Bret Weinstein (2:31)

Sure. I am an evolutionary biologist. That's what I studied to do and that's what I hope to do for a career. And I did find out pretty early in the process I was at the University of Michigan, and I had actually intended not to do evolutionary biology. I had wanted to do what I saw as some of the harder biological science, something over in neurobiology or cellular biology. But as I hunted around the department in my first year as a graduate student, I discovered something which was that the high quality thinkers were not in the other quadrants of biology. They were effectively functioning like refugees in the Museum of Zoology, and in fact, specifically in the laboratory of Dick Alexander, who was a great evolutionary biologist. He technically was the curator of insects, and he himself studied insects. He also studied humans, but within the division of insects, there were all of these people who had gravitated there, because that's where the high quality thinkers were. And so there were people in the division of insects studying dolphins, birds, bats, monkeys, deer, you name it. It was an intellectually vibrant community. So I ended up studying evolutionary biology. I did field work on tent making bats, which was tremendously fun. I spent 18 months living in the tent making tent making bats. Tent making bats are bats that modify large leaves in the understory of tropical forests into a kind of structure that hides them, protects them from the rain. And anyway, not much was known about them. Nobody had ever seen a bat make a tent, though it was well established that they did. And so, Anyway, I spent 18 months chasing bats around a beautiful pristine island in the Panama Canal, Barrel Colorado Island. And anyway, it was some very formative time for me. I got to be completely surrounded by a very fascinating biological habitat, which is kind of what I would always prefer to be doing. But I did my dissertation work on biological trade offs, and the basic idea was that we had spent 100 years studying evolution, thinking of it as an engine of improvement, right? That things get better through an evolutionary process, which is absolutely true. But we had become stumped about many of the patterns that we see in nature with that program of study. And what I realized pretty early on was that there was another way to look at it, and that the engine of improvement I.e. darwinian natural selection runs up against limits just the same way engineering does. You know, you can't make, you know, a fighter jet that is also capable of hauling a huge amount of cargo, right? You have to choose. So I realized that if you think in terms of trade offs, that actually many of the patterns we see in nature that stump us are actually tractable. You can understand them by thinking about what it is that selection is balancing, rather than just simply always improving things, because it can't always improve them. So that's Where I did my work. And in that work, I studied a. I hope your audience will forgive me for this. It's a little technical, but it's worth it. In the end, I think I studied a question which is why creatures like us grow feeble and inefficient as we age. The process we call technically senescence, most people would call it aging. Aging is not a great term for reasons I won't bother with. But in any case, in studying senescence, there was a hidden trade off that I thought was tremendously explanatory. And it turned out to be that the trade off involves a limitation built into our bodies, where each of our cells, almost all of them, have a limit on how many times they can reproduce in a lifetime. And that's an odd thing, because the more you can reproduce your cells, the more you can fend off all of the things that break down our bod. So why, given that natural selection does not favor our growing feeble, why has it left us with this limit on how much cellular reproduction we can do? That's a paradox. And the answer turns out to be, I think we can now say, more than 25 years later, the answer turns out to be. May not be the only answer, but a primary answer, is that because of the way we're built, we are composed of, as adults, 30 trillion cells@ a time, something like that. And most of those cells have the capacity to kill you. If they become unregulated and just keep reproducing, they'll turn into a tumor and then a cancer, and that's the end of you. So that problem is huge when you're talking about a collection of 30 trillion cells. So how did selection protect us from getting cancer? So that in general, it's a very late life phenomenon, you know, after you've already done your reproducing and influencing the world. Well, the limit on the number of cellular reproductions does this job across your entire body. If a cell starts reproducing and reproducing and it becomes deaf to the messages that tell it to stop, it runs into that limit on cellular reproduction, and you don't even notice it. It turns out that every mole that you have is one of these. It's a cell that has run away and then run into this limit, and you can live the rest of your life, and it doesn't bother you. So that turns out to be true across almost all of the tissues of the body. And that explains the basic pattern. In order to protect you from tumors, you have to have this limit. And once you have this limit, it tells you how much repair and maintenance you can do, and therefore sets an upper limit for how long you can live. So that was one of the trade offs that I worked on for my dissertation. I also worked on questions of why there are more species the closer you get to the equator. It turns out that as much as that sounds like an obvious pattern that we must have explained, you know, 75 years ago, we haven't. And it turns out that again, you have to look into the world of trade offs in order to understand why that property of the. Of the biota is there. I worked on the evolution of human morality, again, downstream of a trade off. So anyway, that's my orientation. And it turns out, as much as that may sound like an odd background for a guy who now shows up talking about, you know, modern human political dynamics and things of that nature, it turns out that that same toolkit is broadly applicable. And because of that, although, you know, I'm not a historian, I'm not a political scientist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm able to walk into those realms as a generalist and make sense of them, hopefully more often than not.

Danny (10:00)

Right. And what was the story of what happened to you at the university where you got essentially kicked out? Is that what happened?

Bret Weinstein (10:09)

Not exactly. In a legal sense, we can argue that maybe that is what happened. But in 2002, I started teaching at the Evergreen State College.

Danny (10:23)

Evergreen?

Bret Weinstein (10:23)

Yep, in Washington. I had followed my wife there. She had gotten a very good job right out of graduate school, which is not common. Heather is a extraordinary biologist, and they hired her straight out of grad school. It was actually one of a couple jobs she got offered, and I followed her there, and they then hired me as a visitor. And then when it turned out that I was very popular and successful as a. As a professor, they hired me permanently and I taught there for 14 years. In 2017, things went haywire. And they went haywire in a sufficiently spectacular way that the world paid attention to it. It was right in the middle of the Woke revolution. And so the dynamics of the Woke revolution were still not well understood by people. And they were trying to wrap their heads around it. And there was a meltdown, which I will describe. And that meltdown was filmed obsessively by the students involved in creating it, and they uploaded it to the Internet. I'm grateful that they did, because nobody would have believed the story if they hadn't. But when that video emerged, it raised a question. So the meltdown really Begins with the hiring of a new president of the college, Guy named George Bridges. Now, Evergreen is the most liberal college in the country. It was founded by a group of radicals at the very beginning of the 70s, and they threw out every single structure that a normal university or college would have. There were no departments, There were no grades. The administration did not outrank the faculty. The faculty did not have rank within it. Nothing from a normal university or college was familiar. It also had some very interesting and, I think, tremendously positive educational features. Students took one class at a time, full time, and that class could go on for 1, 2, or 3/4 full year. And professors taught one class at a time, and that class could go on 1, 2, or 3/4. So it was an amazing place to teach in which professors were literally given freedom to teach anything they wanted, in any way they wanted. As long as the student showed up. You could keep teaching that way, and there was no administrator who could tell you to do something different. Now, that was both brilliant and flawed. The people who took teaching seriously took that freedom, and they did amazing things with it that you couldn't do anywhere else. The people who weren't imaginative or were lazy abused that freedom, and they taught things that could waste a full year of your time. So you had to know what classes to take. But for professors like Heather and me, who loved that freedom and loved the idea that we could build new ways of teaching and discover what was possible in the classroom, it was a kind of paradise. The problem was the hiring of the new president. He had aspirations to totally re envision the college in a much more standard way, but he didn't have the power to do it because the faculty had been empowered by the founders to block an administrator. There was sort of this natural suspicion of administrators, and so the faculty would have blocked him outright. So what he did is cynically initiate a kind of race war. He empaneled a committee that he empowered to re envision the college and proposed that these changes were necessary to address the rampant problem of white supremacy that absolutely did not exist at the college, but they claimed it did. And Heather and I were tenured at the time. We were also wildly popular. Heather was literally the college's most popular professor. Anyone who doubts that should go look at her reviews on the site rapemyprofessors. You could look at mine, too. You'll see something similar. But the point is, we were very popular, and it was literally our job to steer the college in the right direction. And this president, this newcomer, was going to destroy the place. So Heather happened to be on sabbatical the year this happened, but I wasn't. And I started following everything. I went to every single faculty meeting, which was not the usual. I listened to everything. I read all of the emails that told us what was going to be changed next. And I started raising the alarm because I didn't want this college that was frankly the only place you should go if you were a very smart student who was not well built for school. This was the place for that kind of student, which is exactly the kind of student I was, by the way. So in any case, I started to oppose the changes, and I got targeted effectively as public enemy number one. Now, that took place at the level of the faculty. It was not initially involving students, but some of the faculty who were interested in these changes because they had been promised an elevation in their power, essentially sent students to portray me, straight white guy, as a racist, and to do so publicly and spectacularly. And in 2017, the thought was, no straight white professor is going to be able to stare down students accusing him of racism. People are going to look at that, they're going to assume there's something to it, and either the guy buckles or he's out. Right? Well, I wasn't the least bit afraid of this accusation. It was so preposterous. In light of my history. I knew that there was nothing to find. There were no awkward statements. There was literally nothing. And I also knew that I was tenured and very popular with students. Further, I had a long history of teaching with people. There were many people on the faculty who knew that this wasn't true. So as much as it's intimidating, on May 23, 2017, at 9:30 in the morning, 50 students, not one of whom had I ever met, stormed into my classroom and started leveling accusations of racism, demanding an apology from me or my resignation. And I tried to reason with them. My job at the time was to take confused college students and unconfuse them. That was literally what I was paid by the state to do. And so I started trying to reason with them, and that enraged them. And they started just simply chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho. Bret Weinstein's got to go, right? It was. It was bizarre. As the meltdown happened, the campus police, the only real police that had jurisdiction on the campus, were called in. The students literally blocked them from entering the building to see if I was all right. Anyway, so the video of all of this emerges, and people start scratching their heads. Why is this guy saying there's nothing to this accusation, he seems very reasonable. What is going on here? Is there something to it? And so as people began to dig into that, I suddenly ended up in the public eye. I ended up in the first week on Joe Rogan's program and I ended up on Tucker Carlson's program. I expected at the time, you know,

Danny (18:07)

when you was on Fox. That was right, when he was on Fox, right?

Bret Weinstein (18:10)

Yep. And I've been a liberal my whole life. I still consider myself one. I thought of Tucker as a terrible human being and I thought long and hard about whether or not to accept his offer to come on his program, because what I assumed he was going to do was portray me as a loony liberal who got what he deserved. That is not at all what he did. He was very compassionate and in fact, he was clearly upset on my behalf as an American who was being unjustly accused of things. And that rocked my world a little bit. That was not what I was expecting from that quadrant. And I have now discovered many times that a lot of the people that I would have been suspicious of at the level of their motives turn out to be better than I had imagined. So that, that's on me. That was an error on my part.

Danny (19:01)

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Bret Weinstein (20:39)

But ultimately, you know, the. The meltdown of Evergreen unfolded over the course of about a week. It was the end of the term, so that was kind of the natural limit of how far it could go. Very quickly, it went from being an irate protest to a riot and a takeover of the campus. The president who had initiated this literally withdrew the police. He ordered them to lock themselves into their police station. And they did. And the campus started to be policed by students who roved the campus with weapons. They assaulted and battered another student, and they were literally stopping traffic on a public road, searching cars. The police said, for me. So it was very strange. Now, I'll tell you one more thing. And then maybe that's sufficient for the purposes of the story. At one point, I was trying to meet with my students. Not one of Heather or my students turned on us. They all, in fact, vocally supported us, including students of color who were mercilessly punished for supporting us in a context where it was supposed to look like, you know, tone deaf white people are being confronted by aggrieved students of color. But at one point, I rode my bike to campus every day, and I rode onto campus to go to my class. And as I was about to turn into the woods to take the trail onto campus, I saw a bunch of students that I had recognized from the protest who were waiting at this trail where there shouldn't be anybody. And I thought, my goodness, what's that? So I diverted and I rode around and I rode to the police station, locked. I knocked on the door. They let me in. And I spoke to the chief of police, Stacy Brown, a real hero in this story. She said, look, I told her what I had seen. And I said, I must be imagining this. And she said, I don't think you're imagining it. And she said, what's more, we can't protect you on campus. We can't guarantee that you'll be safe. Anywhere in town. I don't want you on your bicycle. I want you to go home, take the car, and go meet your student somewhere else. Now, that threw me, because here I am, an American. I'm literally in my own neighborhood. I lived across the street from campus. I'm riding to my own workplace where I'm thoroughly well known, well liked, and I'm supposed to be concerned for my physical safety. That does not sound like it comes from 2017 in the United States of America. It comes from some other chapter and some other location. So, anyway, there's lots more to the story, but ultimately, we in the state of Washington, you can't just up and sue the state. There's a waiting period. And so we couldn't just sue the college for creating an unsafe work environment. We had to essentially alert them to the unsafe work environment and give them a chance to correct it, which they absolutely refused to do. Ultimately, they settled with us. We had to agree to leave. They gave us enough money to give us a couple years to pivot and figure out what else to do. But, you know, it's pretty significant to lose your tenured position in academia. You can't just go get another, especially if you've been at a college that is built around teaching, because what would get you a job at another place is if you had had a history of getting big grants or something like that. If you've been spending your time teaching, you don't have that history, so you're almost unhirable in most of the academy. So we had to reinvent ourselves, and, you know, the careers we had studied so long for were not going to feed us. We had to do something else. And so we did. And we've become authors and podcasters and. And speakers. Thank goodness that's worked out. But anyway, it was. It was quite a chapter.

