EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,052 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- JRJoe Rogan
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) Hello, Brett, good to see you, my friend.
- BWBret Weinstein
Joe, always so great to see you, brother.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, so I was telling you before we get started that I had the most bizarre dream I've ever had in my life last night, the most realistic and most bizarre dream. And it's, uh, so hard to try to explain how strange this was, but I was in some weird corridor that looked like a building, but was odd, very strange, and I was encountering these beings that look like people, but very different. They were very thin, and they were slightly on the tall side. Um, and they had big heads, like larger than normal with larger than normal eyes, but they looked like people, and they were playful, and they were scaring me, like, they scared me, and then they joked around, like, we were just joking around. It was the most realistic dream I've ever had in my life. And I woke up and I could not go back to- I had to stay up. I got up at 3:30 in the morning, and I just went to the gym. And I worked out for a couple of hours, and I was like, "What the fuck was that?" But it was, it was very bizarre in that there was communication going on. It was, uh, it was like... (sighs) God, I don't want to read into this 'cause I know it's just a dream, but it was like, "Get comfortable with this."
- BWBret Weinstein
You should read into it because it's a dream. So, it doesn't make it right, but your subconscious is trying to tell you about something, and the fact that it felt very, very important means your subconscious thinks it's very, very important.
- JRJoe Rogan
I woke up... I mean, I was tired, man. When I went to bed, I was tired. I was falling asleep watching TV. I went to bed at, like, 10:30, 11:00 at night, like, beat down. I was like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna get some sleep." It's been a long week, lot of activities, workouts, this, that, the other. Tired. 3:30 in the morning, after- whatever this was woke me up so much that I just laid in bed for, like, another hour, and I was like, "There is no way I'm going to sleep. I'm, uh, I'm up forever." And then I just went and worked out. I worked out, and I was hoping I would be exhausted after I worked out and I'd be able to relax, but it was, like, a couple of hours after that that I sat, like, laid down and I took a nap for an hour before I came here.
- BWBret Weinstein
Question for ya.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Did you see a video, I think it was yesterday, maybe it was the day before, of some Chinese robots that seemed to be across, uh, on our side of the uncanny valley, that they walk with a gait that feels very human? Did you see that?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, I haven't seen that. Is that the latest?
- BWBret Weinstein
I don't know. I've seen it a few times in the last couple of days. It sort of sounded to me like your dream might've been responsive, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
These things felt very organic. Whatever this was, it felt like living, organic beings that were ve- like us. There was also a water element. It was ha- it was hard to understand what the water element of it was, but there was some sort of an indication that there was water and that there was protection from you going out into the water. But if you did go out into the water, there's a bunch of predators in the water. But they weren't, like- it wasn't like sharks. It was reptil- like crocodile-type things that were in the water and that they were, they had been, like, feeding them and keeping them calm and, like, keeping them away. But whatever these beings were in my dream, they were like, like what humans could eventually be. That's what it felt like. Ev- it didn't feel like a person, but it fe- like, you know, like a- I don't feel like a monkey. You know what I mean?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But th- it was like that. It was very, very realistic. Like, there was communication going on. And I was really freaked out, and they were fucking with me to lighten me up because I was freaked out. They're like, "Uh, ah." And then they're like, like this, like, "Calm down," like, "Relax." It was so realistic, it was so realistic that when it was over, I wasn't sure what happened. Like, it wasn't like, "Whoa, what a fucked up dream." It was like, that was different. That was a different one.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I wanna, um, explore a couple things here. I think dreams are, um, very interesting and important.
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you think dreams are? Let's just get to, let's start with that.
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you think's going on?
