold them down in place, and I think that is a valid move. If you've a, a guy and he's got a gun or he's, he, he's wired on PCP and he's very strong and there's a bunch of you trying to hold onto the guy and someone leans on his neck, I'm all for that. But then when you're done, when you got him cuffed, let him go.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:33 The-

Joe Rogan 1:12:33 He's not a threat. That guy wasn't even moving.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:35 I wanted George-

Joe Rogan 1:12:35 He was just begging for his life.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:37 I wanted George Floyd to be taken to a hospital.

Joe Rogan 1:12:39 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:39 It seems clear to me that he needed to be taken to a hospital, but I don't know-

Joe Rogan 1:12:43 Okay, here we got it here, Jim.

Bret Weinstein 1:12:44 This is the best I could find, I think, of uh-

Joe Rogan 1:12:46 (sighs) Officer can also use two type of neck restraints in less severe circumstances. One is called...... a conscious neck restraint, which is an officer applies light to moderate pressure to the side of a person's neck, but does not intend to knock a person unconscious. That could be used against people who are actively resisting. So that alone just dismisses this whole idea, 'cause that's not what was going on there. That guy was not actively resisting. The other neck restraint is one meant to render someone unconscious. That could be used when someone is exhibiting active aggression and for life-saving purposes. Again, this does not apply. Department policy said neck restraints can't be used against people who are passively resisting. So right there it says neck restraints should not have been used against George Floyd, because he was not violently resisting. That's not what was going on. He was not exhibiting aggre- uh, active aggression. He w-

Bret Weinstein 1:13:37 Well-

Joe Rogan 1:13:37 He wasn't doing that. He was begging for his life. He was calling out for his, to his dead mother.

Bret Weinstein 1:13:41 His mother, I know. Believe me-

Joe Rogan 1:13:42 It's horrific shit.

Bret Weinstein 1:13:44 I, I, I am feeling the need to emphasize, I do believe I saw a miscarriage of justice. But I know that the American thing to do is to have all of this out in a court of law, where all of the appropriate arguments are on the table.

Joe Rogan 1:13:57 I agree with you. I don't, I don't see a way where he wasn't guilty. But I do agree with you that he should be tried in a court of law. But just based on that, I say he's guilty. And then we're also looking at the comparison between the Eric Garner case, which I also thought was horrible. And I also said, as a person who's an expert in martial arts, that was a chokehold. They were saying it wasn't a chokehold. That was a chokehold. But here's the thing about the Eric Garner case. They should've never fucking arrested that guy in the first place. He was just selling loose cigarettes. Like what kind of a world we living in where you grab a guy by his neck 'cause he's selling loose cigarettes? And when those guys did tackle him and take him down to the ground, and held on to him when he said he can't breathe, he also appeared to be i- in poor health. And it was likely that the altercation, which probably wouldn't have killed you, killed him. And it was awful, terrible. But this was 100 times worse.

Bret Weinstein 1:14:53 Well, can we ... Come, you say, "What kind of a world are we living in where somebody, um, selling loose cigarettes has this kind of interaction?"

Joe Rogan 1:14:59 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:14:59 And, you know, we can say the same thing for George Floyd, right? We're talking about-

Joe Rogan 1:15:02 Yeah, counterfeit $20 bills.

Bret Weinstein 1:15:04 The counterfeit-

Joe Rogan 1:15:04 Nothing.

Bret Weinstein 1:15:04 Yeah, right. The ... But, I wanna go back to what I said before. Police brutality is a feature, not a bug.

Joe Rogan 1:15:11 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:15:12 Okay?

Joe Rogan 1:15:12 I agree with you.

Bret Weinstein 1:15:13 So what I mean by that is if you are going to freeze people out of their share of the wellbeing that is generated by society, you are going to have to keep them from revolting. And so what you do is you set up some sort of arbitrary administrator of authority that people run in contact with, that they fear, right? You set up some force that disincentivizes misbehavior. And that force isn't just the police. It's obviously the, uh, the, uh, the prison system as well.

Joe Rogan 1:15:46 Here's where I'd argue with you ab- about that.

Bret Weinstein 1:15:48 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:15:49 That is, that only applies if you only see that force exhibited towards poor people and disenfranchised communities, but you don't. What you see with police brutality is you see police brutality being utilized on wealthy people i- if they don't know, uh, y- you see it ... If they d- don't know that they can't get away with it ... Do, do you know the case of the, the young man that was killed in the hotel in Arizona?

Bret Weinstein 1:16:12 Of course.

Joe Rogan 1:16:13 Yeah. It was horrific, horrific. And on video, this guy being forced to crawl on the ground by this cop, and then the cop shoots him in the back 'cause he's trying to reach to pull his pants up.

Bret Weinstein 1:16:24 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:16:25 There's no threat.