Danny (25:09)

Yeah, that was a crazy, crazy time in American history and in my lifetime specifically. And, you know, I always wondered, like, how much of that was just like, America, the life for Americans getting so good that it's that people start to turn in on each other. You know, I've had a lot of people on this podcast make statements to the effect of, like, the United States needs an enemy.

Bret Weinstein (25:39)

We need. We need a.

Danny (25:41)

We need a scapegoat, or else we will start to turn in on each other. And this is like a Gerardian thing, or I think it's called, like, memetic theory or whatever, where we need a scapegoat. And when we start to. To lose those and. And life becomes so easy for us that society starts to cannibalize itself. Similar to like what we were seeing, what you were experiencing there. And you know, I don't. I've been thinking about that ever since that theory was proposed to me. I like, I can't unsee it, you know, with everything that happens in the world.

Bret Weinstein (26:12)

Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth to it. And I will tell you, I'm essentially certain that what I was seeing were the exact dynamics that go into a witch hunt, which is what Rene Girard was really describing.

Danny (26:25)

Right.

Bret Weinstein (26:26)

I also, because of the way the crowd dynamics unfolded, I believe everything was on the table. I don't think this was. I think in the minds of the people who were doing it, they started out as it was a performative exercise. They wanted a spectacle that they could use to advance their cause. The problem is the human animal gets caught up in these things and the crowd deindividuates. You get a mob mentality in which responsibility is diffused. And I absolutely think, I don't know what would happen if they had caught me riding into campus that day. I don't think they knew. I don't think they had a plan. And what happens when you stand your ground against a mob that is convinced you're a monster? And again, these were students that I didn't know. So what they had been told about the fact that I was a monster standing in the way of their well being. I believe that they earnestly held that and what they were capable of. I'm glad we didn't find out.

Danny (27:34)

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And you know, that was also around the time of the George Floyd riots and all that stuff where people were burning cities down and destroying everything in the streets over one person being murdered. And I can't help but wonder why we don't see anything like this now that this Epstein stuff has come out when there's evidence of people eating children and molesting and trafficking children.

Bret Weinstein (28:11)

Yeah. It's unfathomable because the implications. It's not just that you had this group of monsters apparently engaged in all of this unthinkably evil behavior, but the relationship to power is so clear in the so called Epstein files that the question is we have monsters near power that's extremely dangerous. That's not one person you say being murdered. I think there's a question as to whether or not that's the correct designation for what happened to George Floyd. Right, right, right, right. But nonetheless, we are just off with respect to knowing what to Direct our energies at to the extent that massive protests would be clearly warranted. In the case of the Epstein revelations, the fact that they haven't shown up is wild and I think suggests something very dire. We don't even know how to think about this. Or somebody has figured out how to release the pressure so that we never end up getting to the proper level of anger over what was apparently taking place.

Danny (29:31)

Trying to release the pressure.

Bret Weinstein (29:32)

Yeah, there's some pressure that builds up that would cause people to spill into the streets. If you release it at just the right rate, people feel like they've gotten it off their chests and they're not motivated to go out and make their anger known. And, you know, one thing that is true of the Epstein releases is they're wildly incomplete and systematically so. Right. The way in which we're effectively looking at the result of some sort of filtering process, they decided what to show us and what not to show us. And they do seem to have found a quantity that is, on the one hand, overwhelming. I know that stuff is passing me by that I'm not even seeing because there's just too much of it. It's a lot. It makes us feel like we've seen the Epstein files. On the other hand, there are a lot of files we haven't seen. And what's more, I think there's even a kind of bait and switch in here. To me, the Epstein files before we had seen them would really be like the FBI file. It would tell us something not only about the raw evidence of the conversations that were taking place, but it would tell us something about what the FBI made of it. Right. What did the FBI conclude? Jerky was a code word for I want to know what they concluded and why. I don't want to guess. I want to know whether they did a credible investigation and they came up with an answer for that. I want to know why it is they decided to search the island and the New York residents and not the Zorro Ranch. What was that? How did that decision get reached? What are these things? We don't know. And unfortunately, back to the issue of there being a conspiratorial thread that seems to link all of these different events. The overwhelming implication of the files that we have seen and not seen and the things that are conspicuously missing from our model in the public is the fact that you don't really appear to have an FBI. Right. The FBI did not properly investigate Epstein. We know that. How do we know that? Well, the Zorro Ranch would be the obvious indicator that we can literally take

Danny (31:55)

a time machine and go back and go month for month back to July and look at every single clip of cash. Patel talking about this stuff, and it's just like, it's insane.

Bret Weinstein (32:06)

We have no FBI, which. Okay, what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania? Well, we don't know why because we don't have an FBI. So what happened to Charlie Kirk, I don't feel that I know. Because we don't have an FBI. Somehow this is left to the public and conjecture. And yes, sometimes social media does a pretty good job of unearthing evidence and sometimes it can do an analysis of the sound waves and the trajectory of the bullets and all of these things. But it's nothing compared to an institution that has privileged access to the raw evidence and a budget with which to analyze it and is subject to review by, let's say, the Congress. We don't have that. And it's worse than even not having it. What we have is a thing called the FBI that actually stands in the way of our ability to do the job the FBI is supposed to be doing. Right. The FBI after Butler, Pennsylvania, the next day, I believe was literally washing the roof of evidence. Why would it do that? The only reason I can think of is to prevent anybody from checking the garbage story that we were handed. So as an American, as a patriot, I'm spooked that something seems to have gained control over the FBI and turned it to an obstructionist purpose rather than an investigatory purpose.

Danny (33:44)

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Bret Weinstein (35:30)

Right. And you know, when you. And it's not just the nsa. Right. The Mossad assures us that Epstein wasn't theirs. Okay, but

Danny (35:43)

that's hilarious. If they actually said that. Did they actually say that?

Bret Weinstein (35:46)

That was an official statement Netanyahu said on their behalf, I believe. But, okay, so they say he wasn't theirs. Are they telling us that they didn't know of his activity? That raises certain questions. I don't think they could possibly. Even if he wasn't theirs, I don't think they could possibly have been unaware of his activities. I mean, he has Ehud Barak as a repeated guest, that Mossad would surely have known about it. So the point is, by telling us that he wasn't theirs and not telling us what they knew, there's a whole second layer of question. Even if you assume he wasn't actually theirs, they knew about him and they didn't tell us why. Right. In light of the evidence of what was taking place, if he was just some freelancer, which I don't believe, but if that is the explanation, then there will certainly have been some set of discussions and somebody decided to let this predator continue to traffic girls and young women and do nothing about it. How was that decision being made? And why is this not a focus of outrage in Israel and the US it should be. So, again, some kind of manipulation is taking place where we are allowed to know certain things, certain very damning things. We are entitled to speak somewhat freely about our feelings on these things, but we are denied the substance of a functional system that would address something like this with the utmost seriousness, because anyone with basic human decency understands why you can't have somebody like this functioning with impunity.

Danny (37:35)

Why do you think they would Allow stuff like this to go public. Like, I'm sure they were somewhat aware. I know they're incompetent, but they're not that incompetent.

Bret Weinstein (37:46)

Right.

Danny (37:47)

Why, why would they let something so insane and so like almost like from a sci fi movie come out to the public? And then, not only that, there's so many layers to this, it's insane. But not only that. You have people like Leslie Wexner and Bill Clinton in depositions voluntarily giving up the names of Rothchilds, not even being asked questions, but just giving up. Oh, I heard he worked for de Rothchild, whatever her name was. Ellie de Rothchild and Bill Clinton doing the same thing. It's so weird to me.

Bret Weinstein (38:31)

Well, to connect the scientific thread that I started with to this discussion. The thing about biology is it is truly complex, which is not a synonym for complicated. Complex systems are unpredictable and one has to have a certain mindset to understand them. So if I walk into a tropical forest, the first thing I have to know is that nobody knows how it works. And does that mean it's hopeless and it's impossible to know anything? No, but it means you have to approach it knowing you're going to have a small fraction of the evidence that you would like to have and everything is going to be very noisy. So you have to learn to detect signal. And the signal that I'm getting is that we exist on some kind of a massive chessboard that we do not understand. We make certain mistakes. We assume that the people on the chessboard are like us, which is an assumption that is generally warranted. If you run into somebody in a bar, the chances that they are interpretable by you is pretty high. People aren't that different in general, but there are certain things that change that assumption or invalidate it. One, there are certain people who have no capacity for moral self restraint. In general, such people do not do well. They end up in prison or dead. But if they happen to have that characteristic and are simultaneously very insightful. So they learn not to do the things that catch the attention of others. They learn to simulate the speech patterns of somebody who does have sympathy with other human beings, they have an advantage. And the advantage is they're capable of doing things that you will assume nobody would do because you couldn't imagine doing it.

Danny (40:40)

This is like what a psychopath is, right?

Bret Weinstein (40:43)

Yeah, but a highly functional, highly functional psychopath. A highly functional psychopath. So one thing that is true is our system probably finds those people and makes use of them. It brings them into collaboration because their moral flexibility makes them useful. So that's one thing. The other thing I get is that I don't think whatever the power structure is that we're up against, that it's making all of these moves because they're preferred. I think a number of these things we have actually made surprising gains, especially in the last, oh, I don't know, since 2017. We in the public have certain rights. Those rights are not fully intact, but we basically have the right to discuss things more or less openly. And then the algorithms will tamp down.

Danny (41:37)

Certainly online, you mean?

Bret Weinstein (41:39)

Yeah. So, you know, if you look at, for example,

Danny (41:44)

we got hit hard during that time.

Bret Weinstein (41:46)

Who we? All of us.

Danny (41:47)

I know you did, more than anybody,

Bret Weinstein (41:48)

but my goodness, you know. Well, let's put it this way, it was awful. It's also a set of lessons that you can't buy at any price. We learned a lot about the way power functions during COVID and we learned a lot about how power views our right to discuss things openly. And, you know, we didn't win, but we didn't lose either. I think we punched way above our weight class. And so I think we need to take those lessons to heart. And what those lessons suggest is that there is an ability for rational voices speaking carefully in public to move the needle of public opinion. And so that's why there's this never ending quest to come up with an excuse good enough to do away with free speech permanently. Right. It's probably why there is a never ending quest to come up with a reason good enough or an atrocity great enough to do away with our second Amendment rights. There are people for whom our constitutional rights are nothing but galling. There are things they'd like to do that the Constitution makes difficult. This is why our tyranny is less intense than it is at the moment in Britain or in Australia or, you know, we happen to have an industrial strength constitution and it's tattered, but it's still there. So part of what I'm telling you is that I think we forced a rethink of how to address the Epstein stuff, Right? I mean, in fact, during this presidency, we've been told it was in our heads, right? We've been told it's a dark hoax. Yeah, yeah, It's a democratic hoax. And then months later, it's like, you know, here's 3 million documents I thought it was.

Danny (43:41)

They don't exist.

Bret Weinstein (43:42)

He'll traffic to himself, right? So I think we have forced Goliath, a term I'm happy to defend if you want me to. But we have forced Goliath into a limited retreat, into regrouping, and into taking a different approach. Goliath decided to throw some people under the bus. He decided to give us something to satisfy our quest for information about what the hell this was. He decided he could release the pressure a bit. He decided he could divide us between different narratives, whatever it was that he was up to. So the basic point is we're on a chessboard. We are playing, whether we understand that or not, against a ferocious enemy with many asymmetric advantages. But we are succeeding surprisingly well because at the end of the day, the truth is on our side. Right. It gives us an advantage in that battle. And so I don't know whether we win or lose in the end, but at the moment, I would say take the lessons of COVID and apply them to this. It's the same. Yes, it's mostly the same enemy, which

Danny (44:46)

is crazy enough, though any content that has to do with the Epstein stuff doesn't seem to have any throttling attached to it. Like, there's. There's no suppression of this kind of stuff. And at the same time, I think that this story is probably the most. It's the. It's. It goes across both. The whole political spectrum. It's unifying. This is one of the most unifying things, both left and right. It illuminates to everybody that the battle that we have in front of us is not Democrats versus Republicans. It's us, the normal people, versus the people up there in that layer of reality.

Bret Weinstein (45:25)

The people for whom the trafficking of children is a tool.

Danny (45:33)

A tool for them, a tool.

Bret Weinstein (45:35)

It has a value. It has a risk to a normal person. It's the brightest possible red line. Right? Anybody who would contemplate using this would hide the fact that they've discovered somebody who is using it. Those people are built of different stuff, and they cannot be allowed to continue to wield power. We don't know how many. We don't know in what roles they are. And most importantly, we do not know what role they have played in modern history right up through today. We do not know. And that's the question we need to answer. The Epstein stuff, the details of it are impossible to look away from, but it's the implication of it that is so important. This was about power. We don't know how it even worked yet. Was it outright blackmail? Probably not. You know, as Mike Benz points out, it's very hard to run an operation like that where outright blackmail is the Mechanism.