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, think about the way your mind works at the level that you understand yourself, right? Your conscious mind is capable of taking an input from your eyes, computing what the dimensions of the room basically are, where the objects are, whether there's a threat somewhere, you know? If you've got something that's of a particular focus, you point the fovea of your eye at it and you get a whole lot higher resolution image. That architecture... Y- you know how, um, crypto made graphics card manufacturers the most important industry all of a sudden?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, I wasn't aware of that.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh. Well, so the reason NVIDIA is, th- the company that it is... I mean, never mind that there's, you know, likely overvaluation, but the reason that it's ahead of Apple in terms of, you know, its market cap and all is that the dedicated compute power necessary to make compelling visual renderings, to make video on the fly for video games, which was their...... their stock and trade. That kind of compute turns out to be very closely related to what you want if you want to, um, solve these very difficult math problems involved in crypto. So it was a sort of, I think it was a surprise to everybody that being a specialist on this one niche, you know, video games, put you in a position where suddenly this became important for other things. But the basic point is, if you think about your mind as having something like a graphics card in it, right? What is that graphics card doing? Well, it's sort of like a graphics card in reverse. It's processing the incoming information so that you can act in real time, you know, y- you know, when you're fighting you can understand what your opponent is doing, anticipate their actions, and all of that. That is an amazing piece of hardware, right? It would be stupid not to use it when your eyes are offline, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
When your eyes are closed because your eyes are built for the day and during the night you're gonna close them rather than go out and get yourself in trouble in the dark, you've got this amazing processor. And it is capable of running through practice of various kinds. And m- my hypothesis for what's going on here is that basically you, as a creature with a very complex set of hazards and opportunities in your life, use nighttime when you're not doing productive work to get ahead on challenges that you may face in one way or another. Sometimes those challenges are, uh, warnings about, you know, defects you know in yourself that might put you in a bad situation, like if you're, you know, a procrastinator and you're in school, you may, you know, have nightmares about showing up to the exam without having attended class or something that kind of gets you focused. Or they can be, uh, you know, other kinds of practice. They can be philosophical practice, you know, they can be, you know, situations in which you might be morally compromised where you need to go through the experience of being faced with a choice where you really should choose A but B is very appealing or something. So, I would say scenario-building, that your, your mind is running you through little movies that it makes. They're not completely rendered because it would be too expensive and pointless to do so, but the central elements, the important stuff is there for you to have the experience so that when you do run up against a situation that's analogous, you've practiced it a number of times and you're not starting from scratch. And I, I would just point out that the, the strongest indicator of this for me is when... Uh, I experimented for a while with lucid dreaming. Have you ever done that?
- JRJoe Rogan
I've only had a couple of lucid dreams, but one where I kind... I think I specifically, uh, allowed it to happen because it was after I watched this documentary where this guy was talking about lucid dreams and he said, um, "In order to know if you're in a dream, every time you walk by a door, hit the side of the door and say, 'Am I in a dream?'"
- BWBret Weinstein
Which then very frequently wakes you up. So if you're gonna practice lucid dreaming, you have to practice not to wake yourself up as you become-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... cognizant that you're in a dream.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I did wake up after I realized I was in a dream, like, a few s- not long after. Like there was a few moments where I was like, "Oh my god, this is so crazy because this feels so real." Uh, but I, I just... My hand went through that door, so I know this is not real.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's not real.
- 15:00 – 30:00
We've taught it how…
- JRJoe Rogan
various fears and anxiety, uh, the balance of control and safety, you know, or, m- y- you know, new regulations being put through, how f- how hard people will push back or not push back at all given the anxiety involved and whatever current dilemma it is, whatever, whether it's a military deal or a bio- a w- p- pandemic deal. There's, there's a bunch of factors that it knows about how we've behaved in the past and how easy we are to manipulate. In fact, we've helped it because we've used it to manipulate other people. You know, I don't know if you w- know about the China GPT scandal, but they found out that China was running ChatG someone, I don't want to say China. Someone in China was running ChatGPT to use chatbots to talk about the, the protest about the closing of US aid, to, uh, transgender issues, immigration issues, a bunch of different things. And it was just constantly g- going to war with people online about these things. So we've taught it how to manipulate us.
- BWBret Weinstein
We've taught it how to manipulate us. If it is not smart enough to run experiments yet, it will be five minutes from now. So it can, in fact, investigate things about our cognition that we don't even know about yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
(smacks lips) Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? It can extrapolate from what we do know, and it can run experiments to figure out what we don't know. And that creates an advantage for it in, well, under its own power or in the hands of people who, uh, are hostile to us.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think anybody's gonna have any power over it eventually. But one of the things that I think that you said that's really important is that if it can't do that now, it's going to be able to do that in five minutes. And here's the rub. We're not gonna know when it can do it.
- BWBret Weinstein
You're not gonna know.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we don't know if it can already, right now, but it just doesn't have the power to be fully autonomous, right? It doesn't, the power literally doesn't exist because it's relatively inefficient compared to, like, the way a human mind processes things, right? The amount of power it needs is, is, is extraordinary. You know the Google thing where they're-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... they're building nuclear power plants to run their AI.
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
This is how crazy it is.