Bret Weinstein 1:16:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:16:26 Clearly no threat. No weapon, no nothing. And so you got a monster who just wants to fucking shoot people. And I think it points to what Jocko was saying, a lack of training, a lack of quality people, and a, a lack of a, a process of weeding out people that would be more inclined to use police brutality. And that process, I think, should be similar to BUD/S, like what Navy SEALs have to go through or, or Rangers have to go through. It, it should be something that weeds out people of weak character. So the police should be something that's a very difficult job to get, where you only get the cream of the crop of human beings, of character, of, of, of, uh, emotional stability, people that would not do something like that, who would recognize that man on the ground as being a father and a husband and a, a, a, a human being who's a part of our community. And you don't gun him down just 'cause you're a fucking piece of shit. And that's what that guy did.

Bret Weinstein 1:17:20 Well, look, I-

Joe Rogan 1:17:21 So it's not just a bug that's designed to keep people of disenfranchised communities from speaking out and demanding their fair share. It's a bug of human beings who have power over other human beings. It's when ... You know the Stanford Prison Experience?

Bret Weinstein 1:17:35 Of course.

Joe Rogan 1:17:36 Experiments which, of course, have been sort of discredited in some ways, that they actually probably wanted out of it, so they exp- But the idea behind it makes sense to us, that if you give people power over people, they kinda tend to abuse it. When people have just unchecked authority over folks, they tend to, uh, they tend to use that. It's a, it's a, it's a feature of human beings.

Bret Weinstein 1:17:57 Oh, believe me. I mean, like I said before, uh, I only told you the, um, the simpler story of my run-in with the cops.

Joe Rogan 1:18:06 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:18:06 I know that, that putting a badge on somebody and giving them a weapon and giving them all of that power, um, it brings the worst out in many people. And it's very, very, uh, it's very dangerous.

Joe Rogan 1:18:18 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:18:19 Um, but I still, uh, I still see something systemic here that isn't being discussed.

Joe Rogan 1:18:26 I don't think we disagree on that. I think that's there as well. I think there's multiple factors.

Bret Weinstein 1:18:33 Well, multiple factors, yes. But let's put it this way. My claim is that opportunity is being hoarded, right? At the top of the economic ladder, opportunity is widespread. You can do very well. The farther you get down the oc- economic ladder, the less opportunity there is and the greater the danger of your falling off the bottom.... right? In some communities, you start off, off the bottom-

Joe Rogan 1:18:58 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:18:59 ... right? And you cannot access the ladder up. In such cases, it is not surprising that people resort to crime. The reason most people-

Joe Rogan 1:19:06 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:06 ... do not resort to crime is that they have better options and-

Joe Rogan 1:19:08 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:09 ... people are wired to pick better options. So, let's talk about a couple of things.

Joe Rogan 1:19:13 Okay.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:14 And I do hope we get to some science at some point, but-

Joe Rogan 1:19:16 We got a lot of time, brother.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:17 Good. All right. So let's talk for a second about, uh, why the Black community has a special problem in America. Can we talk about that?

Joe Rogan 1:19:29 Sure.

Bret Weinstein 1:19:30 All right. So I want to talk about two things. One has to do with the special origin story for the African-derived population of Americans. Obviously, slavery is where most African Americans come from. They arrived through that mechanism. But slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being, right? So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software reworked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are, um, able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Kalahari. You can have one for, uh, terracing the Andes to grow potatoes. You can have any one of a number of software programs. Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language. So there was not one culture available, and it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things. But of course, there was a, you know, prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that. So, there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had, who were in the New World, and a substituting of a version that was not as much of a threat to the slaveholding population, right? And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, uh, frankly, even w- we, you know, we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the, to the body and all. So the, the thing that makes the Black population and the Indian population different, I would argue, is the systematic hobbling of the onboard, uh, the inherited evolved culture. In the case of Indians, by transporting them to, uh, to reservations and by, uh, putting them in schools that disrupt, um, the passage of, of normal culture, and in the case of, uh, Africans, it was, um, you know, breaking apart of, of families, keeping people from being in contact with others whom they had the right language to, to talk to and all. So in any case, that carries through to the present. It creates a, a situation where, um, there has not been access to the materials to fully bring, um, uh, to fully update software. Am I making sense yet?

Joe Rogan 1:22:26 Yes.

Bret Weinstein 1:22:27 Okay. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:22:28 You're, you're speaking about this almost purely from like an evolutionary biology perspective.

Bret Weinstein 1:22:32 Yes, I'm, and I'm afraid that it's not, it's not properly going to come through. What I'm saying is that when you have one population in control of how another population accesses the shared culture, that it's never fair.

Joe Rogan 1:22:45 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:22:45 Right? And so we saw this with, uh, you know, Conquistadors who came into the New World and were, uh, forcing Catholicism on the Inca, for example.

Joe Rogan 1:22:53 Sure.

Bret Weinstein 1:22:54 Right? So there's this, there's always this attempt to, to, um, hand off culture that serves the powerful and undermines those who might rebel against them.

Joe Rogan 1:23:05 Right.

Bret Weinstein 1:23:05 Okay. Now, let's, um, let's go back to the question of how