Danny (46:37)

What do you mean?

Bret Weinstein (46:37)

Outright blackmail where somebody says, hey, here's the stuff on you. You do this or we're gonna release it.

Danny (46:43)

Well, it was definitely that case with Bill Gates because there's the email that

Bret Weinstein (46:47)

basically shows you're talking about the Russian prostitutes.

Danny (46:51)

And yeah, there was an email with Bill Gates where he's like, look, he's like. I don't know if he sent it directly to him or he typed it out to himself, but he's like, I did this for you, this for you, this for you. I got you the STD pills, the serum to put in your wife's drink and all this stuff. I need you to pay up. Like, basically that was the summary of it.

Bret Weinstein (47:07)

My recollection is that is a letter he wrote to himself. So the point is, does it hint at blackmail? Of course. Is it tantamount to a letter that he actually wrote to Bill Gates? Presumably not. Or we're not supposed to know. But anyway, the point that Mike Benz makes, and I think we have to take it seriously, is that if you were to build an operation like this and it worked through outright blackmail, it would blow itself up in the first or second use, right? It would make itself unusable going forward because people would just stay away from it. So that's probably not how it worked. On the other hand, I do think it was about exactly the sort of power wielding that we in the public who don't live in this realm imagine was about blackmail. But I think it worked through different mechanisms that we have yet to understand. And so the important thing is what was the power that was accumulated by Epstein used for and what role is it playing in our current political environment? What are we doing that we wouldn't otherwise be doing, except that somebody who owns the Epstein Library or whatever it is is making happen? That's the key question because it's really the most fundamental question in the democratic republic that is the United States. We have a right to self determination. The consent of the governed is the sole basis for the legitimacy of governmental power. To the extent that somebody we didn't elect is wielding tremendous amounts of power through Kompromat or however it worked, that is a violation of the founding principles of this country. And it is intolerable

Danny (49:01)

with the Cold War. Did it changed the whole, the whole dynamic of how war was fought, Right. It went from being just outright kinetic war to espionage stuff conducted in the shadows, secret deals portraying, portraying this projected reality to the public, letting you know, this is how it is, we are the good guys they are the bad guys. And behind closed doors, maybe doing business with other people, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, whatever it might be, it seems like the Cold War was the catalyst for something like Jeffrey Epstein to be able to exist. I think overall, like what, what this stuff did was clear out a window for us to be able to see that this is all the, the political system that we have is illusory. And there's, there's different layers, there's, there's the political people we know in Congress, even the President. Above that, you have this fixer class, like the Jeffrey Epstein's of the world working in tangent with, with, with espionage factions. And then above that you have bankers and then you have, you have people like, like the Rothschilds and, and others, people that, all these people that go to the Trilateral Commission. And I, I think that is probably the most revelatory thing about all of this stuff, which is confirming, like, like we said in the beginning of this, all of the craziest conspiracy theories.

Bret Weinstein (50:33)

Well, if you think about it, flip it on its head. We have these clandestine organizations. We pay for them. They have big buildings in Washington, they have names. We know the nsa, CIA, et cetera. We know that they violate the laws of other nations, international norms. And we know that that more or less has to be the case because we don't want to be the only country that isn't trying to figure out what our competitors are up to and how we might disrupt their hostile activities or whatever. So we set in motion an apparatus that builds the tools that allow it to listen in on the conversations of our antagonists abroad. What exactly protects us from those same tools being used by those in power to listen in to their perceived antagonists domestically, politically and otherwise? Well, we have a set of laws that says you can't do that. On the other hand, that set of laws has to be used by an apparatus with the power to call these clandestine entities onto the carpet and make sure they are adhering to the limits that we set. There's no evidence that that is taking place in the present. What's more, I have a model that I deployed a couple of years ago. It's called the Time Traveling Money Printer. And the idea is everybody knows if you have a time machine, how you make money, right? If you have a time machine, you can go forward in time, see which stocks are going to go up, come back, you can buy those stocks and make yourself very wealthy. Or you can go back in time and you can buy Microsoft and Apple and Nvidia. It's Easy to do if you have a time machine. As far as we know, there are no time machines. But there's a way to do the very same thing. If you have superior access to information, if you know what historical event is coming, you can actually slow down the public's awareness of it and you can position yourself in the market so that when it happens, you can profit handsomely. Right. This is raised obviously by the puts that were bought on American Airlines before 9 11. There's lots of cases in which we

Danny (53:13)

see the insurance policy that was taken out on the Twin towers.

Bret Weinstein (53:17)

Absolutely. For which Larry Silverstein got paid twice because it was declared two different acts of terrorism. Very shrewd on his part. So there's all kinds of places, Covid being a marvelous one. Right. We all became aware of COVID in the early days of 2020, but the powers that be were aware of COVID in the fall of 2019. Maybe earlier, but the fall of 2019 with the Wuhan Military Games, there was already a like virus spreading rampantly. So the question is, when the powers that be got information that there was a virus circulating that it wasn't going to be stopped at any international border, did they say, huh, we've got to alert the public? Oh no, no, no, no, no. They realized that that was a terrific money making opportunity. They were in a position to position themselves in the market based on their knowledge of the fact that the world is going to face this pandemic. They could even amp up the threat of the pandemic to get us to make even grander alterations to our economy. And so we had the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. It was a fantastic money making opportunity. If you were the kind of monster that didn't care about people and their ability to protect themselves or to act rationally, and you only saw in it your ability to increase your wealth and power. So the time traveling money printer is the ability to act as if you have a time machine. Not by traveling through time and figuring out what's going to happen, but by slowing the public's awareness down, which is much easier to do. And knowing the future. Yeah, you know the future because the future is knowable and you disrupt the public's ability to figure out what you've figured out. And it's a very, it's a very powerful tool. I would also point out, I don't know what the relationship is between that property and the destruction of truth seeking in public, but all of our truth seeking mechanisms are broken. There's not one reliable newspaper right Right. We can try to cobble together an understanding of what's going on based on what's in our feeds, but it is not a match for a newsroom with a large budget that can send reporters into the field with the mission of finding out what's actually going on. We just can't compete with that. So somehow the newspapers have been destroyed, the universities have been destroyed. The universities all lined up with the COVID madness. Not one of them dissented. Likewise, not one of them dissented about the gender madness. Not one biology department in the country said, hey, we're sympathetic with people who have persistent gender dysphoria, but it is not true that you can change your sex. Right. That would have been the most obvious, easiest statement. Not one biology department, not one medical school. Medical schools, in fact, stayed silent as healthy young people were being mutilated by doctors over gender madness. So something has taken our institutions designed to seek truth, and it has hobbled them. At the same time, it appears to take advantage of its superior access to information to make money.

Danny (56:48)

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Bret Weinstein (59:19)

I'm cautious about it because I want to know for sure that that's a real pattern and not a trap. But if it is a real.

Danny (59:25)

Are you suspicious?

Bret Weinstein (59:26)

I'm suspicious all the time. Because let's put it this way, if I'm right, that we are on a chessboard and the public is playing against some force, the identity of which we don't know, and we are trying to make sense of the world faster than it can derange us, then one way to deal with people who do have a knack for figuring out what's taking place is to lure them into stuff where they will embarrass themselves. Right? To put something out there that just matches your expectations so well that you're just eager to tweet that thing.

Danny (59:59)

Yeah.

Bret Weinstein (60:00)

Say, see, I was right. Right. And then it blows up on you and it's like, oh, ha ha, conspiracy theorist. So I'm always looking out for the case in which something matches too well. And the problem is the absence of the documents seems to tell a clear story that there is something to hide there. But what happens, let's say, if the some large set of files that is the remainder, Right. Not the whole thing. I assume we'll never see the whole thing, but some big tranche of files gets released and it fills in that gap and there's nothing there. Right. That worries me. For one thing, that you Know, there are tantalizing hints in the stuff that we have seen. You know, Epstein wants to put together a shadow commission to figure out what happened on 9 11.

Danny (60:58)

Well, they invited Ghislaine to the shadow commission.

Bret Weinstein (61:01)

Right.

Danny (61:02)

With a secret.

Bret Weinstein (61:03)

A secret membership list, of course, naturally. But okay. For all of us who have been, you know, tarred and feathered for saying, hey, I don't know what happened on 9 11, but I know that the story that we've been told doesn't add up. I mean, Max Cleland, who was on the 911 Commission, quit in disgust saying it was a setup. Right. So the story we've been given doesn't make sense. There's an awful lot of evidence of various things, including the possibility of foreknowledge on the part of several people who miraculously survived because they were doing implausible things on the day of the attack. We need to know. But, yeah, I do feel that we've seen hints. The missing documents have a particular stench to them. It could be a trap. Maybe it's not.

Danny (61:58)

And I think some of the people in Washington, their behavior has been very telling. Not just Bill Clinton's recent deposition, but I think Trump's behavior has been very telling. I don't know if you remember during the 2016 debates when Trump marched out, all those women who were accusing Bill Clinton.

Bret Weinstein (62:21)

I don't remember that.

Danny (62:22)

So right before that debate, he held a press conference with. I forget what it was maybe six or half a dozen women who are accusing Bill Clinton and held that press conference right there when Bill and Bill and Hillary were sitting in the front row at this national, you know, biggest televised event on television that year. And then publicly during the debate, talked about that. And you. There's a. There's a famous photo of Bill Clinton's face when he says that during the national debate. And Bill Clinton's eyes are like. You could just see his face. He's, like, stunned. So we know, like, they. They used to be friendly.

Bret Weinstein (63:04)

Right.

Danny (63:05)

Leading up to 2016. No longer. I don't think. When you're friends with somebody and then you publicly accuse them of on national television, I think that kind of burns the bridge permanently. Right. I don't think there's any coming back from that.

Bret Weinstein (63:14)

Yeah.

Danny (63:16)

But then you have just two weeks ago, Trump being like, I actually really like him. I really like him a lot. I don't. I don't want him to get any harm from this. This is weird. Okay, then Bill Clinton, the man who was accused of this on public television during the freaking debate. During his deposition. After the deposition's over, he says, I just want to make this clear. I want to add this to the record. I don't think Trump. I think he's been falsely accused. I don't think he's done anything wrong. Why are these guys both doing this? It does not add up.

Bret Weinstein (63:55)

A lot does not add up. And it is suggestive of a coordination. And so in my mind, I'm always. When I say Goliath, I mean the force that opposes meaningful change, something very powerful that does not wish to be challenged by novel sources of power. It gives us certain liberties. It prevents us from doing other things. And it is composed of elements that are both colluding consciously. You know, there are meetings and rooms in which things are discussed, plans are hatched, and it's also got emergent elements where you have people who don't know that they are part of Goliath who are doing its bidding because the incentives around them lead them in this direction. Right. Some of the people crowing about the fact that the Epstein files were a nothing burger. It's like, well, what the hell files are you reading? Right? That's not a nothing burger. It's not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But this isn't a court. You don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. What we have is a preponderance of the evidence of some very powerful, very serious thing that we don't know how far it reaches. That's clear as day. But why do you have, you know, a dozen relatively high profile voices saying, ha, told you, nothing there? Well, they've been trained.

Danny (65:17)

Who's saying that?

Bret Weinstein (65:18)

Oh, Michael Tracy, Claire Lehman, Robbie Suave. You know, lots of. Lots of folks who show up at a fairly prominent level. My contention is that they have actually been trained to respond this way. That if the idea is, well, well, there's an illegal move, you can embrace a conspiracy theory. If you embrace a conspiracy theory, you're gonna pay a price. You may survive. Maybe you'll get an audience of conspiracy theorists. But basically, we are gonna drive you from polite society if you talk about the anomalies surrounding 9 11, for example. Right? So there's a whole class of people who have gotten lazy and they've gotten paid for ridiculing people who cross that line. Not because the people who cross that line are ridiculous, but because there is something that wants a chorus to always pile on to somebody who is alleging collusion of any kind. Right? So my point is those people are now way the hell out over their skis. They don't know what they've read in the Epstein files. For some reason, they think this is a court of law and that somehow those files failed to reach beyond a reasonable doubt. Well, they do fail to reach beyond a reasonable doubt. But reasonable doubt is a standard that was deliberately constructed by the founding Fathers to protect citizens from the ferocious power of government. Right, right. It's an artificially high standard. It's not a logical standard at all. It is designed to protect citizens. So why are these journalists appealing to this standard? Where's the court? This isn't a court. The preponderance of the evidence is plenty to say. Holy hell, there is a lot here and we need to find out. We need to get to the absolute bottom of it. So anyway, Goliath trained these people. I don't think that they're working for Goliath. Not that they know. They just know that their bank account gets fatter when they make certain noises about conspiracy theorists. And so they're doing it reflexively.

