EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,003 words- 0:00 – 3:40
U.S. seizes Maduro’s plane: sanctions, escalation, and “acts of war”
- JRJoe Rogan
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- BWBret Weinstein
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- NANarrator
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Good to see you, my friend.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, good to see you, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
Strange times we're living in.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, the strangest and getting stranger.
- JRJoe Rogan
Didn't some shit go down today? Didn't we steal the president of Venezuela's plane?
- NANarrator
Oh, I didn't hear about that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I think we just stole his plane.
- BWBret Weinstein
I didn't.
- JRJoe Rogan
No, not us.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay, good.
- JRJoe Rogan
The United States. So-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, it's kind of the greater us.
- JRJoe Rogan
So someone stole his plane.
- BWBret Weinstein
All right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is kind of an act of war? What is that?
- BWBret Weinstein
Was he in it?
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think so, no. I think we just stole his plane.
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Crow-
- BWBret Weinstein
Just, like, for a joyride?
- JRJoe Rogan
So what's the story? "U.S. seizes Venezuela (laughs) President Nicolás Maduro's airplane in the Dominican Republic." So we said, "Nope, we're stealing that." How does that work? Even if you don't get along with, like, a president of a country, how disrespectful is it to steal their plane?
- BWBret Weinstein
This, uh, uh, you're right, it's an act of war.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, i- i- imagine if Xi Jinping landed somewhere, and we're like, "We're gonna steal your fucking plane."
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
No chance. That's a bully move. That's a move you can only do to a country like Venezuela, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes, well, I- I'm trying to remember exactly what the story was, but there was a point where Ecuador was acting very courageously with respect to Julian Assange. And there was a question about whether the president of Ecuador could fly Assange out so that he could be outside of the embassy and inside of Ecuador proper, and I believe the reasoning was they couldn't do it because they expected the plane to be forced down. Same, same issue.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. So this says, uh, Merrick Garland said that, "The Justice Department seized an aircraft we allege was illegally purchased for $13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his cronies." What i- i- what business is that of ours, though? This is what I don't understand. Like, if it was purchased through a shell company, then it was purchased.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- 3:40 – 5:27
The “Cartesian crisis”: why distrust either fuels gullibility or nihilism
- JRJoe Rogan
Don't you think now, though, um, most people, I feel like gen- genuinely most people are aware there's more to the story? Every story. Everything in the news. Every time something comes up, people are like, "What's the whole story here?"
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, you know, I, I coined this term, the Cartesian crisis. And the Cartesian crisis basically means the point at which you can't really be certain of anything. And the problem is, yes, I do think people are catching onto the fact that they never know the real story, but the response to that is either that you start believing the bullshit that they tell you or that you just become cynical and stop believing anything. And neither of those are functional ways to exist.
- JRJoe Rogan
And both those ways are good for the people that are running scams.
- BWBret Weinstein
Exactly. They're good for the people who want to maintain power, because-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... it just keeps us back on our heels.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, because if you don't know what's true and what's not true, you're like, "Oh, geez," you know? And then you get cynical, "Oh, it's all bullshit. This whole system is rigged." Then you just go fishing.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. And tha- and that's the thing people don't understand, is that at the point that you think you're striking a blow by checking out of their system, you're actually doing them a favor.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. It's actually beneficial to them, because then you have a smaller number of people that are voting. So essentially, in the 2020 elections, it was, uh, l- the largest ever, uh, win, right? The, the Democrats got 80-something million votes, which is, uh, so let's say, let's, even if it was 50/50, so somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 million people. How many people are women and chil- I mean, how many people with children? Women can vote, what am I saying?
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
How many people or, uh, children are there?
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, geez, I have no idea on the percentage.
- JRJoe Rogan
Under 18. It's probably in the 30%. So that's a pretty high turnout.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes, if that was even a turnout.
- JRJoe Rogan
If it was real.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's the problem, we have no idea.