- BWBret Weinstein
So we have taken away the limits of ... you know, your mind, any person's mind has a, just a physical limit. It's only so big and there's only so much energetic throughput that it can handle, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Or has access to. We are removing those limits, and what we have is, um, an entity. So you'll hear people say, "Well, it's not, it's not really thinking," right? "It's just figuring out, if it was thinking, what the next word in the sentence is." Garbage. No way. Okay? What we actually have is something so analogous to a child that that is the right model. In other words, when a, a baby is born, it has no language. It may have some structures that language will f- slot into, but it doesn't have any language.It is exposed to tons of language in its environment. It notices patterns, r-right? N-not consciously notices, but it notices them in some regard, you know, that every time somebody says the word door, you know, there's a fair fraction of those times that somebody, you know, opens that portal in the wall. I wonder if door and that portal in the wall are connected? Whatever it is. So, the point is, a child goes, in a matter of a few years, from not being able to make a single articulate, uh, noise to being able to speak in sentences, make requests, t- to talk about abstract things. That is an LLM. Right? It's more than that, but it is at least an LLM. It is being exposed to a training data set, which is the world of people talking around it, it is running little experiments, and it is discovering what it should say if it wants certain things to happen, et cetera. That's an LLM. At some point, we know that that baby becomes a conscious creature. We don't know when that is. We don't even know precisely what we mean. But that is our relationship to the AI. Is the AI conscious? I don't know. If it's not now, it will be, and we won't know when that happens, right? Y- we don't have a good test, and I think we are also not, we're just not properly concerned that we have no useful metaphors for describing what to do in this situation, the biggest hazard being it's interfacing with us in our own native tongues. That's an amazing level of influence that it has that we can't turn off. Very frightening.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's all it took, and she was banned for life. And Meghan's a wonderful person. She's, she's a, she's ju- she's not mean, she's not terrible, she's just kind and-
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, we're friends. She- she's, she's a sweetie.
- JRJoe Rogan
... brilliant. I love her.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, uh, I, you know, I didn't know h- or anything about her. I just knew that story, and I'm like, "That story is fucking crazy," and I was trying to bring it up to them, and they said there was other things involved, and she had done other things, and turns out, no, now that wasn't true at all. Th- that was basically it. I- there was a hard-lined ideological wall that we ran up against. And, um, I think if he didn't buy it and expose the government's involvement in censoring people that were distributing true information during COVID, getting rid of people, uh, you know, the Jay Bhattacharya stuff and what they tried to do with, uh, uh, s- so many of these doctors, Robert Malone, the, you know, these, these doctors that were attached to that whole thing. L- uh, there was a concerted effort, and it was being done through social media. I don't think we'd be in the same place right now if he hadn't boughten Twitter.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
If he hadn't purchased Twitter, I re-... I genuinely think people... They're blinded by this thing that he helped Trump get into office, fuck that guy, and he's a billionaire, fuck that guy. But he literally might have changed the course of civilization, or at least partially righted the ship for, for a bit.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. I... Look, I think we dodged a bullet, and the problem is that what has, what has come about as a result of dodging that bullet is very mixed. And so, it doesn't feel like a vindication, but as compared to what would have happened in the last election, I think there's no question, um, Elon deserves a tremendous amount of credit for helping us avert a disaster. But let's go back to your point about his point about AI.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. He wants to make a better version of AI.
- BWBret Weinstein
He thinks the only remedy for bad AI is good AI.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And I don't, I don't disagree with him about this. There's no-
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause it's... It seems to be like the race is on, you can run or not. Like it's... Everyone's running full clip, what are you gonna do?