Danny (67:24)

No, it definitely makes sense. And the more, the more people I know that, you know, only get their information from like, narrative driven stuff like Fox and cnn. That's just exactly, that's exactly what it is. It's just narrative driven garbage hiding behind the words new, the word news, which pays no attention to this stuff and just like plays it down except for, you know, and there, I understand there are like, lots of Democrats in the Senate who are trying to get political points by attacking the right wing and attack Trump's whole admin for covering up the Epstein files when they have been covering it up ever since Epstein was actually in the White House with Bill Clinton. So, like, I get, I have no, no love for any of them. They're just, they're just politicians trying to get political points now that it's convenient for them to attack the other side. Except for people like Thomas Massie and, and Roana who have been like, you know, going crazy on this stuff. And, you know, now you have people like Miriam Adelson trying to spend all this money trying to get him out and fighting this huge campaign against him. Which is, which is bananas to me. But, like, I just feel like there's a huge group of people that I know and that I talk to who about this. I often just get on the phone with people that I know who aren't invested in any of this stuff at all. Maybe they're on one side or the other. And it's frustrating. It frustrates me when people are, are unable to it just seems like there's no interest in it. And I feel like I have to do everything I can to get people more interested in this stuff. So, like, something can change.

Bret Weinstein (69:01)

Well, I think they have to get interested in it at the right level. And unfortunately, I think most people. We have benefited from a very unusual historical experiment. We, in what I call the modern west, which I take to have been founded by the American founders, live in a prototype of an excellent world. Not a utopia, but a self regulating, functional world that maximizes our individual liberty. And it's in tatters, no question about it. It's been disrupted actively by people who have other plans for us, but it's still here and we still developmentally have the experience of having lived it or, you know, the prototype. And the problem is people do not intuit what the alternative to it is. They don't know what it is like to have an absence of governance or a truly tyrannical communist regime or fascist regime. And so in trying to piece together what is taking place, they're exhausted. For one thing, they're sick and tired of making mistakes. You know, you post something you think makes sense online and the next thing you know, people are community noting you, oh, that's AI. Oh, that's been debunked, or that's film from, you know, 2015, whatever it is. So people are shy about trying to make sense of it because they just keep getting punished over it. Right. And the point is, look, I know you're getting punished and I know it sucks, it does not feel good. But if you understood what was at stake, why we've been targeted, and what it is that is going to be taken from us, what is going to be taken from your children and your grandchildren, you would understand that as painful as it is to try to confront this and make sense of it, we don't have an alternative. We have to figure out how to stabilize the prototype that we have and go back to building in a positive direction. We don't have any choice about that. The, the alternative is either some kind of despotic tyranny or warlords, and you're not going to like either one of those. You, in fact have no idea how much you will not like them. They are truly terrifying. And as bad as our situation is, it's orders of magnitude better than it will be if our system finally breaks.

Danny (71:35)

What do you make of this injection of theology into everything recently, especially most recently this Iran war with the soldiers being told about this is going to bring Jesus back. And you Also, I find it interesting that simultaneously you have Peter Thiel doing his Antichrist lecture series and who is apparently there's like a big new church. He's trying to paint Silicon Valley, everything that's going on in Silicon Valley under this Christian narrative, or he's trying to paint Christianity onto it.

Bret Weinstein (72:08)

Well, I don't know about that latter thing. I've actually seen at least one version of his Antichrist lecture in person.

Danny (72:16)

Oh, really?

Bret Weinstein (72:17)

Yeah, it's fascinating. I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, I do think that those of us. I'm secular, basically, just to lay my cards on the table, I'm an evolutionary

Danny (72:29)

biologist, didn't see that one coming.

Bret Weinstein (72:34)

My sense is I am open to evidence that there is some supernatural force, but I have yet to see that evidence in my lifetime and I'm not expecting to. So far, everything I see, I believe can at least in principle, be explained in materialist terms. And so I'm sort of, I'm not hostile to people's belief systems, but I believe that a lot of really all of the ancient religious stuff is metaphorically that stands in for explanations that we don't always have or didn't have at the time it was penned. So that's where I'm coming from. That said, I think it would make sense for all of us, including us dyed in the wool materialists, to take very seriously the symbolism and narratives from these ancient texts. Because even if, I mean, there are really multiple possibilities, one possibility is that they mean nothing, that it's just the stories of a long gone age. Another possibility, and one that is going to be at least somewhat true, is that those stories pick up on powerful patterns that recur. And so the reason that those texts have been carried forward through history is because they enable the populations who believe in them to function better, because they know something about the way the world works. So at a completely non supernatural level, they can have a deep importance. And they do. We can't guarantee that a story that was written and transmitted through time, because it had a great importance, still does, sometimes conspicuously. The creator does not seem to have mentioned the enrichment of uranium, the invention of AI, the possibility of quantum computing. None of these things are described. And so we don't know what to think about them. So that to me suggests those are ancient texts. Their value is uncertain in the present, but we should be open to the possibility that there are many things in there that have currency today. But the other thing is, it doesn't matter to me at all. Even if Those stories are nonsense, which, again, they're not going to be. But even if those stories were nonsense, the fact that people with tremendous power may be guided by them means that there is every reason for us to be searching there for patterns that look like the present. And I will tell you, I am frightened by the fact that we seem to be fighting a modern conflict with unacceptable nuclear risk, according to beliefs that are millennia old. That should stop us in our tracks. That the people doing this, they either believe it or they want to use those stories to motivate others to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. But I do feel like somehow we are. We are. Somehow. Even though I and others specifically voted against this. Right. It's not that I didn't vote for war in Iran. I voted against it. I voted for the candidate who said no new wars.

Danny (76:04)

Yes, exactly.

Bret Weinstein (76:05)

So the fact that we are now fighting a war that I could have told you was on the neocon agenda since 9 11. Right? This was on the agenda. And in fact, I tweeted, I think weeks before this current war was initiated, we are not going to be given a choice. We will be going to war in Iran. And we little people are not going to get to say no. Right. So this was obvious that this was coming. And the idea that it is coming because of privately held beliefs of leaders in nominally democratic countries who think that they know how history is supposed to work and feel entitled to destroy societies in order to make the thing that they want happen, that is terrifying. Further, let me just say one more thing about that. I mentioned earlier that complex systems and complicated systems sound alike, and they are radically different. The human body is a complex system. When we do something like inject a novel vaccine into it and think we know what that's going to do, we always get our comeuppance. Because the one thing that's true is if you intervene in a complex system, unexpected, unintended consequences are guaranteed. So the Middle east, guess what? That's a set of complex systems. And you've got these people who time and time again have told us fairy tales about what will happen. You know, I remember when we weren't exactly welcomed as liberators in Iraq. Right?

Danny (77:47)

Yep.

Bret Weinstein (77:48)

We were told we would be and we weren't. And we got half a million to a million Iraqis killed over a fairy tale, over the existence of.

Danny (78:00)

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when Saddam had nukes, weapons of mass destruction.

Bret Weinstein (78:04)

Right, Absolutely. Of course he had them. I mean, you know, Colin Powell told me so he had Some pretty cool animations at the UN Netanyahu was a

Danny (78:11)

big part of that sales pitch, of

Bret Weinstein (78:13)

course, because there is this neocon contingent that has. I think they're all secular. I don't think these are believers, but they have a religious commitment to some fricking PowerPoint presentation in which they told themselves how they were going to remake the world and it was going to be in their interest and, oh, by the way, everybody else's. And these people. People have proven their track record tells us they don't know anything. And yet here we are in 2026, returning to their agenda, just so happens to be that the country that they most wanted to go after, the most terrifying of them all, we're now attacking it without apparently any plan for what to do next. That's madness. It's absolute madness. And so we should be paying attention to all of the various theology and eschatology that is surrounding this, because they haunt this theater. We have people doing things in a place where believers are everywhere and they're various. You know, the idea that some fraction, a substantial fraction of the motivation in the U.S. the support for this conflict comes from people who believe it's gonna end the world. World.

Danny (79:29)

It's going to end the world.

Bret Weinstein (79:30)

Yeah. Now, I'm not saying they don't have a right to believe that, but I am saying we cannot govern the modern world this way. You have some belief about your path to heaven, you can't end the world for all of us who have a different belief because you're sure the world cannot work that way. Our founders had their religious beliefs. Frankly, the modern west is founded on.

Danny (79:59)

Most of the founding fathers were pagans, weren't they?

Bret Weinstein (80:01)

Well, it's a mixed bag.

Danny (80:04)

Thomas Jefferson certainly wasn't a fan of

Bret Weinstein (80:05)

Christianity, but I will freely admit that the modern west is impossible. But for the update of the New Testament. Right. In the New Testament, Jesus argues for a broadening of the in group. The story of the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan stops to take care of a guy bleeding by the side of the road that isn't from his tribe. Right. He invests in him. The Golden Rule is a story about how to treat people that doesn't say, treat people who have your skin color and your nose shaped this way. It says treat people this way. That is the basis of the modern West. But those same people who founded, I think, the greatest civilization that has ever existed decidedly put the brakes on the idea of it being theologically motivated. Yeah, right. They did that for a reason. They knew if you were going to bring in people from different traditions, you can't have some tradition decide this is how we're going to do this thing. And so we had that agreement. We don't get to go to war because a book tells us that that's the thing that must happen for us to get to heaven. Even if that is your heartfelt belief, you don't get to do it. And yet some fraction of the motivation for this war comes from that particular interpretation of Christianity, which I will point out is not universal, right?

Danny (81:37)

No, it's not.

Bret Weinstein (81:38)

No, there's not.

Danny (81:38)

No, it's evangelical, right?

Bret Weinstein (81:39)

Yes, it's evangelical. And downstream of something that I believe is called dispensationalism. Dispensationalism suggests that the Jews with whom the covenant was made originally are the modern Jews. And therefore what the book says about where they have to be in order for the resurrection to take place or the return that is now carrying weight. Whereas other Christians have what's called a covenant view in which they view Christianity as the inheritor of the covenant with God. Those are very different views that have a very different implication for our modern conflict. And yet you have Jews who have one view partnered with those who are frankly trying to bring about the end of the world because it's a good thing. And that's a frightening coalition.

Danny (82:45)

It is frightening. And one of the things that I've come to understand, which I think a lot of people, they like to, they get confused about this, is that this is like, we're only talking about the very tip of the iceberg, like the very top tier crust of the people that are making, making these decisions. Right. Like, I, there is, from my understanding, like a vast majority of the Jews in Israel don't believe in any of this and don't support Netanyahu whatsoever. The same way I don't support Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Like, I, I don't want to be associated with that, with that warmongering group of people. And, and it's the same way as all the people that were protesting Netanyahu Before October, October 7, don't want to be associated with all the crazy that he's doing right now. And I think that's how they win. And this goes back to that whole Pax Judaica thing, how it seems like it's almost on purpose, like, I can't go anywhere on the Internet without just seeing, like, blatant, like, low iq, Jew hate.

Bret Weinstein (83:54)

Yep.

Danny (83:55)

And it's, it seems like I don't think Netanyahu is a dumb guy by any stretch of the imagination. He's a lot of things, but he's certainly not dumb. It seems like he's been doing this on purpose. It seems like the Israeli government has been making the decision to. If they had two options, two less, one evil, one less evil. They're choosing the one that is the more evil because it's going to be. It's blatant, it's outright, and it's, it's makes people be like, what the fuck? You know? And it's. I, I think that the more and more I think about it and the more that I see happen in the media and in the news, like, for example, him getting in front of the camera saying, listen, class, we have to take over. Tick tock. And the more you see people like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz talking to Tucker Carlson and him just like, I'm flabbergasted by some of the stuff that I'm seeing that I was never aware of, that these people are saying, you, I'm with them. I, I suspect that that intention for them to stoke this worldwide anti Jew sentiment could potentially be real. And again, the theory is that the, the idea is to get the Diaspora to go back to Israel to make people afraid of, you know, if I went now, if I went out right now and asked 10 of my Jewish friends, each of them separately, hey, would you mind moving back to Israel? Nine of them would say, no, I'm not going back. Why would I want to go back there? Maybe one of them would say, okay, yeah, I don't mind going back. But if this did continue on the trajectory it's going, I could see in a few years, maybe five to 10 years, these people being like, yeah, I'd be okay with doing that because I don't feel safe in this society anymore.