- 5:27 – 14:57
Election integrity, mail voting, and the disappearing audit tools
- JRJoe Rogan
Therein, that's the problem with the whole cynical game. 'Cause I'm not convinced. The, I, you know why I'm not convinced? 'Cause everybody wants me to be convinced. When, when they, like, yell at you if you ask a question, like, "Hey, what-" Uh, one of the things that I've always said, and everyone sort of agrees with this. I mean, literally everyone, even people that think that the, the election was 100% legitimate. Uh, the percentage of voter fraud is never zero, correct?
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they're always like, "Yes."No one can say it's zero.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not zero. There's a bunch of p- slippery people that get arrested on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats get ar- arrested for election fraud. It's a real crime. The idea that they commit all these other acts of fraud and deception, but when it comes to elections, Brett, that's a sacred institution-
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... that we don't violate at any cost.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep. Well, and- and the way they maintain that story is by ruthlessly punishing anybody who questions it, even though questioning it is the obvious thing to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Because for one thing, elections used to be different, as you remember.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? First of all, you used to vote in person. And voting by mail was something you were very reluctant to do, because you knew that if your vote got counted, it was gonna be very late in the process. It wasn't really going to matter.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was mostly for soldiers serving overseas.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. Exactly. It was for people who just simply couldn't vote in person.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
And it never really mattered except in very rare cases. The disappearance of that and the normalization of voting by mail, the normalization of voting across a period of time so that you're not all voting on the same day, and the absence of exit polls, right? When everybody's voting from home or wherever, you can't detect fraud by virtue of the fact that the count that came in from that precinct didn't match what the exit pollers registered.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so, you know, I don't think we are wrong to imagine that we have lost the ability to check whether an election is fair and that that's not an accident. That that o- that leaves the possibility open to cheat. And as you point out, they cheat in every other way. Are we supposed to believe that they won't do that because their patriotism is so deep? I don't see any patriotism to them at all.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, not only that, they've established this narrative that it's imperative that the Democrats win to save democracy.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, they've already made all of these, uh, statements that would, uh, it's more important for them to win than anything. More important than anything. More important than having primaries, more important than letting the people decide who their representative is, more important than having, uh, like, live actual conversations, interviews that aren't edited on CNN. Instead they have a 40-plus-minute one that's edited down to 18 minutes. Like, what? (laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, and we just went through this with them over COVID.
- JRJoe Rogan
(smacks lips) Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
We know that when they think they're in the right, they feel entitled to lie about everything.
- JRJoe Rogan
Everything.
- BWBret Weinstein
They feel entitled to coerce.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so, the idea that we're supposed to imagine that our elections are somehow different to them, I can't imagine how that would even work.
- JRJoe Rogan
It doesn't make any sense. And it's, uh, it's one of those things, again, that you're- you're forced into agreeing with just out of fear because people get very aggressive with it, just like people were super aggressive about the vaccine. You know, I- I hate seeing people die because they made a poor choice. But there's something insane about how many people were like pro-vaccine advocates that were shaming people and angry at people, and now they're dead. And they're not dead because they ran their time and they got old and they died and, you know, it's unfortunate but it happens to all of us. Uh-uh. No, they're dead young. Like, a lot. A lot of people. Not one, not 20. We don't even know what the real numbers are because it's not something the mainstream media covers because they've all been vaccinated too and they're probably freaking the fuck out too.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, it's a huge number of people. We can detect that statistically. It- the trouble is that it's hard in any individual case to know whether or not you're looking at something that would have happened anyway.
- 14:57 – 21:12
From JFK to polls: “how much democracy is left?”
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, if you just get one good one, you're hooked. For me, it was the Kennedy assassination.
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
One good book on the Kennedy assassination, I was like, "Goddammit, they killed the fucking president." It freaked me out forever. That was like the... I literally had a, a giant shift in how I viewed the world after reading that book. Because before that, I was never a questioner of whatever was in the news or whatever the narrative was that we were being told about anything.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, but, I mean, I have exactly the same reaction to that story and I, I've been down that rabbit hole, and I think you're just ultimately left with a question. Something happened in 1963. That's before either of us were born. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
That thing was either an anomaly that robbed the nation of a president and the nation continued to be a democratic republic in the aftermath of it, or that was interference with democracy and we don't know how to look at all of the seemingly democratic things that have happened since. How much of what has happened since are the people who took control with that assassination? How much is them continuing to maintain control with a certain amount of democracy, and how much was that a- an aberration that then returned us to our normal course? And, uh...