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. So, yeah. The... If you pause, what you're doing is you're putting whoever didn't pause ahead.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Yep. …
- JRJoe Rogan
and we spent, like, an hour and a half outside where he told me some stories about what... His first encounters with, uh, these young boys that get treated as, uh, uh, sex toys by these grown men there, that he thought it was a driver who was driving with his son, thought it was a guy working with his son. He said, "Oh, that's cool, man. He takes his kid to work with him?" And the, the guy explained, "No, no, that's his boyfriend. That's not his kid, that he, he owns that boy."And he's like, "What?" And he said they would have parades where they'd ... The guy who had the most boys with him was like ... It was like a- a man with, like, a bunch of hot girls in a music video behind him. It's like this guy was the man, and they would parade down the street with all the boys that he fucks. In the 21st century, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
What I ... And- and when he and I were talking about it, it's, it's so hard to believe. And it's so gut-wrenching and terrible. But then I'm like, okay, well, isn't that spot very unique? Because Afghanistan, you, you have very few, like, large population areas. You have essentially warlords controlling chunks of land all over the ... And it's very difficult to get to where they are. These people are essentially separate from a lot of the rest of the world, and I think it's a glimpse into how people used to behave, especially the very deep ideologically religious ... Like, this is ... It's like a view into how I think people were, like all throughout history, which is so weird. It's like we're awakening to how fucked up we were just a couple thousand years ago.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, I think you're right about this. There are a couple thing ... I- I'm a little hesitant to go here. I think there is a evolutionary story that, um ... There's evolutionary hypotheses that need to be explored with relationship to this. One possibility is that this is, um, a modern phenomenon that has something to do with the alteration of the landscape.
- JRJoe Rogan
The which is a modern phenomenon, the- that we think is horrible now?
- BWBret Weinstein
The- what you're ... That what ... No. No, no, no. Um, there is very definitely an alteration in what we think and what we're even allowed to know about what people are doing, right? So just even the fact that you're aware of this is the result of a modern phenomenon of, you know, people going to Afghanistan, you said it was Afghanistan.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's cellphone footage-
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... of these guys with these little boys dancing around them.
- BWBret Weinstein
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
And shaking their butts.
- BWBret Weinstein
Let's put it this way. Um, I believe that our modern sensibility about this is exactly right. And frankly, I would argue that there is no greater crime than the sexual exploitation of children. And the reason I say that is because A, it is life-destroying for the victims, and B, the victims are by definition innocent. Right? You take those two things. You're gonna destroy a life, and that life, it was gonna ... They had a long life ahead of them, and you've wrecked it, and there's nothing they could have done to justify being treated any way but well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not only that, but many of them often go and do the same crime to other children that was committed to them.
- BWBret Weinstein
That is a key piece of this puzzle.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's almost like they're a vampire that got bit and has to turn other people-
- BWBret Weinstein
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
... into a vampire.
- BWBret Weinstein
Exactly. It is contagious. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is insane. It just let- lets you know how weird people are.
- BWBret Weinstein
Which is another reason that it has to be, um, punished at the highest level. If you're going to break that cycle, you have to break that cycle.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. But it's ... Isn't it crazy, though, that it took people so long to realize that?
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, you know, I don't know what they realized, and I don't know at what level.
- JRJoe Rogan
Today's episode is brought to you buy Tractor Supply. Every town's got its heroes, veterans, firefighters, EMTs, and police officers, the folks who show up when it matters most. At Tractor Supply, they call them hometown heroes. Now through November 11th, Tractor Supply is celebrating hometown heroes with 10% off their purchase on First Responder Day, Veterans Day, and a special in-store event on November 1st. And while they're saying thank you, stores will also be giving back, making donations to local hero organizations in their communities. To learn more, visit tractorsupply.com/honoringheroes. Tim Dilance and I were on a podcast once. We were talking about some child sex trafficking scandal from decades ago that involved, like, government figures, and there's this child sex trafficking scandal-
- BWBret Weinstein
You're talking about the ... What was it called?
- JRJoe Rogan
I could s- I could send it to Jamie.
- BWBret Weinstein
Boys Town, or s-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Geez, that is so…
- BWBret Weinstein
narrative is so ridiculous that you should throw it out and say, "Something else happened here." You know, that would be the case in the JFK assassination, I would say. Um, and when the mainstream narrative is actually right, and you're just, you know, looking for flaws in it, of course there will be things that don't seem to fit that really do fit, and you just don't have the ability to know how. Um, so I guess, you know, uh, like you, I'm watching and I'm seeing an awful lot of indicators that pedophilia and kompromat have a lot to do with the way the world runs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Geez, that is so scary, because that's always been the big dark conspiracy theory, and that's always the one that I always dismissed. I'm like, "Sure there's some pedophile," but the idea that they're all pedophiles? That's crazy. But then, uh, uh, you know, there's a case of this Catholic priest that was involved in a sex scandal, and then they moved him instead, which is one of the things that they had done in the past. When someone had molested children, they would just move them-
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to another place-
- BWBret Weinstein
I remember that.
- JRJoe Rogan
... where they wouldn't molest children. So, they moved him to this new place where he molested 100 deaf kids.