Bret Weinstein (85:47)

Yeah, unfortunately, I'm feeling this heat myself. I'm watching the exact conditions that stoke real virulent anti Semitism, not just a little suspicion or prejudice, but, you know, violent feelings about Jews. I'm seeing that all over the place. And I know sometimes when I say things like that, people will say, I don't, I don't see it anywhere. I think you're imagining, it's like, whoa, you got to sit behind my computer for a few hours. You'll see it. It's all over the place. But I also have the sense that this is a feature, not a bug from the point of view of Netanyahu and the people he's aligned with. I did want to and they say every so often they say, well, don't move to Florida. Move back to Israel. That's the only place you're going to be safe. This kind of thing, like, whoa, who are you talking to? I'm an American. I get to decide for myself. Right? That's the great thing about this place, is that it doesn't matter that I'm Jewish. It shouldn't. What I do should matter. But I wanted to correct one thing. Netanyahu was not well liked in Israel prior to October 7th. You're absolutely right about this, and I would not say that he is well liked now. But there is a primordial tendency of populations to rally behind whatever leader they've got during war, which creates a perverse incentive to make sure that there's always war, enough to keep the population from throwing you out. So I will say I get regular pushback from people who, I think it's fair to say, like me in Israel, and they hear what I have to say. As an American who's pretty upset, I'm not upset with Israel. I'm upset with the Israeli regime, exactly as you said. If you hold me responsible for the Biden administration, I'm doing everything I can to get rid of these terrible people. They don't represent me. There's no the Americans. That's the opposite here, team. So I want the best for the people of Israel. I think Netanyahu represents the exact inverse of that. I think he's steering them into great danger, and I think they are rallying around him because of something biological. Because the instinct to question your leader as you are embattled is considered a kind of heresy. Right. I mean, and remember, you know, I remember this from just after 9 11. I remember a. That George W. Bush went from being a ridiculous political presence, you know, somebody who was almost laughable, you know, likable. Right. Seemed like a nice guy at the barbecue. But holy hell, how do we end up with this guy in charge? But after 9 11, there was this sort of coalescing around him, and all sorts of people who wouldn't have made common cause found it in their hearts to do so.

Danny (88:59)

Civil rating went through the roof.

Bret Weinstein (89:00)

Yeah. It just felt like, oh, my goodness. Right. I watched the towers collapse. 3,000Americans are dead. So what does. You know, I don't much like the way Netanyahu portrays the magnitude of October 7th relative to 9 11, but he's not wrong that in a tiny country, that event had this profound impact on the population in Israel. And so he now has A kind of support that I don't think otherwise he could conceivably have. And all the more so if Israel is in battle with Iran and Iranian missiles are landing in Tel Aviv or Haifa or wherever, it's going to result in the skepticism that you and I imagine should be there and remember being there having largely evaporated.

Danny (89:57)

Yeah, 100%. And I think. I think the Israelis should overthrow their government. I think that government needs to be overthrown. I did see a report or I heard from somebody, told me yesterday that Ben GVIR might have gotten killed by a rocket.

Bret Weinstein (90:11)

I don't know. I haven't seen that. I think it wasn't confirmed, but I don't know. But I do somehow, as I maybe here's the place to go. One of the things that I have worked on evolutionarily in the last decade is a model that I call lineage selection, which I believe has everything to do with understanding human history up until the present, but especially not in the West. So the model works like this, especially

Danny (90:49)

not in the West.

Bret Weinstein (90:50)

The west is the exception to lineage selection. Lineage selection, I would argue, covers all creatures throughout evolutionary history. It doesn't matter whether you're a plant or you're a monkey. It makes no difference. The basic idea is that if you think about what you've read or heard about evolution, right? We understand why you act in your own interest. It's obvious, right? That's how you get into the future. That's what evolution is about. We don't have too much trouble explaining why you might risk your own life to save your child from a burning building, right? In fact, if we're to be narrow about it, we can say, well, that that child has 50% of your genes. They are your ticket into the future. So your willingness to take a risk to save, that is a kind of selfishness, genetically speaking. If we zoom out, right, and, you know, we've known for, I don't know, six, seven decades that you could extend this logic to, you know, let's say, cousins, for example. In fact, the evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane once joked that he would gladly give his life for two brothers or eight cousins, hinting at the exact math that describes how related your first cousins are and your brothers. So anyway, that logic is uncontroversial. Every evolutionary biologist knows it. What is controversial is that that logic actually extends out even when we get into levels of relatedness for which there's no name, right? You and I have a degree of relatedness. We don't know what it Is. But the point is that level of relatedness, you and I might be very distantly related, but if you brought in, you know, a Somali, then the chances are you and I, if you were to draw a phylogeny, are on the same branch here and here, and the Somali is one branch down. Right. So the point is, in every conflict, you could draw the evolutionary phylogeny of the populations who are battling, and you could predict what the alliances are going to look like. So, for example, you know, you've got the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland. You can't get those guys into the same room for anything. Right?

Danny (93:10)

Right.

Bret Weinstein (93:10)

Except you can. Right. Immigration from Africa caused them to actually march together. Right. Why did they march together? Well, I would argue it's a straightforward prediction of lineage selection. So to make a long story short, history and prehistory, prehistory being before history was written down, but in history and prehistory, populations displaced each other. That was what they did. And that may sound petty and nasty, but the point is you either displace others or they displace you. And so history is overlapping patterns of displacement that are based on genetic relatedness. Again, that's controversial in evolutionary biology, but I believe it's straightforward, logically speaking.

Danny (94:02)

You're meaning similar genetics?

Bret Weinstein (94:04)

Yeah. You know, people team up based on how closely related they are between populations. When there's no enemy, they break apart. You have this constant factioning based on relatedness and displacement is the goal. Why? Because territory is effectively your ticket into the future. And evolution is about lodging your genes as far into the future as you can get them. So how are you going to get to the future? Well, if you've got a certain amount of territory and you can expand it, that's a good hedge against going extinct. Right. Bigger piece of territory can have more people who are related to you. So I would argue you can take all of the most grotesque events in history and understand them in this regard. Why did the Nazis go after the Jews? Well, you had a small population with a certain amount of resources, couldn't defend itself. And this was a way of providing what felt like growth to the German population by stealing the niche that was held by this diaspora Jewish population. Right. Very straightforward. But anyway, that process of lineage selection is supplanted by a different process in the west, where we agree in the US to not prioritize relatedness and instead to collaborate with each other because we're Americans and because there's stuff to do. Right. So that's the alternative. I would argue is a society based on reciprocity rather than based on relatedness. That's why this prototype has to be protected. Because frankly, a world based on relatedness, with nuclear weapons and AI surveillance and all of the rest isn't going to last. If we want humanity to survive, we have to have a system in which we sideline our instinct to go after each other based on who we're related to. And so anyway, I think this, unfortunately, if you look at Israel, Israel is on the one hand a modern state. Its head of state is, I think, a secular guy. I don't find any evidence that he's a believer. And Israel has one foot in the modern West. It's fully capable of being a high tech cosmopolitan society. On the other hand, it has one foot in the Old Testament. And my concern for years has been that Israel falls back into its Old Testament instincts and drags the world backwards into the Old Testament in a outbreak of lineage against lineage violence that is unconstrained in the Middle East. And unfortunately, the modern conflict looks exactly like this, right? You have a Jewish state partnered with a state state founded on Christian values, though it is not a Christian state. I want to be clear about that. Partnered in a battle against Shia Muslims. Now that battle has one unacknowledged nuclear state and is ostensibly about another state which we are told has nuclear ambitions. But nonetheless, if you look at the, what one interpretation says are the expansionist aims of Israel, that looks like lineage against lineage violence and displacement, as frankly does what took place in Gaza.

Danny (98:06)

So. Right. Because what I heard was that the Palestinians and the Israelis, the, the native Israelis are virtually identical genetically.

Bret Weinstein (98:17)

They are actually closely related. That's certainly true.

Danny (98:21)

Which is insane.

Bret Weinstein (98:22)

It is insane. And it, it raises, you know, their

Danny (98:26)

pro regime accounts spread false claim that Ben Gavir was killed in an Iranian airstrike.

Bret Weinstein (98:31)

Okay, yeah. All right, so it's not true.

Danny (98:34)

Not true.

Bret Weinstein (98:34)

All right, so to fight another day. And you do, I will say there is a question. You have Ashkenazi Jews from Europe who are much more distantly related to the Mizrahi Jews and the Sephardic Jews than the local Arab populations.

Danny (98:53)

Ashkenazi's, Russian Jews, Eastern European, like, okay, which ones are from Spain?

Bret Weinstein (99:01)

Those are Sephardic.

Danny (99:01)

Sephardic.

Bret Weinstein (99:02)

Okay. But anyway, there are questions about how this works. And you know, you find the same thing in Islam, right? You have African Muslims, you have Indonesian Muslims and you have Muslims in the Arab world. So you have these different factions and you have the confusing fact that they are to one extent or another united by belief structures. Right. So obviously Islam is a series of lineages united by basically belief in the Quran, likewise the Torah, but for Jews.

Danny (99:41)

But anyway, second biggest religion in the world, right?

Bret Weinstein (99:44)

Islam. Islam, yeah. At 2 billion people, Christianity being the largest, at 2.4 billion.

Danny (99:51)

And it's the second largest in America.

Bret Weinstein (99:53)

Right. Islam.

Danny (99:55)

Oh, number one is Christianity, number two is Islam.

Bret Weinstein (99:57)

I think in America. That makes sense. Yeah. So in any case, I'm concerned that basically an old evolutionary dynamic that results in a displace or be displaced mentality is reasserting itself and that what it is going to do is hobble and displace the West. Because the west is the alternative to that style of thinking.

Danny (100:22)

Yes. And simultaneously what it's going to do to the economy of the west because from what I understand, those, those Gulf countries are propping up the big AI bubble that is driving our economy right now because they're. The petrodollar relies on the oil that those companies make and their money primarily gets invested into our stock market and our AI. And a lot of people are calling this AI thing a big bubble.

Bret Weinstein (100:54)

Well, I mean, let's be clear about it, there's undoubtedly a whole lot of bubble there. Right. The companies that have large market capitalizations may not survive, they may implode. But just as the dot com bubble was simultaneously a bubble, obviously it popped. But it's not like, you know, the promise of the Internet fizzled. It's not like dot com didn't become an important phenomenon. It was every bit as important as people thought it was going to be. It was just hard to place your bets in that context. And I believe we are in exactly the same place. AI is incredibly capable and incredibly rapidly increasing in its capability. So is there a bubble? There's a lot of bubble. Is this thing even going to exceed our expectations of what it's capable of? Quite possibly. So those two things are true at the same time. But I will say the patterns in our economy, both absurd valuations of some corporations based on bubble dynamics are compounded by, it's hard to know how to say it delicately, a whole lot of fraud. We have some major corporations that are involved in jaw dropping levels of fraud, like Enron level stuff. Oh really? And this should give everyone pause because when those things become public knowledge, one of two things will happen. Either the market won't react because it's too automated now and maybe too much under control, which will tell us that none of the valuations in the market mean anything because something overrides Information about what the value should be. If you discover a fraud, it should cause the stocks in question to reprice. And if it doesn't, that says one terrible thing.

Danny (103:02)

Yes.

Bret Weinstein (103:02)

And if it does, the question is, well, how rampant is the fraud? How can you know if you discover it here and there? Is it the whole market?

Danny (103:12)

How deep is the rot?

Bret Weinstein (103:13)

How deep is the rot? And so I think that based on what I've seen, we are in very dangerous waters. And the bubble aspect is one part of it, the fraud aspect is another, and those things cascade out of the stock market. The danger to, let's say, the banks and therefore to average people, is substantial. And I would advise people to check out a book called the Great Taking.

Danny (103:46)

The Great what?

Bret Weinstein (103:47)

The Great Taking. Taking, yeah, by Webb. It is not a very long book. I read it in one sitting and I'm a dyslexic slow reader, so it's digestible. But it describes all sorts of mechanisms that we average folks are not aware of that actually create a jeopardy for us that we don't anticipate. So, for example, you may own your home, and like everybody else, you've got a mortgage. Maybe your mortgage is very manageable to you, and frankly, you maybe have enough in the bank that if you had to bail yourself out and pay off your mortgage, maybe you could figure out how to do it. But if you can't access the money in the bank, you can't pay off your loan. And if you can't pay off your loan over a long enough period of time, then the provisions of the contract under which you took the loan may allow your bank to repossess your property. So in the same way that people who have had their homes burned down in a major disaster have found themselves in territory they never imagined they would be in with respect to whether they'll be allowed to return or whether there's some other plan for their property, the idea that a collapse in our markets might lead to the repossessing of homes for people who had perfectly reasonable loans, that's conceivable. Also conceivable that that the FDIC protection that you have for the money in your bank account could be leveraged against you in the following sense. Imagine your bank goes belly up because the banks are rickety and the federal government shows up and says, don't worry, we've got your money, you're insured. We're going to give it back to you in the form of a central bank digital currency. It'll be just like regular money. You can spend it as you want.

Danny (105:51)

So.

Bret Weinstein (105:51)

As you were. Okay. But if suddenly we have a central bank digital currency thrust onto us, we just lost the ability to have free speech. Yes, because that money is programmable.

Danny (106:06)

Now we're China.

Bret Weinstein (106:07)

Yeah, now we're China. So I see the ricketiness in the economy and the marching of technocracy as two sides of the same coin. And again, I would have people look at the Great Taking because it describes things that have already happened in the Depression, things I didn't know about the fact that it became illegal to have gold.

Danny (106:30)

Someone told me about this.

Bret Weinstein (106:31)

Yeah, it's quite a frightening read.

Danny (106:33)

Maybe it was Katharine Fitz might have said this.

Bret Weinstein (106:35)

That's probably right. But anyway, it makes sense for us to, A, A, do what we can to protect ourselves from the ricketiness in the markets and B, to prepare ourselves that our crisis is an opportunity for Goliath to make moves that he might not get away with otherwise.