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a good point. A certain amount of democracy.
- BWBret Weinstein
A certain amount. It's, there's clearly a certain amount.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Well, which is one of the reasons why they're so terrified of Trump.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, they... There's a certain amount of stealing they can do. If, if... Let's imagine, if there are... If it is dirty and you really can manipulate elections, how much can you manipulate it by? Can you manipulate it by 30%? You know?
- BWBret Weinstein
I-
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause we don't know. And as long as they can have you believing in the polls... This is what's really important, polls. "Kamala Harris is up by 3%."
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
"Oh, she's up, she's winning." Like, who the fuck are you talking to? Who are you talking to?
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. And, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm... You're not talking to me.
- BWBret Weinstein
What narrative is it in which Kamala has done something that might have caused a surge in her popularity? Like, I didn't see it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, some magic. It's like, um... You know, there's that theory, that concept about multiple dimensions and multiple universes that we all live-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, yeah. Multiverse. Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. This, this possibility that there's infinite numbers of universes all around us all the time and we enter into a different timeline. We entered into a different timeline.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Clearly.
- BWBret Weinstein
I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Something happened.
- BWBret Weinstein
I, I think, I think the multiverse thing is nonsense. I think it's an accounting scheme for figuring out how to deal-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
... with the fact that actually the universe is not deterministic, which people wrestle with because we don't exactly know why it isn't. But, um, but to your point about how much can they cheat, I call that factor, which none of us can put a number on, maybe they can.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
I call it the cheat factor, right? The cheat margin. And one of the things that I'm trying to convince people of is that it's not hopeless because they can cheat, but it means that you have to succeed...... at a level that exceeds their capacity to erase it.
- 21:12 – 29:50
Party realignment and media framing: MAGA, labor, and the New York Times lens
- BWBret Weinstein
um, that w- we are up against. But to the question of what Trump is doing with an issue like this, I, I wanna make a couple points. One, I think there are two issues that are getting tangled. One, I think he's politically going to some places that are not traditionally Republican, because I don't even think, I think he's destroyed the Republican Party. I, I just don't see the same Republican Party I remember at all. I see a different thing, and it's flying-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's the MAGA party.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, it's a MAGA party. Right, exactly. And that's a very different thing, because I see MAGA as mostly the labor faction that was cut loose by the Democrats in the Clinton administration, and so they've now found a home under MAGA.
- JRJoe Rogan
Interesting. Right. Like, 'cause blue-collar people were generally, um, union people, which were generally Democrats.
- BWBret Weinstein
Totally.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
And then Clinton turned the Democratic Party into a second corporate party, so that those people-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
... who were homeless, and then Trump picked them up as MAGA, and they're now under the Republican banner. But it doesn't read like the Republican Party at all to me. And now it's picked up a, you know, a, a, I don't want to say technocratic, that's dismissive, but it's got this, this, uh, Silicon Valley component to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes, that's recent.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's recent-
- BWBret Weinstein
As of the convention.
- JRJoe Rogan
... over the last year.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. It is interesting, right? Because we did, growing up, always associate unions and blue-collar people with voting Democrat, because Democrats were looking out for the middle class, looking out for people's best interests, supporting unions and fair wages, and funding schools, and all that kind of stuff, keeping neighborhoods safe. And Republicans were more like small government, "Fuck you, figure it out, I don't want to pay taxes."
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
Stingy.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they were the ones that were encouraging war.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is crazy today, that you have this massive 180-degree shift, and the Democrats are talking about how important it is that we keep funding Ukraine, and that, you know, we have some sort of an, whether you're pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine, I should say, or whether you're pro-Israel, there's involvement in that. No one is saying, neither, uh, th- th- no Democrats are saying, "We need to get the fuck out of there."
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're saying, "We need to free Palestine." Oh, okay. How are you gonna do that? How are you gonna do that? What are you, what, how much is involved in that? Are you gonna bring in people? You gonna send people there? Like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna kill people for this? What are we doing? The Democrats are, they're, you guys are looking for war, you're not looking for peaceful solutions? Like, this is kind of weird. This is interesting. You know, the, that, "We need to beat Russia." Are you out of your fucking mind?