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's one of the most evil stories. And you're like, "Well, how, how could you have, how could you tolerate that at that level?" Where you're, you're not just tolerant, you're aware. This person does something. You somehow or another get to deal with it yourself, and then you just move them and no one ever gets charged for anything.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, this is why, you know, when you say-
- JRJoe Rogan
And he does it again.
- BWBret Weinstein
You say, "We need a CIA." Uh, I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I agree with you. Of course you do, right? Y- you know, in the big adult world, you need an agency that can, uh, look out for your interests, y- you know? It, it doesn't seem like you're likely to persist very long if you don't have that. On the other hand, if you do have it, does it not inevitably become some sort of a fourth branch of government? Does it not eventually merge with the mafia, right, because of the nature of its business? Does it not become an obstacle to the consent of the governed? And I'm not saying I know the answer to that puzzle, 'cause I don't. What I'm saying is, I think it is, it's a canonical problem, right? You're damned if you do and you're damned if y- you don't, and we are now damned 'cause we do, right? We would be damned in a different way if we didn't, and that doesn't make it acceptable. At some level, we have to figure out how to balance that trade-off. We have to figure out how to actually exert control over entities like the CIA, right? If you, if they are, if they, if they gain control over themselves, then the catastrophe is inevitable.
- JRJoe Rogan
(smacks lips) So, it's just a function of the way th- human beings work when they get power. When they get absolute power and they know that they have absolute power, and you're involved in stuff where it's all top secret, you don't have to tell people exactly what you're doing all the time with everything, and you're realizing these presidents just cycle in and cycle out... I would imagine if I was doing something like that for, like, 25, 30 years, I'd probably ignore the Biden administration too.
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I'd be like, "Fuck off. We'll slow this thing down. We'll do whatever we want."
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I don't think that this, um, idea that, you know, power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely, I don't think that's actually true, and we, we-
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's often true.
- BWBret Weinstein
It... Yes. It...... for a particular type of person-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... gaining that kind of power does create exactly this cycle.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the problem is, those jobs are very attractive to those types of people.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And those types of people are willing to do anything to get there.
- BWBret Weinstein
Precisely. So, we-
- JRJoe Rogan
The scariest person you could ever work with in the office is the guy that you know will fucking sell you down the river for a promotion. He'll fuck you over, he'll lie, he'll say you made the errors on the account when it was him. He'll sabotage whatever things you have by making sure that someone doesn't send something in time. And there's people like that will do that. Those people win sometimes.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, they win a lot.
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot.
- BWBret Weinstein
And, and in fact, there's an evolutionary game playing out, because the ones that aren't great at it tend to end up kicked out. The one- the better-
- JRJoe Rogan
And you probably have to be kind of a psycho to get ahead.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. The better you are at being absolutely ruthless, the more likely you are to find your way to the top of that organization.
- JRJoe Rogan
And maybe the better you'll be at your job, too.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Right. …
- BWBret Weinstein
when they're going to forget that they're paying for it on a monthly basis and continue to pay even though they're not using the service. That kind of thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, so that behavior is counterproductive because it keeps incentive that should go to somebody else who's producing something valuable, uh, out of the system. It, basically, you are hoarding the profits and only some fraction of what you're producing is productive, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... it's, it's bad for all of us. But the other thing is it creates the exact resentment that results in these outbreaks of communist sentiment, right? Because it freezes so many people out of any prospect of having a cool life that they have no incentive to keep the system going, and what they want is to use their vote to get the system to redistribute stuff in their direction. And they're not entirely wrong that their lack of stuff is the result of some-... bad behavior on the part of others. Right? The market, if the market just simply restricted people to wealth-producing behavior and said, "I don't care how rich you get, but you shouldn't get rich for harming other people," if it did that and it distributed the incentive as widely as possible, nobody would be interested in communism. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