Danny (106:56)

Are you familiar with the Fourth Turning concept?

Bret Weinstein (106:59)

Yeah, more or less.

Danny (107:00)

I've heard people say that this is the fourth turning. It's like every 85 years. The first one was the American Revolution. Then was what, World War I or World War II, and now this Iran war could be like the, the final turning or whatever to recess civilization.

Bret Weinstein (107:16)

Well, it certainly does have a potential for finality that I don't think we've seen in our lifetimes. You know, I think there was, There were flashpoints during the Cold War that had that. That. Yeah, to them. But. Yeah. My concern here is that actually it's not that hard to imagine a scenario in which we go from an intense regional quagmire to a nuclear exchange.

Danny (107:52)

Yeah. There's been reports that Israel basically told the Trump administration, if you guys don't let us go in and do this war and you don't help us, we're going to send a nuke there.

Bret Weinstein (108:01)

Right.

Danny (108:01)

And like, that's just a mind bending. If that's real. Like we're gonna use the nukes we stole from you that are not declared under the IAEA treaty if you don't help us fight this war. Like what?

Bret Weinstein (108:14)

Well, frankly, whether or not that interpretation is correct, that there was an actual threat made, the simple fact that we have Israel behaving in a belligerent way, and according to Marco Rubio, leading us to act in a way that we wouldn't have, whether that was strictly about the timing or the launching of the attack in the first place, the idea that we have a small vulnerable state in a terrifying neighborhood with a nuke acting in a belligerent way stops me in my tracks because, I mean, I spent a lot of time a year ago thinking about this puzzle, and I don't think I ended up saying it into a camera. It was. Frankly, it gave me pause. But I think we needed to have a discussion back then about what it means that Israel has nuclear weapons. On the one hand, I see the vulnerability of Israel. I don't want it destroyed. And I know that those nuclear weapons will give its neighbors pause. But why? Because if Israel finds itself facing an existential threat, it's sure to use them. What else are they for? So to me, that puts a moral obligation on Israel and on us as Israel's ally to keep Israel out of trouble. In other words, if you. Just like this protester at the ice thing who was packing a Sig 321 in the chamber, it seems like that guy had an obligation not to get into an altercation with officers. Right. Because you've got a loaded weapon, as they say in gun circles. If you have a gun, then any fight you get into is a fight with a gun in it. Right. If Israel is a nuclear state, which it clearly is, any fight it gets into has that as a risk, especially if that fight might go badly, and Israel feels like this is its only mechanism to protect itself. So thought, you know, a year ago, I thought we should be having a discussion about the moral obligation to avoid conflict that comes with having a nuclear weapon. And I watch the Netanyahu regime doing exactly the opposite. Right. It's. It's picking fights. Yeah. And I think that should worry everyone on Earth.

Danny (111:04)

Hold that thought. I gotta take a pee real quick. We'll be right back. Yeah. We're covering a lot of good stuff.

Bret Weinstein (111:09)

Yeah, we sure are. I hope it doesn't get me killed. I actually do worry about it.

Danny (111:17)

What's that?

Bret Weinstein (111:18)

I actually do worry about it.

Danny (111:19)

Do you really?

Bret Weinstein (111:20)

Yep. I mean, you want to talk about that? Sure, I'd be willing to.

Danny (111:24)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What. What specifically has you worried about your safety?

Bret Weinstein (111:30)

Let's put it this way. We're up against some very powerful forces that have a very clear understanding of what they want to happen. And let's put it this way, I think people could hear me say that, and they probably would have the natural reaction of, come on, you're not that important. Right. They got better things to do. And I get that. But on the other hand, to have a Jewish talking about his concern about the Israeli regime, about the functioning of the US Government What I think is on behalf of the Israeli regime in a reckless adventure in the Middle east that we should have avoided. I think that that is pretty inconvenient because the way this has worked is people have been bullied into accepting this action because if they oppose anything in the neighborhood, they get accused of anti Semitism. And people. Of course there is lots of anti Semitism and people do not want to get lumped into a category with a bunch of people who really do hate Jews. And then of course, the typical move would be that, you know, if a Jew says, I'm not. I'm not down with this. This is. Seems very dangerous to me. It seems very bad for the United States and very dangerous for Israel, then, you know, the next move would be to accuse them of being self hating. But I'm not self hating. Pretty obviously not. What's more, I have a.

Danny (113:16)

It's very rational. You're calling out a government.

Bret Weinstein (113:19)

It. It's very rational. I'm somebody with expertise in complex systems and a certain experience thinking about historical events. And what's more, the story from 2017 says that I'm a guy who will stare down accusations about my character that aren't true and come out okay on the other side. So if your point is you want certain things to happen and that means that nothing can stand in their way, then what you don't want is an actual discussion in which people can formulate their own opinion and not be shouted down with accusations about bigotry. So I think there's bound to be some consternation in very powerful circles about my stepping out of line by saying these things. On the other hand, I think it's my patriotic duty to call it like I see it, and that's what I'm doing.

Danny (114:25)

When you say powerful circles, what do you mean specifically?

Bret Weinstein (114:29)

I mean, I don't know what that Epstein stuff was. It was about power. Yes. Those people were obviously perfectly comfortable with the destruction of innocent people. Right, right, right. If you're trafficking girls and young women, these people didn't do anything to ask for that those are innocent and you're okay with literally destroying them in order to wield more power. So something that is comfortable with that, what do you think it thinks about somebody who speaks inconveniently?

Danny (115:05)

Yeah, but you're such a public figure. You're so big. Like that would be. Don't you think that's like too obvious? You kind of like have achieved escape velocity already.

Bret Weinstein (115:13)

You would hope. Maybe I comfort myself with that thought. But then I Have this other thought that's so uncomfortable, which is. First of all, let me say I don't think Goliath kills. It's a last resort. Goliath does kill, but he doesn't want.

Danny (115:31)

They have easier ways of ruining your life.

Bret Weinstein (115:33)

Yeah, they have ways of ruining you, of capping your reach, of robbing you of your income, all those things. And I've faced many of those. But it will kill if it doesn't have a choice. And the thing about being a public figure is that there are two reasons that you might eliminate somebody from the chessboard. One is because you don't like what they're doing on the chessboard. And the other is to send a message to others who might think about doing the same thing. So, you know, I guess my hope is that. My hope is that I'm imagining that danger, that it's not real. If it is real, I hope that they will decide it would not be a good idea in light of, you know, all of the people, yourself included, who have big platforms, who would, you know, would look at a failure to investigate such a thing and end up talking about what its implications are. Yeah, sure. But I don't know.

Danny (116:43)

I think about this sometimes, but then, you know, obviously I'm not like, as a widely known public figure like yourself, but. But I do. You can't help but think about this stuff sometimes. And other people that are way bigger than me who talk about these crazy, divisive geopolitical conflicts all the time. But then I remind myself, Tucker Carl, still. Tucker Carlson, is still walking around and he seems fine, and he is like, at the tip of the spear when it comes to this stuff. And I don't know about any sort of personal stuff that he's dealt with that he maybe hasn't been public about or whatever he's been dealing with. But, I mean, that guy is going around kicking every fucking hornet's nest around the world. I don't know what drives him. I don't know if I could do that.

Bret Weinstein (117:30)

Yeah, I think, first of all, he has paid a very high price. Now he is so spectacularly, independently powerful and wealthy on the basis of all that he's done up to this point, that he can afford to be slandered. But I know that amongst people who are in my circle but have not been part of the battle over Covid, they haven't been through the wringer themselves. He is viewed as a lightweight lunatic with terrible perverse incentives. Now, I know him. That's not what I see at all in Fact, I don't think if you were to just say, okay, I'm going to give it a week, and I'm going to listen to what Tucker Carlson has to say, and then I'm going to reevaluate what I thought about him. If you did that, I think you would inevitably come away with a very different picture. But the useful thing, and I know because I've faced this attack so many times, the way they hurt you is they lodge. It's a sneaky trick. They lodge this idea in people's minds, which is that person is so crazy or so dumb or so corrupt that if you listen to them, them. And that makes sense to you, there's something wrong with you. Right, right, right. Nobody could be fooled by Tucker Carlson. Right. That's the idea. And so the point is, why is that sneaky? Because if you decide, hey, wait a minute, I'm not going to be bossed around. I'll make my own decision. And then you go and you start listening to Tucker and you hear, actually, that doesn't sound racist. That sounds reasonable. And, hey, that's a good point. Then you start to think, oh, God, am I one of those people who can't see it? Am I a sucker? Right, Right. So anyway, they wield this trick. I call it gaslighting by ricochet. The idea is they lodge. They launch an attack on somebody.

Danny (119:50)

Yes.

Bret Weinstein (119:50)

It doesn't fool them.

Danny (119:51)

So you don't want to associate yourself with them.

Bret Weinstein (119:53)

Yeah. It hits the person who's giving that person a chance. So I've seen this happen so many times. But the point is, is they have done a good job of pruning Tucker away from polite society. And is there enough leftover of other people for him to spend the rest of his career productively? Sure, there is, but let's just say it is not that they have not had an effect on how far his reach is. His reach is still vast, but it exists. Exists in one quadrant and not at all in another, where he is treated as somebody who's lost his mind, gone off the deep end, whatever your metaphor might be. So anyway. Yeah, but he is still alive. And that's good news.

Danny (120:38)

Yes. Yeah, you're right. And he's a lot of things, but he's certainly. I mean, he's terrifyingly smart. He's a very smart guy who's been in this world for. In this geopolitical world and understands different dynamics around the world better than probably anybody I've ever listened to.

Bret Weinstein (120:55)

Yeah. In fact, if you just notice the fact that he delivers these very long monologues with tremendous historical detail and insight, and he's not reading it off a teleprompter. Right. This is somebody who knows a lot about the way the world works and is able to deliver it logically. And I often look at. At that, and I'm going to take a lot of crap for saying this, but what I see is, you know, a really good college professor who ended up in a different career. Right. That's the person who can stand at the board and spend two hours elucidating some picture so you can understand what it is. That's an incredibly rare skill. And he does it night after night.

Danny (121:43)

And now I think it's just so crazy that, you know, he's being attacked by now more than ever by the very people that he was the biggest proponent of, of, you know, when. Before the election, you know, he was the. He was the main event at that Republican National Convention.

Bret Weinstein (121:57)

Right. No, it's. It's amazing. They've. They've turned on him. Yeah. And that tells you something about the particular bloodsport that is being played.

Danny (122:08)

Now, you guys, you had an interesting debate with him.

Bret Weinstein (122:11)

You.

Danny (122:11)

You guys, on your last appearance on his show, you guys debated evolution, and he said he made a comment on Rogan's podcast where he says, evolution, Evolution's fake, or something like this.

Bret Weinstein (122:21)

Yeah, he did.

Danny (122:23)

And so how did that. How did that ultimately turn out? Did you guys find any middle ground there?

Bret Weinstein (122:30)

I mean, look, this is all playing out absurdly because my field, evolutionary biology, is stuck. Most of the people in it don't realize it's stuck. And it's just like the rest of the academy. It's dysfunctional. Now, how it got dysfunctional, we could have an argument about that. I can't say that I know for sure, but I can say it's become feeble. And what I said on my last episode of Rogan was that I think there's a way to understand evolutionary dynamics that adds an element which greatly increases the power of Darwinian evolution. So I think guys like Tucker are listening to people like Stephen Meyer who are correctly identifying that the story the public has been given about how Darwinian natural selection works is not powerful enough to account for the creatures that we all see. Right. I believe the story that is in your bio 101 textbook is not complete. I don't think it's untrue, but it is not complete. And the field has been very reluctant to admit what it doesn't know because it thinks that opens the Door to creationists.

Danny (123:52)

Right. At the same time. At the same time, those people like to write off the religious people as quacks when it seems like the reality is God and religion seems to be like a fundamental puzzle to the human brain.

Bret Weinstein (124:04)

Oh, let's put it this way. The biggest error. Error of all, the one that is resulting in all of the missteps that are the product of paranoia about creationists, is the abuse of religious people by naive Darwinists. So, look, religious faith, religious belief stories that constrain what you're allowed to do on Earth are fascinating evolutionary puzzles. We don't treat them that way. Right. Richard Dawkins will literally tell you religion is a mind virus. He's telling you it is a pathology, that it is causing an organism that is otherwise well built to function to function poorly. Bullshit. This is a pattern deserving of explanation every bit as a wing or an eye or a leaf or anything else that we find in nature that has this elegant aspect to it. So to treat it as a virus, as a pathogen, is not to give it its due. Right. The right thing to do is to say, huh? That's a huge amount of effort that humans put into something that is not obvious why it would be productive. So the onus is on us to figure out in what way that works out for creatures who believe and apparently does not work out for creatures that don't or humans that don't. So in any case, that whole mess has caused evolutionary biologists to fail to find the ways in which the story that we tell about how evolution works is incomplete and that there are other aspects that enhance the power of that mechanism. Awesome. So I laid that out on Rogan. I'm not gonna run you through it. It's a pretty long explanation. But if people want to check it out, check out the most most recent Rogan podcast. And I think it's the first 20 minutes.