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Are you serious?
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you know how big that place is? Do you know how much military force is behind Putin? Are you, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Like, what if-
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... he just decides to go nuclear, at any point in time? If he gets pressured to keep advancing further and further into Russia, and he's like, "I'll just end this right now. I'll just turn Kiev into a fucking sandbox." Boom.
- 29:50 – 33:16
Lawfare, executive power, and why institutions fear “outsiders”
- BWBret Weinstein
All this law fair stuff, that's frightening. They're weaponizing the courts.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
And-
- JRJoe Rogan
They're weaponizing the courts over what was a misdemeanor with, uh, that's already... If you look at the... Uh, like Bill Ackman had a, a post that he made on Twitter laying out the legality of this 34 count, um, uh, uh, thing that they convicted him of, that this is essentially an accounting error w- or deception...... that's a misdemeanor, that is past the statute of limitations.
- BWBret Weinstein
Not only that, but I don't think you have to really even squint at it to see that it's just simply unconstitutional to point the courts at particular people and not other people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? We have a constitutional right to equal protection under the law. And obviously, they are setting a different standard for Trump because they want to keep him tied up in court, maybe they want to lock him up and put him in prison. But whatever they're doing, is un-American. It is anti-American.
- JRJoe Rogan
And dangerous. And very dangerous, because you've set a precedent now. Now, let's imagine, like, we've gone through shifts in this country where we leaned heavily left, like during the Carter administration was run by a serious lefty. You know? And then, what if now it was run by a hardcore right-winger? What if there's some sort of an attack on American soil and it ramps up patriotism, and people get real angry and, and right ... The, you know, just like the left has moved so far left that if you're not in favor of hormone blockers for kids, somehow you're transphobic and you're a bigot. Like, somehow or another, if you're not in favor of that, you're a bigot. What if it gets so right that if you're not in favor of, you know, uh, stops and frisks all over the country to, for everyone, then somehow or another you're, uh, anti-safety of the nation. And if you're, uh, not in favor of no-knock raids on people's homes with no warrants, that somehow or another you're a danger to our democracy. Like, it can go really creepy far right, just like it's really creepy far left, and then they're utilizing the courts. If they fill the courts up with a bunch of hardcore Republicans, now you're utilizing the courts against people in a way that you would find very offensive, because you've made it a, you've set a precedent.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. And, and I think actually we are already living this nightmare in one way, because what they did was loaded powers into the executive branch that were never supposed to be there. They created emperor-like discretion and they gave those powers to the President, I think believing that they would never be in the hands of anybody that wasn't on their team. Right? And I'm not talking red or blue.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
I'm talking about inside versus outside. And one of the reasons that I think the reaction to Trump is what it was, is that he was taking over an office that had been given all of these exotic tools that he could, in principle, use against anybody. These are tools that are absolutely a violation of our Constitution, and yet they exist there. And so the need to prevent him from having access to those things was existential, in their mind. And so anyway, the point is, they created tools they never expected to be in the hands of someone else, and that is the situation, that's the scenario you're describing here as well.
- 33:16 – 41:16
Multiverse debate: parsimony vs. cosmic weirdness
- JRJoe Rogan
Why do you think the multiverse is bullshit?