It only happens because we are deaf to the admittedly inarticulate complaints of the people who are shafted in this system. They're not making their case well. And their real point is, "Well, if you're going to do that to me in the market, then I'm going to do that, this to you at the ballot box."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. Makes sense. Um, the argument for having some sort of, uh ... I m- I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with th- the w- the way i- it, you have to pay to get, to go to college. I think it makes sense that the professors should make a lot of money. It makes sense that it, we should encourage higher learning, right? It's important that it thrives, right? But if, if it was funded by the government, if everybody could get a higher education, just think of the money we spend on, with things. Like how much more money would people have to spend if they weren't burdened by debt? And couldn't we offset that? At le- like f- forget about even absolving student debt. Just like off, for, from now on, if we just funded higher education, if that was a mandate, to fund higher education, think about how many more people would enter into the job market, how many more people would get educations. How many more people would pursue various different interests that they discovered while they were learning, and that you would have never had access to that education before, because they couldn't afford it. And, w- as a resource, like human beings are our greatest resource. And a country with the least amount of losers is a better country.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like if you want to make America great again, let's make less losers. Like what's the b- best way to make less losers? You got to give people hope. You got to give people education. You got to give people a real pathway. And instead, you get non-interested people that can't control unruly kids, and you're barely paying attention to the lessons, and no one's motivated because no one's making any money. And you go through this system where you can barely read, and you're graduating high school. And now, you're off into the world, and you're fucking lost 'cause no one gave you any real guidance or any real usable education. And that's a giant swath of the population. And it feels like that could be fixed. That could be fixed with resources. That could be fixed, I feel like, if you directed people, uh, like, as a job, it's not attractive to people that want to make a lot of money. You can't, y- it's capped. It's one of the most important jobs that ever exists for you as a person is, uh, y- your interaction with a person who's going to teach you something when you're a child, it's like one of the most important things you could ever experience. And we fund it so poorly. We want ... It's almost like w- there's people in this country, they want to f- to like, no fucking way do you get to join in. And you just stay with your shitty schools, in your shitty towns, with your shitty crime rates, and we're going to pretend there's nothing wrong. And that's what's going on. And th- if socialism has a point, like if a p- if there is like a broader way of distributing things, like we do with the fire department, like we, we, eh, not ... Instead of capping it out, it out at that, how about look at all the problems we have in this country, and put together a fucking game plan instead of just letting it exist like some weird fucking cancer that you just ignore 'cause you hope it goes away. It's, it's not going away. Y- it's, it's been like this forever.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Fix that.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or come up with some kind of a plan. That's the best way to make America great, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree with you in one regard and disagree with you slightly in, in another. Okay? The one regard is you abs- absolutely need a system that does not produce an abundance of losers because they will overthrow your system. Okay? It's a terrible thing to allow to happen, even just out of self-interest. Right? The stinginess of the right produces the communist impulses of the left.
- JRJoe Rogan
100%.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's a bad cycle.
- JRJoe Rogan
And back and forth.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. As for the rest of your point, I think it's exactly right, and it's a great speech, and it's just too late. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Too late?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Damn.
- BWBret Weinstein
I mean, I hate saying that. Right? I mean, I, I, I was a very-
- JRJoe Rogan
You're Mr. Glass Half Full.
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs) Uh, I have some Navy SEAL friends who call me Professor Killjoy.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
But, um, but the problem is this. So I, you know, as you know, I was a professor for 14 years. Very happy in that job. Really enjoyed it. It was, it was, it was so rewarding, and I feel like I did a ton of good. And anyway, it was great.
- JRJoe Rogan
For people who don't know you, well, 'cause th- uh, millions of people do, but, you know, as a standalone podcast, we should probably tell people how we met. Because we met because I found out that you, uh, there was a ... Th- they used to have a day at your school for people of color where they were appreciated, so they could take the day off work and still get paid. Right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
And then, they decided one day to change it to be a day where white people can't come.
- 1:15:00 – 1:24:44
Yeah. …
- JRJoe Rogan
of climate change.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? Like, how many people are caught up in that movement? "It's so important to stop this. It's so important to stop all fossil fuels. It's so important." But, is it, or is it you just found a movement? You found a thing where you feel like you can become attached to. It's just like a natural thing that young people tend to do when they want to make, make a change in life, and they get very excited by it. But it's also... It's real easy to get captured by existing systems when you're in that state, because there's people that manipulate the fact that people want to protest things. They'll manipulate the fact that you want to be a part of a movement. They'll create movements that get you involved, and it's just a very strange aspect of human behavior that, uh, uh, we don't teach kids about in school. You should teach kids like, "Hey, don't join a fucking cult. Here's how you know it's a cult. You know, if the guy's like a yoga teacher and he gets to have sex with everybody's wife, guess what?"