Danny (126:05)

Yeah, there's a great book also called the Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, where he. I'm not sure familiar if you're familiar with it, but he does a. It's an old, old book. But he. I think he was, like, friends with Thomas Jefferson, actually, where he basically makes the case that it's like. Like it's the gift of reason that we're able to discover God in the first place. Right. Like, because human beings have reason. That is why we can assume. Or we have to. We have to think of some sort of a creator that created, like, who was the first one? Like, I came from my dad. My dad Came from his dad. Eventually that has to like, where does it start? Right. So it's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a part of our psyche that has to be filled with something. And if, if used for good, it's a great, I mean it, it makes perfect sense. Why, you know, that has to be there. And it's, it is interesting, you know, how does that evolve? And I think you said it was adaptive or something. Religion is adaptive?

Bret Weinstein (127:01)

Oh, 100%. I mean not every, every word in every text. Sure. A long standing religion, a religion that's been around hundreds or thousands, thousands of years that restricts what you can do. Right. That's a cost. Evolutionarily speaking. If a book tells you who you're allowed to reproduce with and who you're not, that's interesting because evolution has a lot to do with reproduction. So you would think, oh, reproduce with whoever you can reproduce with. Nope. Book says no. Huh? Why would it say no? In what way do you win in the long term, evolutionarily speaking? If you agree to lose out in the short term based on what it says in this book. That's the mother of all puzzles when it comes to human behavior. Why would you restrict yourself from profiting? And the answer is, oh, in the long term, that's the only way to persist. If you are constantly reproducing in every way that you can, with every opportunity in front of you, you don't end up with a civilization. You can't have a civilization if that's the mode. So.

Danny (128:08)

Right.

Bret Weinstein (128:09)

It's a very important puzzle. And I am never endingly disappointed in my colleagues for failing to honor it. And for even worse, ridiculing believers as if they had a mind virus. That's just, that's nasty and completely unjustified and it is the result of illogic of evolutionary biologists that they would have arrived at that conclusion.

Danny (128:32)

Yeah, and it can, it's like a double edge. It's a, it's a, it's a, a, it's a weapon that can be, it can be used. Religion is something that can be used for good. And it's vast. I mean just, it's, it's used for good probably more than it's used for bad. But the problem is you just don't hear about the good stories, you only hear about the negative stories.

Bret Weinstein (128:49)

Well, you know, let's put it this way. What I've said is not a defense of it at a moral level. Obviously many traditions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam contain moral constraints that are highly desirable, differentially. So we can compare those traditions and we can say which level of constraint leads to the best society. And I would argue that one of the ways in which the Torah falls down is that it is a book built for lineage, against lineage violence. And that we are better off with with the update that is the New Testament, which tells us a different way to live in which we don't stop competing. The point is we stop competing with violence and we start competing in something that looks more like a marketplace. And it's still competition. There are winners and there are losers. But it's a vastly better way to live. It's safer, it's fairer, it's just simply superior according to all the values that we think we hold. And the other problem, which goes back to what you said a couple minutes ago, is that when that tendency to want to believe in something that enables you, that empowers you, that makes you and everyone you care about better off, when that thing is not met with a proper belief structure, it gets filled by something else. Right, so the woke revolution, that was not a religious phenomenon. That was something that was a cult. Right. That was something that took over that religiosity that is built into people and directed it at something that wasn't even true. Right. The fervor with which people are supporting Benjamin Netanyahu in his reckless nuclear tipped campaign in the Middle East. Some of the people supporting it are very religious and have their own beliefs about the Second Temple and the Third Temple and the Al Aqsa complex and all of that. And that's very frightening. But a lot of the people who are the most excited about this are secular. And it's almost as if they have come up with a kind of religious devotion to the PowerPoint presentation that told them that Iran, Iran was next. That phenomenon is quasi religious. And so this war, even though there's a whole lot of secularness involved in making it happen, it is in some ways an undeclared holy war.

Danny (131:31)

It is, but it doesn't feel like when you see the clips of people like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham talking about it, it doesn't feel like they actually believe this. Yeah, it's so weird. It's so weird hearing them speak because it's like I'm trying to analyze, like the words feel hollow to me. Oh, it doesn't feel like they believe what they're saying at all.

Bret Weinstein (131:55)

Yeah, I don't think they do. And frankly, I worry that Trump is the same way. In other Words. If you just sort of say, well, what? What behind the scenes that I can't see and I'm never going to see would explain what I do see on my screen or in my feed or whatever. And I agree with you. I hear these proclamations and it's like, yeah, okay, I get the words, but it doesn't feel like you want to be saying them right. Leverage would do this. Leverage would do it right, if there's leverage. And the point is, okay, it's an

Danny (132:30)

invisible leverage that we. That's undeclared, that we are called conspiracy theorists for trying to connect. We try to draw a line between the two. And it's like, oh, you're fucking crazy, right?

Bret Weinstein (132:41)

So just imagine that somewhere off camera before the interview ever starts, these guys have decided that they don't have any choice but to give it the most convincing portrayal that they can. They've made their peace with whatever it is, whether it's a threat against them, you know, the revelation of something they don't want out there, or it's an incentive, something they can't resist, that they're going to get up there in front of the camera and do the best they can. But these aren't actors. These aren't people who have trained to convince an audience that they are, that they mean it. And there's some part of them that is resentful of being forced to do anything. And so they get up there and they deliver as, you know, as good a version of it as they can. But it's not that hard if you're paying real close, close attention, to feel like there's just something unspoken here, something that calls their belief into question. Well, it's interesting that you see it. I feel the same thing when I watch this.

Danny (133:44)

Okay, let's talk about this. The sexual revolution idea. How did you come to this? What inspired this, this whole crazy theory that you've come up with? I wouldn't call it crazy. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Bret Weinstein (133:56)

You just did call it crazy. But that's her.

Danny (133:59)

Yeah, crazy in a good way.

Bret Weinstein (134:01)

So most people aren't gonna know what you're talking about. But let me put it to you this way. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. There was a certain mythology about how mating and dating, sex and romance, all that stuff worked. I took a trajectory that just happened to not. That didn't leave me in that world very long. Heather and I got together very early. We both had some experience outside, but we got together very early. And I would say that if I look back, I'm now 57 years old. If I look back on our life together, I now realize that the mythology that we were handed was totally wrong and causes you to do harm to yourself constantly until you figure it out. So I make lots of mistakes, but I'm very good at tracking the consequences of things and correcting my model. And my point is, if you start from almost anywhere, any model, but you're good at correcting it, you're good at detecting the signal that actually, that stuff's not so good.

Danny (135:23)

Good.

Bret Weinstein (135:23)

This stuff is good. And you track your way through history, you end up figuring out how stuff works. Right. So I would say I'm not any smarter than I was at 16. I'm probably a little less smart. Your brain just doesn't fire as quickly. But I'm way wiser because of all of that experience that teaches you how things actually work. So what I would say is I'm reflecting on the lessons of my life since I was 20ish when Heather and I got together through now. And I now think I understand how the thing works and where all the places are that somebody who picks up the mythology of the culture will tend to do themselves harm. I think it's gotten way worse. I think my children's generation, my kids are 19 and 21, that their generation has an even more backward view of these issues than my generation did. I'm Gen X. But anyway, it's led me to feel some obligation to pass on what I think I've learned, because I know that if I had known it, I would have behave very differently and that there would have been tremendous benefits. I'm virtually sure of that. Tremendous benefits to. In my life, to my marriage and all those things. So that's how. How I got here. Presumably you want me to say something about what it is, because that's all.

Danny (137:04)

Yeah. What is the mythology?

Bret Weinstein (137:06)

Well, the mythology, you know, it depends whether we're talking about the mythology of my era. It was something like, look, you're almost certain to sign up for a life partnership. There's a really good chance it's not gonna work, but it might. It's not gonna be fun. I mean, it will at first, but basically it's gonna be like another job. It's a kind of work and it's going to be constant and it's probably better than the alternative, but kind of sucks, and you're not really built for it. So you're going to be constantly struggling against your own biology and impulses in order to be good to your spouse. And here's what you should probably do. You should probably delay it as long as possible, right? Get all that stuff out of your system, have a good time. And then at some point, when that stuff isn't so exciting to you anymore, maybe now is the time that you should look around and you should figure out who is a pretty good match for you. And you're not going to find a soulmate, but you can find somebody who you can imagine spending the rest of your life with. And you do that and you have your kids and that's going to be painful and. And it's going to wreck your life. But that's kind of what the thing is. So good luck. That was the mythology, okay? It's all wrong. All of it. Yeah. I mean, it's all wrong. What I didn't know is that A, an excellent marriage is possible, B, that the process of creating an excellent marriage is a developmental process. It is not a matter of finding a match and proceeding from whatever you two people bring together. It's not that. It's a matter of growth. The two of you grow together, sure, they change you, you change them. And if you both have your eye on the prize, it ends up fantastic. And that actually it satisfies. I know this is going to sound weird, but completely. I didn't think that was possible. I had been told and I was dumb enough to believe that actually that was impossible. That it was going to be a constant struggle against your biology. That's just what it is. And the sooner you accept that, the less of a struggle. Little B. Right. That was the idea. But if I had known. So when Heather and I got together, so I got kicked out of my high school and into her high school. And I was shy to begin with. And I had also been at an all boys school for four years of high school. So I was behind my peers in terms of knowing what to do with girls. And Heather was just beyond stunning. And I fell in love with her very quickly, but I didn't have a shot. I didn't think I had a shot. We just became friends, right? And I didn't know that she had become interested in me. She knew I wasn't ready, but that she thought long term, actually this is a good bet. So I didn't know that that was in her mind. And I basically accepted a friendship with her and we became pretty close in high school. And then having gone off to college, we ended up getting together and have been together ever since. But the initial reaction when I. When Heather and I first got together, when we decided to give it a try, I was a little embarrassed at how early we had gotten together, because my. You know, when you hear that somebody was high school sweethearts, and that was not our situation. We were friends in high school, but when you hear somebody was high school sweethearts, you think, oh, that's nice. And you think, do you even. You chose before you knew, you know, so it's cool that that worked out. But. But isn't it a little sad and there's some part of it. Nope. What I didn't know was that the key thing that makes my relationship with Heather work is the fact that we spent all of that time together and we went on all of these adventures, and we faced the craziest stuff together. And so it turned us into companions that really work. Right. So the point is the instinct, logically speaking. Yeah. Delay it as long as possible. That way you don't have to keep a marriage going for an extra decade. Right? That's the. Logically speaking. That sounds right. It's not because you don't want to have to keep your marriage going. You want to actually deeply love the other person, deeply love and understand them so that you actually have the goods to make them happy, to address their problems and for them to address yours, and for you both to see what you really want is to actually just want the other person to be happy. I have a certain number of tools to just make her happy, and I should not be thinking in the back of my head if I make her happy. Maybe things go well tonight or something like that. The point is, you just want this person to be happy the same way you want your kids to be happy. If you get to that relationship, it works. And it's not a struggle, and it's not torture. And none of the things that I was warned about were worth worrying about if somebody had just told me, hey, it's a developmental process, right? You want to spend the time when you're young with that person so that you aren't. So that you are as compatible, as complementary as you can be. Right. Yin yang. There's a reason for that symbol. It's that. That.

Danny (143:24)

And you're saying in today's day and age, this is almost impossible, or it's not happening as much anymore.

Bret Weinstein (143:30)

It's been poisoned. It's been poisoned. We've had a new level of toxic mythology. Displace. The level of mythology that I just described is quaint compared to the current one. Right? The current one. You have A you went through the woke revolution, you went through the Me Too movement. And as I recall, the MeToo movement, it portrayed normal masculinity as toxic. It portrayed men as basically monstrous. The good ones keep their monstrousness under control, but that the basic nature of men is sexually predatory. And the problem is that with the combination of novel factors in the modern environment, like porn, that has been driven by market forces in the direction of the extreme, right, in the direction of fetishes and taboos and violence, that's what's on the porn sites. And the problem is a human being does not come wired with a sexual program. It has a prototype. But that a normal human being, a thousand years ago, before there was technology intervening, a normal human being would get a certain amount of narrative from religious texts, from stories told in family or in your congregation or whatever, and then they would observe a certain amount about people romantically involved with each other. And they wouldn't be able to observe everything. You don't observe what's going on in other people's bedrooms, though maybe you get a hint of it every now and again. You hear something or whatever. So the point is, a human being is programmed to come to understand romance and sex from observation and deduction. What happens when you load up the channel with a consumer product, porn, that is designed to get your attention and keep it by pushing your sexual instincts into the extreme? The answer is it affects the development of the people who are consuming this stuff. Yeah. And it's really awful. But what it does, what it means is that as young people are discovering each other, a woman takes a guy home. If he's been watching porn, then he has an idea about what sex is supposed to be like. That leans towards the extreme, towards the violent, towards the taboo. And that validates the Me Too story. Right. The discovery is that the secret desires of this person are, I don't know, pretty disgusting. Right. So, so now she thinks, oh, that story is actually. Right. So my claim is women have gotten the ick for men. They don't like men because they think they've discovered a fundamental truth about what men are. And the truth isn't a fundamental one, it's porn driven. Right. Well, men have also got the ick for women because men find women in this context self interested and unwilling to establish a partnership worth having. It seems kind of conniving, right? Like there's always an angle. Right. Like there are superficial parameters that women have on a list of deal breakers. Right. A guy's got to be six feet, really. That's dumb, right? I'm not saying you shouldn't want a guy who's 6ft feet. That's fine, have your preferences. But the way this is supposed to work, especially on the female side, as women are looking at men, they should have a list of characteristics that contribute to a good mate. Right? A long list. Sense of humor, insight, influence over other people that allows you to create opportunity where there was none. Instinct towards being protective to provide. All of these things are important characteristics. Maybe being 6ft is on that list. But the point is nobody gets everything they want on that list. And the real question is, well, what would you trade the six footness of somebody for? Would you trade it for their ability to make financial security? Right, exactly right. So anyway, the point is, and men have the ick for women, women have the ick for men. And it is resulting in something that actually has a primordial an evolutionary history, which is the following thing. Women have traditionally one reproductive strategy. The nature of being a mammal is that mothers are committed to high investment in offspring. They can't help it because they gestate them internally. Men have two reproductive strategies. One of them involves investing in their mates and their mates offspring. And in that mode they are not the same as women, but they are symmetrically invested.