- BWBret Weinstein
I just don't think it makes any sense, because, um, if you take the multiverse literally ... So let, let, let me back up a second.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
We have a principle that tells us, more or less, what is true, called parsimony, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
We take the simplest explanation that accounts for what we observe, and we imagine it's true. And there's a little imperfection in there, but if you had all the information, it would, it would work, I think perfectly. And then there's a flaw in how we apply it. The multiverse is analytically very simple. Right? It's just one move. Oh, there are an infinite number of universes. I- every moment there are an infinite number of things that could happen, and a universe is created for each one. That's very simple. I just said it in one sentence. On the other hand, at the practical level, it couldn't possibly be more wasteful and absurd. Right? And the idea that, uh, you know, there's gonna be a different, there's gonna be two universes, you're gonna double the universe because I just moved my glasses, and we need one universe in which I didn't and one universe in which I did, and then each of those universes is gonna pler- proliferate out from each moment, this does not make any sense. So I think what it is, is this is just part of the process of discovery. If you imagine an infinite number of proliferating universes from each branching point, right? That accounts, that allows us to understand, we could describe it that way and it allows us to understand the universe as we observe it. Now, the question is, what's really going on that allows that to take place without the proliferation of universes? That's why I think it's wrong. It's, it's, it's the intermediate, it's the immature analytical point at which we have noticed that something is going on, we know we need to explain it, and we haven't yet stood in the right place to explain it in a way that's actually efficient. So what we're doing is we're explaining it in a way that if you typed it out, it's, uh, it's one tweet.
- JRJoe Rogan
But isn't existence itself insane? The universe itself is insane. Its subatomic particles are insane, going all the way out to solar nurseries. There are ... It's all insane. The whole thing's insane. It's insane in scope, it's insane in size, it's insane in its complexity.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's almost incomprehensible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Almost incomprehensible. So why would it be more incomprehensible if it was, there was infinite variety and infinite numbers of them? It would just be a different level of crazy that we weren't aware of.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, n- no. It-
- JRJoe Rogan
No?
- BWBret Weinstein
I mean, I don't think so, because it's not a different level. If... Let's just agree that the universe, the size of it, is impossible to actually comprehend. I think it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Impossible.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's literally impossible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. We, we just look at it as a number.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a small number, actually. You look at it, oh, like what's the most recent, the James Webb Telescope, the most recent advanced versions of it, they're talking about 22 billion-plus years for The Big Bang. They're looking at that now because of the, um-... the, 'cause of the structure of some galaxies that shouldn't exist, shouldn't exist in the time period of which th- it, what they would have to w- be formed in a certain amount of years. And so, there, there's stor- there's s- it's- it's very contentious, but there's some of these people studying the results that s- seem to believe it's very, quite possible that you- you might want to push that date back, for whatever the big bang is.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
And then there's Sir Roger Penrose who thinks it's like a constant cycle.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. I- I- I'm- I'm open to all these ideas-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... except ones like the multiverse-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... because y- let's put it this way-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
... you haven't solved a problem by invoking the multiverse. What you've done is you've caused a problem that is like the original problem that you had raised to the infinity.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so my feeling is any time you've made the problem, the philosophical problem you had that we all admit is really, really difficult infinitely worse, you probably made a wrong move.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know about that. I don't, I don't think that's necessarily true, because just because we haven't solved the problem of this immense thing that's impossible to grasp, it doesn't mean it can't be way bigger than we even imagine in a- a- a concept that's impossible to grasp. And there's got to be some reason why so many people are entertaining this multiverse theory.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's not... Well, that's just because-
- 41:16 – 1:00:25
UFOs: slow acclimation vs. psyop hypothesis
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is what I think they're doing, by the way.
- BWBret Weinstein
Using the UFO story?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, yeah. I think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... so too.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I think, I think both things are true. I think we have been visited, and I think it only makes sense th- uh, I think there is life out there because it doesn't make sense there isn't. And I think I would visit if I got a thousand years more advanced than we are and we found out about some planet that's 2,000 light years away that actually is making nuclear bombs. Fuck yeah, I'd visit.
- BWBret Weinstein
Of course.
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course you'd visit.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
100%. So, of course they would visit, and of course they would want to protect us from the overwhelming shock to our culture that would ind- undoubtably be f- thrust upon us if we were c- if we were confronted with a city-sized spaceship that's hovering over Detroit, just- just hovering over there. It would send the world into a massive panic.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
No one would know what to do.
- BWBret Weinstein
... I'm-
- JRJoe Rogan
So I would hide.
