Ep 347 | It’s Time for a Libertarianism 2.0 | Guest: Bret Weinstein

Summary

Podcast Summary: Kibbe on Liberty – Ep 347 | “It’s Time for a Libertarianism 2.0”

Host: Matt Kibbe
Guest: Bret Weinstein
Release Date: August 27, 2025
Recorded at: Freedom Fest

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Overview:

Matt Kibbe hosts evolutionary biologist and public intellectual Bret Weinstein to explore “Libertarianism 2.0,” drawing parallels between evolutionary biology and the principles of spontaneous order and self-organization in society. The conversation covers the failures and opportunities within the current libertarian movement, critiques of both government and governance, and asks what it will take to build a larger, more effective libertarian coalition—especially as disaffected progressives join the fold.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights:

1. Defining "Libertarianism 2.0" & The Evolving Coalition

• Ex-progressives and New Allies:

  • Kibbe observes a trend where disillusioned progressives, like RFK Jr. and Nicole Shanahan, migrate toward libertarian thought because their political “team” has become authoritarian rather than genuinely progressive ([02:25]).

  • Weinstein calls himself a “progressive” but not in the current political sense, emphasizing that progress is only justified when absolutely necessary due to the risk of unintended consequences when intervening in complex systems ([02:57]).

    "Progressive change is terrifying if you understand the danger of intervening in a complex system and suffering the unintended consequences." – Bret Weinstein [03:00]

• Liberty as Governance Principle:

  • Weinstein’s intellectual evolution: he once dismissed libertarianism as absurd but now sees liberty as the “most central governance principle,” arguing that maximizing liberty integrates all other governance values ([03:49]).

    "Libertarians have actually found the most central governance principle... liberty is in fact a measure of the quality of a system of governance." – Bret Weinstein [03:54]

2. The Biology of Self-Regulation & Spontaneous Order

• Hayekian Parallels:
  • Kibbe explains how Hayek critiques central planning and champions society’s self-organizing capacity: knowledge is “created through the discovery of solutions in real time” by free people ([06:01]).
• Systems Analogies:

  • Weinstein uses biological metaphors: effective governance should be as “light-handed as possible” like the body’s internal regulation, which doesn’t feel oppressive because it functions in the organism’s interest ([08:38]).

    “A body is actually beautifully regulated... regulated in a way that liberates us...” – Bret Weinstein [09:16]

3. Governance vs. Government—Scale and Structure

• Small-Scale Societies:
  • Early human societies operated without formal government but relied on self-organizing governance; as communities grew, more formal, sometimes coercive structures became necessary ([12:37]).
• Authority Based on Merit:

  • Leadership and arbitration should derive from earned trust and demonstrated character, rather than titles or formal appointments ([15:53]).

    “You have no idea whether [leaders are] worthy of that trust until they've been exposed to a profound test...” – Bret Weinstein [15:53]

4. Stress-Tests, Crisis, and Integrity

• The COVID-19 "Painful Upgrade":
  • Both note that crises like COVID-19 revealed who could withstand social pressure and stay true to principles. Many institutions and intellectuals failed this test ([16:41]).
• Entrepreneurial & Scientific Parallels:

  • The disruptive, risk-taking entrepreneur is compared to the dissenting scientist—both work in conditions of radical uncertainty, challenge consensus, and advance society with new insights ([18:46], [20:49]).

    “The ability to be unpersuaded by the consensus is a very important trait of character and it's very rare.” – Bret Weinstein [22:55]

5. Corruption of Science: Governance, Trust, and Power

• Governmental Distortion:

  • Funding structures and political interference have corrupted the scientific process—mandating orthodoxy rather than fostering true consensus ([25:57]).
  • Weinstein draws a critical distinction:

    “There’s a consensus of doctors... Did it mean that there was a lot of truth in it? No, it means... you had everybody who disagreed thrown out, and all the people who remained were either very confused, cowardly, or both. That's not a consensus you want to pay attention to.” [28:37]

• Fragility of Science:

  • Science “is incredibly powerful but incredibly fragile,” demanding rigorous formalism and honesty from its practitioners ([31:43]).