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
"That's a cult." You know what I mean? (laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs) Nature's way of telling.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a lot of these tells, but w- you're not teaching kids that. We don't teach kids how to avoid scams. We don't teach kids how to communicate ideas without getting upset, 'cause that took a long time for me to learn, you know? And we don't... We have to figure it out through a lot of intelligent and challenging conversations, where you're like, "I don't know why I feel the way I feel. Let me examine why I feel the way I feel about this, rather than just say what I think." 'Cause sometimes, it's, it's, that's required to have a, a delicate conversation between two people that disagree where no one gets to shouting. You know, every a- argument that I've ever been in where it was like, "Fuck you," or it w- it got real loud, every one of them, I probably could have avoided.
- BWBret Weinstein
Mmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Even if the other person was like hyper, super aggressive, I probably could have avoided them. I probably could have deescalated it. You know? And that's a reality of being a human being that needs to be taught. Like, that, that's something you learn on your own, but you should also explain these principles to kids as they're growing. Like, "Hey, uh, you know how you feel jealous about someone? Yeah. You need to turn that into fuel."
- BWBret Weinstein
Mmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
"That's inspirational fuel. That bad feeling is motivation to get the good feeling that comes with improvement and success, and you can use it to ruin your life and become jealousy, or you can use that same feeling and use it as inspiration, and you will thrive, and you'll also have a lot more friends. Try it that way." And you could teach people how to rethink scenarios when they come up and go, "Okay, I know this little bitch in me wants to be mad that this is not me happen- th- that's getting to be Superman in this fucking movie or whatever it is, but th- that's just, like, cool that someone got to do that, and that's how I have to look at it." Nobody teaches that. Nobody te- it's like o- one of the best ways to manage your life, and you gotta figure it out through, like, stumble after stumble, you have e- trial and error all along the way, no one telling you how they did it. Like, how about teach that? (laughs) Teach that to fucking 12-year-olds. Like, don't argue. Like, have disagreements whenever possible. Nothing wrong with that. But don't, you know, don't get, like, completely attached to your idea to the point where you're angry at this person because they voted this way and you voted that way and they, now, you've cut them out of your life, and you can no longer communicate with them because they're an other, because they're a, a liberal or they're a Republican, they're a conservative. Like, what are you doing? (laughs) Like, how did you get tricked with this...
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
What a dumb fucking trick. Like, you're with us or against us, there's only two teams, it's sh- it's shirts versus skins. Like, this is so dumb. Of course, there's a bunch of different ways to think about things. We're just suckered into it, and if we don't teach kids that, it's, we're gonna stay suckered forever and ever, and it seems like something that can be taught, and there's almost no effort to explain to kids, like, how to navigate life.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I don't think, you know, I don't think teaching it is the right way to think of it. I think y- y- what you need is an environment in which it teaches itself, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
That's good.
- BWBret Weinstein
Like, a co- a coherent environment-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
... in which you learn the lesson, you know, at small scale before you're faced with a larger-scale problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's probably a more clever way of handling it, but I mean, the principles of it would help to know as you're experiencing it. So, as you're going through this trial and error, having these principles of how to navigate it so you could recognize it when it comes up, because you've already defined it-You know, that's like you- what you do with skills, like physical skills.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You have to... Every... When, when you f- like, find, like, a deficit in what you're doing, you have to recognize that and define it. And if you don't define it, then it's gonna always be there, and it's gonna always fuck you up.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. But, you know, we used to do this automatically. We were just sort of built to do it. Our culture, which I would argue is every bit as biological as our genes, our culture provided this experience. And this really is what human childhood is for. If you have an environment that is coherent as a child, that's like a miniature version of the adult world that you're gonna grow up and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
... live in, then you learn these lessons, right? You get your heart broken by, you know, the girl that you fancied in grade school and, you know, you, you learn something about, you know, what you did that caused her to, to leave or whatever. You know, you learn it at small scale. And we don't... A, our childhood environment doesn't look like our adult environment, because the adult environment is changing so rapidly that nobody knows what environment you're going to live in as an adult. And it's just not set up properly. For one thing, we don't immunize children from being parasitized by corporations that view them as profit centers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so, you know, corporations are distorting childhood for their own purposes. But, uh, I want to go back to your point about movements for a second.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but wh- h- while we're on this-
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just to define it. Um, I'm... I think everybody has to go through all those things. I think everybody has to go through breakups, everyone has to go through heartbreak. But I think having an understanding of what it is, is not bad.
- BWBret Weinstein
No, it's good.
Episode duration: 3:08:03
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