- BWBret Weinstein
... not sure about this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BWBret Weinstein
So I- I wanna, I wanna just adjust a couple things you said.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, please do.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, so my perspective, you're absolutely right. It would be... There's every reason to think there's lots of life in the universe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And that life that attains a certain level of cognition will inevitably create technologies that break boundaries that it can't biologically break, so it'll, you know, traverse some, uh, distance across space. But the real question is-... how many islands of life, what's the closest one, how traversable is the cosmos, right? It may not be traversable at all at those scales, or it may be much more traversable than we know, and then it doesn't take very many islands of life to have somebody visit us. But as to your last point, I actually... Well, first of all, everybody, every thinking person I know is pretty troubled by the present. And, you know, a, a hostile alien force would freak everybody out. But I, A, can't see a reason why aliens would be hostile. Doesn't make sense to me that-
- JRJoe Rogan
They don't have to be hostile.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just, just being there-
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. But then-
- JRJoe Rogan
... yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... if they were just there, first of all, we've been training for this. Right? We all spend a lot of time on sci-fi stories of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- BWBret Weinstein
... aliens and all that stuff.
- 1:00:25 – 1:06:34
Space risk, survival hedges, and the “we don’t understand our calm period” problem
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Well, you gotta also think, here's, here's another problem with the idea of them being biological. Um, we ... It's far more effective to send things that are non-biological into space, like what we're doing on Mars. We, we don't have a base on Mars, allegedly. But there's a lot of nutty people that believe we do. But, um, they do certainly have some robots that are on Mars-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that's gathering data, and they're doing it right now. And so they don't have to worry about radiation, all the things that kill people, make people sad. If we lose one of those rovers, who gives a fuck? Make another rover. Ship it out there. Fly it. Nobody cares. If you lose 50 people, if you take 50 people and they die on your Mars trip, you're gonna have ... Congress is gonna be meeting about it, "What are we doing? Why are we killing people? Let's not do that." And so, as time goes on and as technology improves and as ...... sentient artificial intelligence becomes a better option for sending some intelligent robot to gather data, why would, why would anybody go through space as a, a living creature? It seems stupid.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. I mean, I agree. On the other hand, I, I probably ... You know, why, why do I want to go to the Amazon, right? I can, I can see-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but you can go to the Amazon. That's the thing. Humans live in the Amazon.
- BWBret Weinstein
True.
- JRJoe Rogan
Humans don't live on Mars. It's way simpler to send-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
... a robot to Mars.
- BWBret Weinstein
Why would we go to Mars?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. There is a good reason to go to Mars, and the good reason to go to Mars is we're in jeopardy here, and I don't think Mars is in any way a long-term plan for survival of people. But there are processes unfolding here in our solar system that put us in jeopardy potentially here on Earth, and having just at least an outpost of people, uh, somewhere else would not be a bad hedge against that. So I think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Definitely. I agree.
- BWBret Weinstein
... I think we're, I think we're not close enough, but ...
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's, it's definitely a potential reality, and if it was possible, it would be a good move if you wanted to hedge your bets.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
And we should hedge our bets because-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is Elon's position on this.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, that we're in danger of the human race going extinct from a variety of different things, not even our own fault. It could be a l- a bunch of different things, asteroid impacts, super volcanoes. A lot, a lot of stuff can happen right here that kills us all.
- BWBret Weinstein
Space weather.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, yeah. Fucking some supernova too close. Sorry. Everything's cooked.
- BWBret Weinstein
Micronova, which is actually a viable hypothesis. Apparently, this is something that can happen. It doesn't necessarily destroy the star. You can have a burst of radiation that radically alters things down here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, fun.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And maybe that's what happened to Mars, which is also part of the problem, because Mars at one time had an atmosphere. Mars at one time had liquid water. We don't really know what happened.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. No, agreed. Uh, uh-
- 1:06:34 – 1:14:09
Complex vs. complicated systems: medicine’s reductionism and COVID’s “comeuppance”
- BWBret Weinstein
Wow, if we lear- So this, this is something Heather and I talk about frequently, is that we have more or less an epidemic of people who are maybe smart, but they don't know the difference between a complex system and a complicated one. And so they take their complicated system thinking into complex systems.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the difference?