    "The requirements are not very many for something to be scientific, but they have to be adhered to with near perfect formality..." – Bret Weinstein [31:43]

6. Social Division, Politics, and Coalitional Growth

• Team Politics Destroys Social Trust:

  • The rhetoric of moral exclusion—refusing to associate with those on the “wrong” side—has deeply damaged political and social discourse ([36:29]).

    "The political rhetoric has become such that those who disagree with you are assumed to be morally defective..." – Bret Weinstein [34:57]

• Coalition Building & Movement Growth:

  • Kibbe expresses optimism: A new libertarian coalition is forming, uniting traditionalists, newcomers, and the “liberty curious” ([38:18]).

  • Weinstein wonders whether the Libertarian Party could replace one of the two major parties, given the Democratic Party’s loss of credibility in his view ([39:36], [40:19]).

  • Both hosts acknowledge that ideological movements tend to be exclusionary for internal reasons, but hope the necessary “growing pains” lead to genuine diversity and strength ([41:19], [42:59]).

    "Accomplishing something... unfortunately, forces us into the political swamp. But there's nothing riding on this but the fate of Western civilization." – Bret Weinstein [43:29]

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Notable Quotes by Segment

• On Progressive Change and Liberty (03:00):
  “Progressive change is terrifying if you understand the danger of intervening in a complex system and suffering the unintended consequences.” – Bret Weinstein

• On the Value of Liberty (03:54):
  “Libertarians have actually found the most central governance principle of all, which is that governance should seek to maximize liberty… Liberty is itself integrative.”

• On Governance vs. Government (12:37):
  “I agree with you. Governance is a prerequisite to the functioning of humans. Government is a different matter…” – Bret Weinstein

• On Trust and Leadership (15:53):
  “You have no idea whether they're worthy of that trust until they've been exposed to a profound test…” – Bret Weinstein

• On Social Division (34:57):
  “The political rhetoric has become such that those who disagree with you are assumed to be morally defective…”

• On Coalition Growth (43:29):
  “There's nothing riding on this but the fate of Western civilization. So if the Libertarian Party is capable of reshaping itself… wow. Is that the right thing to do?” – Bret Weinstein

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Episode setup & Libertarianism 2.0 concept – [01:32]
• Weinstein on progressive roots & dangers of interventionism – [02:57]
• Weinstein’s evolution on libertarianism – [03:49]
• Hayek, spontaneous order, & knowledge creation – [06:01]
• Analogies: biology, self-regulation, and governance – [08:38]
• Scale, authority, and trust in leadership – [12:37], [15:53]
• COVID, painful upgrades, and the stress-test of principles – [16:41], [17:42]
• Entrepreneurs, dissenters, and scientific process – [18:46], [20:49], [22:55]
• Corruption of science, consensus by coercion – [25:57], [28:37], [31:43]
• Social division, trust, and the fate of coalitions – [34:57], [36:29]
• Libertarian coalition & movement-building challenges – [38:18], [39:36], [41:19], [42:59]
• Closing thoughts and self-promotion – [44:38]

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Memorable Moments

• Weinstein’s honesty about his change of heart on libertarianism, and his hope for an upgraded, more inclusive movement.
• Discussion of authority in science and leadership hinging on proven character, especially under pressure.
• Analogies connecting biological self-regulation to social and political self-organization—a recurring metaphor for healthy governance.
• The “painful upgrade” (Weinstein’s phrase) as a cathartic, necessary culling in one’s social and professional circles prompted by crisis.
• The call for separating the funding or approval of science from both government and private special interests to avoid systemic bias.
• A hopeful, yet sobering, final assessment: “Nothing riding on this but the fate of Western civilization and maybe the planet itself.” – [44:25]

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Summary Conclusion

This episode is a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the next phase of libertarianism—a moment when people from across the ideological spectrum are seeking more effective, less coercive, and more robust systems of governance in an era of crisis and polarization. Through the lens of evolutionary biology, scientific integrity, and the lessons of recent turmoil, Kibbe and Weinstein chart a path toward a broader, more resilient libertarian movement grounded in humility, trust, earned authority, and a fierce commitment to liberty as the guiding principle of a healthy society.