Danny (148:58)

Yes.

Bret Weinstein (148:58)

Okay, but men have another mode that works which is so. And go. Right. You engage in reproductive behavior with somebody where you have no intent to invest in them or their offspring.

Danny (149:10)

It's like the Florida panther. The Florida panther is the same way. They don't. They don't. They. They basically get the, the female panther pregnant and the female takes care of the kids, raises them all the way, and then the male goes and finds another woman, another female somewhere else.

Bret Weinstein (149:22)

Most mammals are like that. Humans are not inherently like that. In fact, it's a very rare strategy. Monogamy isn't as ubiquitous as it might be. But the idea of males fathering offspring and walking away is largely frustrated by females unwillingness to participate. Human babies are too expensive to be raised by an individual. It can be done, but the quality of the offspring that is raised by an individual strongly tends to be lower because a human baby is too labor intensive. Right. So women traditionally guard sex and won't engage in reproductive behavior with somebody who doesn't show strong signs of being ready to commit. Okay, so the point is the strategy in which males invest in females and their offspring, and females of course, invest in their offspring, that is a collaborative strategy, right? That is the mindset that makes marriage work collaborative, whether or not you're going to have kids. You want your relationship to be one in which you're both trying to make it better, and then it does end up better. Right? Because together you have that power. The relationship in which men are trying are behaving in a way that if an ancestor behaved that way, would be impregnating people and walking away. That is predatory, Right. I'm going to steal your labor for the next 18 years by impregnating you during the course of one night. Right. That is a predatory or parasitic strategy. And women who are not wired for that strategy are now culturally persuaded to engage in it anyway. Right. It makes perfect sense to go to the bar and take somebody home them and walk away. Okay? So now the point is, okay, you

Danny (151:23)

got these drugs that they can take, so they're infertile and they. Or they. The birth control stuff.

Bret Weinstein (151:27)

Totally. So the stakes are lower because they're not gonna end up walking away from it with a baby. So it feels like, oh, this is entertainment or something. It's recreation.

Danny (151:34)

Sure.

Bret Weinstein (151:35)

Okay, so the point is, if both men and women are now just looking to get lucky, right? And they're not in it for some long term thing, they're both acting in this predatory way. Right. Women are aping men who are acting in a predatory way that they have built into them as one of their strategies. And the point is, oh, what do you think would happen if you had an entire culture in which almost everybody who passes through youth goes through a phase of just trying to parasitize the other sex? Well, the point is, you become unsympathetic to each other. You get the ick. And that's what's happened. Men and women have the ick for each other and that is a disaster for civilization. Right. These people should be creating partnerships. And the benefit to them if they did it, if they knew it was possible, if they didn't think that somebody talking like I am talking was spreading fairy tales that aren't true, if they really believed it. And the answer is, oh, you're choosing what your future is going to look like. You're choosing how happy you're going to be at 57. If you knew that, you'd take it a lot more seriously because you have a hell of a lot of power over it. But the problem is it's very hard for an individual. Even if somebody listening to this right now is like, oh my God, that sounds right. What are they going to do? Right. It's very hard for an individual to opt out of the mating and dating culture of youth, it's. It catches everybody. So I think that's tragic. You know, I'm very concerned about my own kids in this regard.

Danny (153:15)

I had this woman on named Melissa Elardo who's a. She's an evolutionary expert who. She actually did a study where she studied these, these c. Nomad people in Indonesia. And he. She found out that they're free divers and they're like this little like, like segmented culture in Indonesia. The seafaring group of people, and they free dive and they catch fish and stuff like that and they spear them.

Bret Weinstein (153:44)

They spend a ton of time underwater.

Danny (153:46)

All their time they spend in the water. They have insane breath holding abilities and they're like. She thinks that they're. They're evolving. She did this thing where they, she measured their spleens and they have like abnormally large spleens. So she's like, she's came to the conclusion that they're like evolving in real time. And she. You can see it. And she was explaining to me that there's this phenomena with human beings where there was this study done. It was called the, the dirty T shirt study, where they gave women the T shirts, the sweaty T shirts of men and let them smell the T shirts and they would rate from 1 to 10 how attracted they were based on the scent.

Bret Weinstein (154:24)

Yep.

Danny (154:25)

And there's like this idea that like, human beings should be able to come into contact with each other because there is these pheromones that the women can detect from the men that is somehow connected to our, Our immune systems.

Bret Weinstein (154:39)

Oh, yeah.

Danny (154:40)

So like, the scent is like the female's immune system where it lacks the male's immune system, will fill in the gaps for when they reproduce. They'll create strong humans.

Bret Weinstein (154:50)

Yeah, I've.

Danny (154:51)

And how does that get fucked up when you're literally meeting people on like, dating apps.

Bret Weinstein (154:56)

Dating apps where you can't smell them and they've got some filter that adjusts what they look like. I have been wondering, for God since grad school, since the 90s, whether or not if we stopped wearing deodorant, whether the divorce rate would drop because people would make better choices about who to make with. And I don't know the answer to that. But the point is, yes, there's clearly something going on where the body, you know, to say that you have chemistry with somebody. We have no idea how literal that might be, like literal chemistry. And you'd be a fool to ignore that stuff. We don't even know what problems it is that biology is. Solving by doing so. We do know that the immune system system is involved, but we don't know what the implications are with respect to how functional you end up. And, you know, and we're distorting all of the. All of the signals.

Danny (155:50)

Right. I think a huge part of what you're saying too, has to do with the fact that we value the lives of children more now than we did in the past. You know, in antiquity, the Greeks were having orgies all the time.

Bret Weinstein (156:02)

Yeah. It's a good question as to why or in what way the obvious consequences of this were addressed. And maybe that is known and I don't know it, but there are these anomalous circumstances in history that I think over inform what people imagine normal sexuality is. And anyway, it's unfortunate.

Danny (156:25)

Yeah. And you see, you know, you see people that are, I think, a great example of this going. This goes back to Tucker again. He did that debate, or not a debate. He did that interview with that guy, Nick Fuentes. And the guy, Nick Fuentes is like, I've never had a girlfriend. I'm still a virgin. I don't like women. I. And he had this very, you know, misogynistic, for lack of a better term, view of the opposite sex. And you could tell he had never had a meaningful experience with a. With the woman.

Bret Weinstein (156:58)

And.

Danny (156:58)

And you wonder how much that warped his Persona and his view of the world. And how when you're only surrounded by the same sex or people that venerate you or think that you are like this, you are the king, you are, you can do no wrong. What that does. I mean, I. I feel like it just unravels people, you know, when you're. When you don't have that. That pushback of a female in your life to challenge you and to humble you.

Bret Weinstein (157:31)

Well, I would say it's two things. There's the lack of somebody to school you female that you care about. And you have to start figuring out, how do they see the world and why do they see me the way they do and all of that. Okay, that's one side. But at the same time, you have women behaving in a repellent way, public. And so the point is, it's actually the mirror image of what I was describing where a woman takes a guy home and finds out that he actually has, you know, he wants to choke her or hit her or whatever. Right. A guy who hasn't had the experience of having to navigate a relationship with a woman that he deeply cares about is seeing all of these, you know, publicly slutty displays that just frankly, aren't that appealing feeling. Right. And so it sort of validates his worst fears about what women are, which are not true. Right, Right. Yes, some women are that way, but it's not the truth of womanness. Right. Any more than sexual violence is the truth of maleness. Right. These are failure modes, and those failure modes have become ubiquitous, and it's not going to do good things for civilization, and it certainly is. Isn't fertile ground in which healthy children can be raised. Right.

Danny (158:54)

How do we fix it, Brett?

Bret Weinstein (158:56)

Well, that's easy. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the only thing you can do is force this stuff to consciousness. Right. We collectively have to figure out what to do about it, but we have to understand how far off track we are. Actually, I sent a text to my wife last night after walking at sunset down your beautiful beach, and I was looking around at this quintessentially American crowd,

Danny (159:34)

and it's spring break, too.

Bret Weinstein (159:35)

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Danny (159:36)

Yeah.

Bret Weinstein (159:37)

So you had, you know, black folks and white folks and South Asian folks. The melting pot was on the beach, I'm telling you, it was. And you had, you know, the girls doing their Instagram thing, trying to get it look just right in front of the sunset. And you had the, you know, the moms telling the dads, hey, go watch the kid in the water in the inflatable thing. Yeah, the whole thing. Anyway, there was something actually delightful about it. It just felt. Felt like what I remember this country is like. Right. It was just nice. At the same time, I had the feeling that I often have if I'm at the airport and watching a huge number of people flow by, just so I can get a sort of statistical sense of how we're doing. Right. And I just think we are not well. Right. Look at these people. These do not look like wild animals. Right. Wild animals look well because they have to. Right. Americans are fat and poisoned, and they don't get enough sun, and it's not good. But anyway, the text I sent to my wife last night, looking at the scene, feeling, on the one hand, nostalgic for what it suggested, what I remember about what it was like to just be an American when we didn't all hate each other so much. And looking at the dysfunction was, you know, these people are broken. They just are. But they're a generation and a half from being way better. If we just stop poisoning their bodies and their minds, if we stopped lying to them about how to be and we stopped giving them food, that isn't really food. Right. This level of dysfunction actually can be corrected, but you've got to stop doing the harm. Harm. Right. You just have to. I mean, this is kind of the Maha message.

Danny (161:34)

Yes.

Bret Weinstein (161:34)

We're poisoning ourselves. And so anyway, on the one hand, yeah, I'm pretty down about where we are. On the other hand, all we got to do is stop doing the harm to ourselves and start going in the right direction. And this is. I don't know, it's kind of why I switched careers from being a working professor to being a podcast or an author, is that I actually think the right first step is just to as well as you can to wake people up to what they're doing to themselves so that they can just start choosing to go in a different direction. Because as bad off as we are, we're not that close. We're not that far from a trajectory that actually is. Okay. So anyway, I hope that people will get that. You know, on the one hand, I know that my view is pretty dark, and it's pretty dark because I'm an observer and a careful thinker about the way things are. We've got some very serious problems. On the other hand, I'm not depressed. I'm not without hope. I actually feel that this is fixable. And that's, you know, if I didn't think it was fixable, I wouldn't be bothering. Right. I would just go and I would enjoy my life and I would, you know, hold my kids tight and, you know, I'd think, well, I wish there was something we could have done. That's not what I feel. There is something we can do, and it involves understanding what we're doing to ourselves. Right. That's. That's definitely step one.

Danny (163:07)

I couldn't agree more. A great way to end this on a high note. Thank you again for doing this, man. This has been amazing. And tell people. What are the best ways for people to find you online?

Bret Weinstein (163:18)

Yes, you can find Heather and me at the Dark Horse podcast. We do a live stream every or almost every Wednesday. I also do discussions with people several times a month. You can find me on X. Bret Weinstein. Brett has one T. There is a Brett with two T's, and he gets a lot of my. My mail and my.

Danny (163:41)

That's why you don't pop up when I type in. In with two T's. I was wondering. I was typing in B, R, A T. I'm like, he's not popping up. What's going on here?

Bret Weinstein (163:47)

It's a conspiracy entirely staffed by the guy with two T's. You can read Heather and my book, A Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century, which is written. It's similar content to what we've been talking about here. It's written for a lay audience, and if you don't want to. To read it, Heather and I actually read the book for the audiobook, and people have really liked the audiobook, so you can read that as you're driving.

Danny (164:19)

Fantastic.

Bret Weinstein (164:19)

Without crashing your car.

Danny (164:21)

Amazing. Cool. We'll link all that stuff below. Man. Thank you again.

Bret Weinstein (164:24)

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Danny (164:26)

All right, good night, everybody.