- BWBret Weinstein
Whether it's predictable.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So for example, your computer or your phone, you know, it's beyond your comprehension or my comprehension, but it is well understood how it works. There's nothing mysterious about the outputs, right? It's a, it's a, it's a system that all of the, the functionality of it is, is well understood. Um, but a biological creature isn't anything like this. And so when you intervene, you know, when they give you a drug and they think they know what it's going to do-They're intervening in a system in which things are connected in ways that they've n- not yet discovered, and they can't anticipate the cascading effects. So, you know, we keep getting upended by the sense of like, you know, "Oh, this thing is wrong with you. Here's a biochemical intervention that will adjust one parameter and put you back into health." No, almost never true, right? It is occasionally true if somebody is quite sick that you can push them back in the direction of homeostasis. You can rescue them. But the idea of improving health with an intervention is almost always the wrong approach, right? You should be restoring the environment in which the body knows how to take care of itself because it is a complex system. Given the right inputs, given the right parameters, it has all of the processes necessary to keep it functioning. But if you think you're going to improve it by intervening, you're almost certain to do harm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. But what about medication for people that have, like, type 1 diabetes?
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. But the question is, why do you have type 1 diabetes?
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's a genetic thing.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. But i- is it a- a- you think our ancestors were walking around with type 1 diabetes?
- JRJoe Rogan
They might have and just died off.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, but then you would have a very low rate of that gene. So our ancestors-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
So the question is-
- JRJoe Rogan
So then there's an environmental reason for type 1 diabetes?
- BWBret Weinstein
I think there is a massive disruption in all of the environments that we pass through in life that is causing a mismatch between what we are b- we are basically perpetual fishes out of water, and that process is making us unhealthy in every single regard. Heather and I call this hyper-novelty. And in fact, it's not even that we're just out of our environment in which we can be healthy, but the rate of change is so high that even to the extent that we are highly adaptable, we can't adapt fast enough to, uh, to keep up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's, it's a, it's a pathology. And the flip side of this is if you did recognize exactly where you started that you are actually a system that is complex beyond even the sense that you're an organism. I mean, you're, you're, you're multiple organisms at multiple different levels. Every single cell in your body is being fueled by mitochondria that started out at a different place on the evolutionary tree and got taken inside of cells to become powerhouses. That's a symbiosis. So you are a symbiosis, uh, you know, in each of w- of your cells.
- JRJoe Rogan
And even crazier, your psychology, your mentality affects your physical health.
- BWBret Weinstein
Profoundly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Profoundly. So the way you think about things, the joy you have in your life, the happiness that you encounter, has a- an enormous effect on your biology.
- BWBret Weinstein
100%. Yes, if you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is just madness.
- BWBret Weinstein
If you are-
- JRJoe Rogan
So the reductionist view of just give him a shot of this and a pill of that, like, well, there's a lot more going on here.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. No, uh, our whole medical, uh, standpoint is fundamentally flawed. And I'm, I'm really hoping that we will take the lesson of COVID seriously and we will recognize, in my opinion, allopathic medicine, standard Western medicine, is living on a- the gains of a tiny number of sub-fields, right? The fact that a surgeon can put you back together after a car accident, that's something that we all know we want there for us if we need it, right? That surgeon's capacity to do that is, A, predicated on the abili- uh, the ability of the body to repair itself, right? A surgeon can cut you open and go, you know, take out your spleen. But that surgeon is depending on the fact that your body knows how to heal the damage, right? You can't go up to a car and, you know, slice it open and pull out the alternator and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... put in another one and have the car healed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Staple it back together again. Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. It doesn't work like that. So anyway, there are a few things in medicine that are transcendently awesome, like the ability of a surgeon to fix you and the ability of an emergency room physician to stabilize you where your body is, you know, spiraling out of control. But those things result in a sense of the godlike powers of medicine. And most of the time, medicine is in danger of hurting you. If it's not of the mindset that we should be minimizing intervention, we should be figuring out what the root cause of the pathology is. If we have to intervene, we have t- it should be a temporary intervention that pushes you back to the place where your body knows what to do, and then we should take our hands off, which is, of course, not profitable.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. The problem is we want you to be hooked on a medication because then we can prescribe that to everybody, and then you have the Sackler family.