Transcript

[Matt Kibbe]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm live at Freedom Fest talking to Bret Weinstein about Libertarianism 2.0 and the similarities between evolutionary biology, his field of choice, and social evolution and spontaneous order. The way that libertarians and Austrians think about this and how we might build a more powerful movement together, it's a really great conversation. Check it out.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty.

[Matt Kibbe]

Hey, Brett, how's it going?

[Bret Weinstein]

It's going all right.

[Matt Kibbe]

It's going all right.

[Bret Weinstein]

How are you doing?

[Matt Kibbe]

You were just talking about this being your fourth thing today, and I think this is my fourth show today. And I think it's sort of ironic that someone that doesn't particularly like to talk, I'm speaking of myself, is a professional talker for a living.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yep. Life is throwing us curve balls.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

So we'll see what happens because eventually I run out of words on a 24 hour rolling basis.

[Unidentified Participant]

Really?

[Bret Weinstein]

That's frightening.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

So I might just.

[Bret Weinstein]

It could happen.

[Matt Kibbe]

Lose my track and all that. You and I and some of our friends are going to be on a main stage panel tomorrow called Libertarianism 2.0. And that is a phrase that I stole from you when we were hanging out at a brownstone retreat and you had just given a strategic overview, kind of big vision talk, drawing very strongly on your roots in evolutionary biology. And I came up to you afterwards and introduced myself and I'm like, you know, you sound a lot like Friedrich Hayek and you said, I haven't. People keep telling me that, but I haven't, I haven't listened to it. But to frame the conversation, I want to have, I want to pick your brain about what this emerging new libertarian coalition is looking like. And a lot of them, like yourself, are, I'll say, red pilled recovering progressives who realize that their team was not progressive at all. It was authoritarian. But. But RFK Jr absolutely fits into this category. Nicole Shanahan. I could go on and on and on. And to me, those are some of the most interesting minds that can help rebrand, reshape, and maybe even re strategize what does it mean to be a libertarian and how can we be effective as libertarians.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, let me just put that in perspective for a moment. I still think of myself as a progressive. That doesn't mean that I align with anybody who's using that label. In fact, I'm frightened by what it is that progressives generally want these days. And as a progressive, my feeling is progressive change is terrifying. If you understand the danger of intervening in a complex system and suffering the unintended consequences. You realize that progress is something that you should pursue only when you don't have another choice. But that's exactly where I think we are. I think we cannot conserve our way out of our current crisis. We have to build a new system, but we have to be very careful because the most likely thing, in fact it's certain that if we build something new, there will be many unintended consequences and they can be quite terrible.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Bret Weinstein]

So I will also just say up front that as a young man I was quite convinced that libertarianism itself was absurd. And I've come to realize as an older, wiser person that I was wrong about this, that libertarians have actually found the most central governance principle of all, which is that governance should seek to maximize liberty, that liberty is in fact a measure of the quality of a system of governance. And that although it is true that you cannot reasonably maximize any single value, if you try to maximize something like fairness, you end up with something like communism, which is a despicable dystopian outcome. You can maximize liberty because liberty is itself integrative, that in order to be free you have to have solved all of the other issues in governance. So when you say maximizing liberty, what you're effectively arguing for is something that balances all of the trade offs and tensions between the other values. So I now consider myself certainly a smaller libertarian in the sense that I think our objective collectively should be to maximize individual liberty. As to whether or not I'm a large L libertarian, that's going to require some work, because I think libertarianism as it is conceptualized, and of course libertarians are by their nature not all in agreement about what it means, but the general scheme I don't think is yet up to the job of actually plotting a course that maximizes liberty, which is what I would hope that we would do. So I'm hoping to see libertarians upgrade their model of good governance so that maximizing liberty is something that I can join them in trying to pursue.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I mean, I just listened to your. And by the way, I'm talking about smaller libertarianism, I'm talking about the values of. And the way that we understand society to be in large part self organizing, that free people come together and because they live in a radically uncertain future, they solve problems and they succeed and they fail. And through that process, and this is Hayek's entire critique of central planning, through that process, knowledge is not only conveyed, but created through the discovery of solutions in real time. And that System is very value laden but it's also a very practical understanding of. This is why we have civil society. It wasn't necessarily mandated from the top down. It was people figuring out if we don't hurt people and don't take their stuff, we're going to have more freedom and more prosperity and more happiness. So I don't know, like when you say big L, if you're talking about the party, we'll just put that aside for a minute because I'm politically agnostic. I don't. Parties are empty vessels.

[Bret Weinstein]

Parties are necessary evils.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yes, yes.

[Matt Kibbe]

And that'll be a different show that we'll talk about but in a very simple way.

[Unidentified Participant]

Way.

[Matt Kibbe]

I 100% agree with you. But I just listened to your conversation with Michael Malice and it's fascinating where you guys can connect and disconnect on this question of. Ultimately the question is do we use violence and coercion to organize society, which is government by definition, government is violence or do we use coercion, cooperation and trade and mutual respect. And in my world I want to get as close to cooperation as possible. And it's, it's a continuum. I'm not naive enough to think that we could have anarchy tomorrow.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yep.

[Matt Kibbe]

But I definitely know that we have too much violence and coercion in, in society today. So I, I want to move towards that. And if we get to the point where we're 98% cooperation, you better believe I'm going to be an anarchist because I want to fix that last 2%. But to me it's like I don't spend all my time debating like what's the perfect end goal. Because I don't think it's an end goal, I think it's a process.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I agree with that. I think we should get as close to a coercion free system as we can get. I don't think you can have a system that's perfectly free of coercion. But I would like it to be as light handed as possible. And there's also a hint in what you say there that I think points to the correct dimension of the problem, which is we are talking about building an analog to a biological system system, something that self regulates without the need for top down authority. Again, I think probably some top down authority is going to be required even if we accomplish the goal as well as we can. But I would point out that a body like a physical biological body is actually beautifully regulated. It is regulated in, in a way that liberates us and where we do not regard the regulation of, let's say, our temperature as tyrannical. It's not an imposition, right? It's a function. And you know, if our temperature was not correctly regulated, you get more than a few degrees away from our normal body temperature and our enzymes begin to malfunction and, and we're literally sick. So the fact that we don't detect all of the modulation that is causing our temperature to be well regulated, causing the PH of our blood to be well regulated, causing us to coordinate our steps as we go down the stairway, all of that doesn't feel like tyranny because it's all happening in our interest. And I think governance has to be be like this as light handed as possible so that you don't even detect the coercion because it's not necessary. It is functioning in your interest to the extent that it is functioning at all.

[Matt Kibbe]