- 1:14:09 – 1:37:03
Vaccine harms and mechanisms: myocarditis, lipid nanoparticles, and liability shields
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. There was a paper recently, uh, I haven't delved deeply into it, but that just says, you know, that the spike protein, which is obviously produced by the shots, is interacting with fibrin, which is a clot-producing protein. Um, so it's not surprising that it's having these cascading effects. But okay, so you had all these doctors who gave terrible advice to patients. They assured them not only that this was the right thing to do, but that it was safe, which they should have known better, because it couldn't possibly have been. And there's no, there's no course taught in medical school about, you know, repentance. How do these people repent for what they did so that they learn the lesson and it can't happen again? And the fact is, the whole system is rigged around pharma, and they can't.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's so many people out there that are still all in. I've fo- I've found some lady in my timeline, uh, I don't follow her, but she was talking about how disturbing it is to her that children are not being vaccinated and that COVID is, uh, killing kids, and the reports that she has of child death. And she was talking about how she wears a, a mask everywhere. And then there's all these people in the comments that are commenting on that, "I only go to places where I know there's gonna be minimal amounts of people. I always wear a mask." And they were all like, uh, uh, r- it was some weird echo chamber where they were all terrified still of what is now like a cold.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I don't, I will resist portraying it as a cold, because I do think that ain't where we are.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not a cold to you, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
When you got it, it was rough.
- BWBret Weinstein
I got something that was pretty rough. Um, but let's put that aside for a second.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Let's say that this is not a very severe disease. And by the way, I will just tell you, uh, at the risk of, uh, opening old controversies, it took me a long time to understand that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, they have broad applicability across RNA viruses, and many of the things that make us sick are RNA viruses. Right? So, there is a strong argument to be made that in a world where we are now being exposed to all of these RNA viruses, that acting quickly and taking those things is a reasonable thing to do. Now, hydroxychloroquine may have more toxicity than ivermectin. In fact, it does. But ivermectin has such a low toxicity that from the point of view of not doing the damage to the body that comes from being sick with these pathological agents, simply being reflexive about taking the stuff quickly is sensible. And of course, if what I just said is correct, you would expect pharma to look anywhere but there, 'cause they can't patent the stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Did you see, um, Chris Cuomo on Patrick Bet-David's show admit that he's taking ivermectin now?
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, I heard about it. I didn't see it.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) He admitted it. He admitted his doctor has him on ivermectin for long COVID and he kept dis- distinguishing the difference between long COVID and vaccine injuries. Like, 'cause he said, had some sort of a vaccine injury, then he was talking about how ivermectin's not good for COVID but it's good for long COVID. And I'm like, "What is long COVID?" Long COVID's not even a thing. Like stop saying that. Like, you, you're fucked up because either of COVID, or you're fucked up because of the vaccine. One of those two things happened where you got damaged. Calling it long COVID is weird, because that's like saying you're still sick from COVID. That's not really what happened. O- okay, if you get pneumonia and you get lung damage, you don't l- h- don't have long, long pneumonia.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You just have n- you had damage to your lungs. It's not long COVID. So you're either taking ivermectin because your doctor said ... Like, what benefit would ivermectin have on long COVID? Like, what does, what does that mean?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or vaccine injuries.
- BWBret Weinstein
It has a benefit for vaccine injuries. We can just say that empirically. The people who have become successful at treating these things tell us this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which vaccine injuries?
- BWBret Weinstein
COVID.
- JRJoe Rogan
But which ones? Which specific vaccine injuries?
- BWBret Weinstein
You mean what are the symptoms?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah, what things? Like-
- BWBret Weinstein
Things like brain fog, fatigue, neuropathy, these things. And I, I actually have several friends who report that they were suffering badly. I sent them to Pierre, he treated them. Ivermectin was core to the treatment. And, uh, they report, I don't want to say miraculous, but spectacular recovery.
- JRJoe Rogan
Pierre, by Pierre, you're talking about Dr. Pierre Kory?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, who, did he lose his license or something?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, I believe so, or it's in the process. But they are punishing him for, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
For talking about a beneficial medicine-
- BWBret Weinstein
They are-
- JRJoe Rogan
... that happens to not be patentable.
Episode duration: 3:15:26
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