And this is why I mentioned Hayek to you, because I think there's an important distinction between government and governance. And to me, governance in the Hayekian sense is the rules and institutions that we develop together to make sure that the body functions. And in this case the body is not just individuals, but the community around that. And when I think Libertarian 2.0 and I think of people coming over from a more progressive background, I think about perhaps the failures of, of libertarians to emphasize the second half of the coin. The first half is my ownership of myself. I'm an individual. I have a right to think and act for myself as long as I don't hurt people or take their stuff. But the other half of that coin is the beauty that comes out of free people actually cooperating and trading and building and helping each other and lifting each other up. And my graduate school professor, a guy named Don Lavoy, talked about that process as creating a greater social intelligence more than any individual could conceive of, more than any individual could plan. And to me that's a radically libertarian notion because the knowledge in that greater social and intelligence can only happen if people are free. You can't manage that from the top down. So again, like the metaphor for the biological body and the community, I think is powerful to understand why you don't want to mess with it too much. Even though there's plenty of governance, there has to be. Otherwise if people don't know what the rules of the game are, they can't function.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah, I agree with that. And I would point out that the. I agree with you. Governance is a prerequisite to the functioning of humans. Government is a different matter. And when human bands were small, you had no formal government. You had the self organizing property that you are describing, which is perfectly reasonable. And humans are do very well with it. The problem is one of scale. As you scale up a society, you begin to need something slightly more formal with more coercive authority. And so actually anthropologists have a taxonomy that they recognize. Where the earliest version of this, before you even have something like a chief is, you have a head man. And the head man is in a position to, let's say, arbitrate disagreements. Interestingly, that position is considered a burden. Yes, there is some prestige that comes with it, but the job of being responsible is one that has a tremendous cost. And it is understood to have that tremendous cost. As we scale civilization way up so that we are here in this hall with innumerable people who are anonymous to us, the need to have structures that are more formal goes up again. I'd still like to see them be as minimal as possible, but the requirement for them is greater the more anonymous a society is.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thank you for joining me today on.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

[Matt Kibbe]

This gets into a subject that I know you're quite passionate about because I'm thinking of leadership and authority. And in the case of the sciences, we now have a crisis in authority where you don't trust the experts. And when I think about about people that I would trust to make, to arbitrate disputes, for instance, to be the judge, you'd want to know that that person is trustworthy and that they earned it. It's not because they're wearing the chief's hat. It's not because they were elected president. It's not because you have to call them senator. It's because they have earned the hard way the credibility to adjudicate disputes and to be a moral authority that other individuals would defer to. Does it make any sense where I'm going with this?

[Bret Weinstein]

And I would go one step further. I would say you have no idea whether they're worthy of that trust until they've been exposed to a profound test that in fact people don't themselves know whether they are trustworthy until they face that pressure and either succeed or fail to meet it. So, yes, I tend to be very. The more rodeos I've been through, the more I know that many people who may be perfectly nice, seem to share your values, are not up to the challenge of a dangerous environment if they haven't been put through it and shown themselves to have the features of character that are only necessary in such circumstances.

[Matt Kibbe]

My joke about the libertarian movement during lockdowns and what I now call Covid authoritarianism is that we're really good and we're really diverse and we're really strong except when it matters. And so many of our think tanks and institutions, because they were afraid, like, we're all afraid and, you know, the novel virus and we don't know what's going on, and we're wanting to trust the experts, particularly when it comes to scientists who we somehow imagined were immune from political corruption. But when, you know, when our principles really matter, everybody caves like a tent. And it's a great stress test to see which intellectuals and which leaders were willing to sort of withstand the firestorm, or better yet, say, well, I had this position, but as I see more evidence, I was just wrong. Very few people are willing to say that.

[Bret Weinstein]

Very few people. So I have now been through this process on a number of different topics, most famously the woke revolution and then Covid. And each time it happens, I go through something that I call the painful upgrade. And the painful upgrade is when your social circle is exposed to this intense pressure and most of the people that you thought you could trust buckle, and you realize they were never up to that challenge. But then you discover many other people who you didn't know, who are up to the challenge, who do the thing that needs to be done. And you think, well, how much better off am I now, knowing that those people that I may have liked but couldn't trust have gone a separate way? And all of these people who have these amazing strengths of character show up and reveal themselves. I'm better off. It's not like I don't feel bad about the one ones I've lost, but did I come out ahead? Absolutely, yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

I mean, to take it back to the, to the market metaphor, this, this is the role of, of entrepreneurships, entrepreneurs in, in a market process where there's a novel problem and there's radically uncertainty, radical uncertainty about the future, because we're living in real time.

[Unidentified Participant]

We don't. We.

[Matt Kibbe]

We have a theory about what tomorrow is going to look like, but we don't know. We can never know. And most people just follow. They did what they did yesterday. This is a necessary trait of our survival. But there's always a gadfly that steps up and says, you know what? I got a different idea. And it always comes out of stress, it always comes out of crisis that someone has to sort of break the rules and come up with a new way to do things. And one of my favorite economists, Ludwig von Mises, has this great passage about entrepreneurs. And, you know, the entrepreneur is stubborn enough to ignore the public. When the public, they're laughing at him, they think he's crazy, but then he sort of soldiers on and gets it done. And suddenly you're Steve Jobs and we all have an iPhone and we're slaves to it. And Steve Jobs is a sort of famous example I love to use. Like, he. He didn't care if anybody wanted it. That's what he wanted. And he was kind of an a hole about it. But that, to me, is like the disruptive nature of social entrepreneurs as well. Like, I'm going to solve a problem and. And out of COVID And this is why I love going to those brownstone events, because it's kind of. It's a gathering of. Of the Remnant, where there was a time when it was very uncomfortable to be a Covid dissident. Now, not so much.

[Bret Weinstein]

No, It's. Well, in part because the COVID dissidents successfully made their case. And all of the people who ridiculed us, many of them have rethought it and they've regretted having participated in what they did.

[Matt Kibbe]

Entrepreneurship.

[Bret Weinstein]

Right. It's that. Now, I would point out your. The point about entrepreneurs is less familiar to me in that context. But there's another context that works exactly the same way. It is science. And the idea here is most people, for reasons that aren't that hard to figure out evolutionarily, are terrified by the idea of being alone in an important belief. They feel very jeopardized if they are ever out of phase with their entire. Their entire group. And that. That's because in ancient times, if you were out of phase with your entire group, that was the first step to starvation. It's not a big leap from there. However, if you are in science, your job is to figure out what we don't have.

[Unidentified Participant]

Right?

[Bret Weinstein]

Right. And that means that if you do your job correctly and you actually happen on something important, there will come a phase where you say it out loud and absolutely everybody disagrees with you. They've all got it wrong. If you've done your homework, you've got it right and everybody else has it wrong. That's the feeling that you get right before a big win. And so you have to look, learn not to be persuaded by the fact that everybody disagrees with you. It's not evidence. It's just literally not evidence of anything.

[Unidentified Participant]

Right.

[Bret Weinstein]

The fact that they disagree means nothing. Now if they have a good argument that you can't meet, then you have to think about, well, maybe they're right. But if you've done your homework and everybody disagrees with you and you understand their objections and you don't think they're persuasive, well, that's what it's going to feel like right before you contribute something important enough to increase the size of the pie, where you bring wealth to your population by teaching them something they didn't know that was important. So anyway, that ability to be unpersuaded by the consensus is a very important trait of character and it's very rare.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, and I feel like you just came pretty close to describing the scientific process of some gadfly suggesting the theory of relativity and everyone's like, that sounds crazy.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yep, sure does.

[Matt Kibbe]

And then it gets tested and then it gets stress tested some more. And then you have competing paradigms and you have these knockdown drag out fights. But out of that comes a step closer to understanding how the world actually works.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, let's take that example and one other that looks like it. The beauty of relativity, or one of them, is that it came with predictions that no other hypothesis could meet. So the idea of relativity sounds preposterous on its face. But the idea that if it is true, that starlight will be bent by the gravity of the sun and that you will be able to detect that during an eclipse when the moon has covered the sun and you can therefore see the stars that are near, near to it in the sky, well, nothing else suggests that's true. All you got to do is go to the eclipse and look at the position of the stars and you'll know right away whether or not that idea was correct. So when somebody says, hey, I have an idea, I know it sounds correct, but here's how you're going to know I'm right. That's the sound of a deep insight. And Darwin was this way too. Darwin actually spent a lot of time worried about certain things he didn't know how to explain. And effectively each one provides an opportunity to falsify his hypothesis. You know, for example, the behavior of ants, their high Level of cooperation initially seems inconsistent with the competition that is the basis of his hypothesis. Well, we now know that there's an underlying genetic system that explains why these animals would be disproportionately cooperative in the way that we observe them. So that's the elegant way the game is, the scientific game is played is here's a model. It explains everything that we already know. It explains some things that we don't know. And here's the prediction that will tell you if it's true. I mean that sounds like fun to me.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

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[Matt Kibbe]

You know, I'm thinking about the corruption of science and how government corrupted that process. Again as a distinction between governance which and I'll say self governance to push that even further, versus government which was a top down choosing winners and losers corrupted by money and politics and and mandating that there only be one paradigm, one truth as opposed to competing ideas in a marketplace for ideas and the humility that is required and the judgment and the authority of actual scientists who are willing to take that responsibility. And you may not agree with me, I know Jay Bhattacharya doesn't agree with me either. As much as I would like for there to be good government investment in science, I worry that it's virtually impossible to achieve that. And maybe the only way to protect science is a separation of state and science.

[Bret Weinstein]

I think a separation would not interact with in and of itself solved the problem. Private money would produce the same bias. So I'm not sure what the solution is. But certainly you can't have effectively this unguarded pool of money. And effectively what you get is reciprocity networks where people grant each other funds and it becomes a racket very quickly. What happened during COVID was that people had gotten used to a correct idea, which is that when a scientific insight is so overwhelmingly important and persuasive, something like natural selection, relativity, it comes to be universally held. And so if you look at idea that's universally held, it is often an idea that is at least has a lot of truth in it if it isn't the truth itself. But that was used to game the mind. In other words, that consensus that emerges from a vigorous interaction of competing ideas where one idea just simply defeats all the others, and therefore everybody comes to believe it. Well, there's another way to get to consensus also, which is coercion.

[Unidentified Participant]

Right.

[Bret Weinstein]

And that's what happened is people were threatened if they disagreed with the idea that, for example, the COVID vaccines were safe, effective, and that there was no other remedy that could be used. If you disagreed with that, you got driven out of medicine. So there was a consensus of doctors. What did that consensus mean? Did it mean that there was a lot of truth in it? No, it meant that you had, you know, everybody who disagreed was thrown out, and all the people who remained were either very confused, cowardly, or both. That's not a consensus you want to pay attention to. In fact, that's a blinking red light telling you, don't listen to these people. Right. You know, cowards and fools. That doesn't sound like the authorities that I want to be paying attention to. So we have to be very suspicious that there are these two kinds of consensus. And just because people are in there for the first reason they've been persuaded en masse that something is true doesn't make it right. But it does mean it had a lot of currency, it had a lot of predictive power. And so, at least for the moment, it is a good model for reality to proceed from.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I was thinking very much of Friedrich Hayek's critique of central planning, and he, he called it scientism. And it was taking the faith that we had in the so called hard sciences, the natural sciences, and applying it to human action as if we're just rats in a cage or atoms that can be manipulated into some greater social organization. And he actually traces it back to. There was a French aristocrat named Henri de Saint Simon who is considered the godfather of positivism. He's also considered the founding father of socialism. And his version of socialism was very different than Marx because it wasn't violence, it was elitist. And he wanted to. It sounds kind of crazy now, but he had this idea of replacing the chaos of markets and free will with a temple to Sir Isaac Newton. And in that temple would sit a tribunal of. Tell me if this sounds familiar. Scientists. Oh, no, engineers and biologists and architects. And I started thinking about this, like Hayek has this fairly unhinged critique of how stupid this idea is, which was not Typical of how he would approach ideas. And I started thinking about this when we were all under the boot of faucism, and how the science became sort of a religious trope not to be questioned. And if you did question it, you were an apostate that was cast out from the church. So the analogy again between Hayek's critique of central politics planning and a government takeover of the scientific process, it's kind of the same thing.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah, it is. And what people do not realize, even most scientists do not realize, is that science is incredibly powerful but incredibly fragile. The requirements are not very many for something to be scientific, but they have to be adhered to with near perfect formality in order for it to work. In other words, to the public, or even to a scientist reading a paper where they weren't participating and doing the work. If you collect a bunch of data and you see a pattern in the data, and you formulate any hypothesis to explain that pattern, and then you write your report as if that data set tests that hypothesis, you have violated the scientific method. It is not true that you have tested that hypothesis. You spot that pattern in the data, you formulate a hypothesis. Now you have to run a whole separate test. But that doesn't happen very frequently, because if you compete two scientists against each other, where one of them goes and runs the second experiment in order to test the hypothesis, and the other simply reports the initial data set as if it had been collected in light of that hypothesis, the one who does the latter produces two papers in the time it takes the other guy to produce one. So you should expect a system in which. Which this is done. Basically, it's the honor system. You should expect to see the people rise to the top, who cut the most corners, who are not doing science by definition, and then you end up with something like the replication crisis which we saw in psychology, where there were all these results that were believed to be true, but when you did an experiment to see if they were true, the experiment did not replicate the initial finding.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thinking about this, this problem of, and I'll say it this way, like having the reputational integrity to protect the scientific process. It's not like you can't regulate your way into that. It has to be. It has to be trust. And I'm thinking about the same, same problem. I'm watching Congress not using the power of the purse, and I'm watching the executive, both Republicans and Democrats, expanding executive power way beyond what our founders or the Constitution envisioned, and then watching the judicial branch not actually doing its job when Congress steps on constitutional power principles. A lot of those restraints were not constitutional at all. It wasn't law. It wasn't anything but people decent enough to say, I'm not going to cross that line. And now there's no lines, or a lot less, a lot fewer than there were before. I don't know how you put the genie back in the bottle.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I think in a world where, where we were not the unique superpower, there was an understanding that we had shared fate, and therefore there was a reason to behave as if even those who disagreed with you were assumed to be part of the loyal opposition. And what's happened now is that we have a lot of people who are nominally part of our system, but do not view us as on the same team. In fact, the political rhetoric has become such that those who disagree with you are assumed to be morally defective, that they are missing the obvious truth that you know, and that the only way for that to be the case is that you're so profoundly stupid or morally misformed that you end up on the other side. So you can't have a society that functions that way. You have to imagine what it was more or less when we were children was those people. I profoundly disagree with them about how to, let's say, improve education. But we would agree that it should be improved. We would like people better educated. Right. So the division into teams, into zero sum teams is the problem. The recognition that actually, if our society is strong, we all benefit, even if it is the other team that has made us.

[Matt Kibbe]

So it does seem to escalate. Like, I have friends on Facebook who will make the pronouncement. I won't name names, but someone just made the pronouncement. You know, I've decided that if you vote, voted for Trump, I will never associate with you again. And everybody has a story like this, right?

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

And I don't remember that being the case. And I, I live in Washington and I did politics and, and I suffered some, some shocking betrayals by the best of friends because politics is an ugly business. But I never saw anything like that. And, and I, I think that the two teams that create that us versus them thing, they like the division, they like to keep us fighting, they feed off of it.

[Bret Weinstein]

They want us at each other's throats. And I must say, I mean, I guess this is just personal, but when I run into somebody who has that approach.

[Unidentified Participant]

Right.

[Bret Weinstein]

Oh, you supported Trump. Clearly there's something wrong with you. This is, let's say it's an old friend. My Feeling is, look, you just, logically speaking, you should be having a very different reaction to that news. Your reaction should be, I know this guy. If he has reached the conclusion that that was the right thing to do. And I think no reasonable person could have reached conclusion something is not right. Maybe it's in my model that that is an unreasonable place to have landed. And maybe I should go check that rather than not investigating whether it is your model that is the broken element.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

Which, which gets us to the topic Libertarianism 2.0. I is for all the reasons I could be blackpilled. And I could tell you just endless scenarios where I think we're totally screwed. I see this libertarian ish coalition percolating and you were just on a panel with Del Bigtree and Robert Malone and talking about RFK Jr and these disparate elements that joined the Trump coalition but independent of maga. It's not the same thing.

[Bret Weinstein]

It's not the same thing.

[Matt Kibbe]

And you know, the practical politics of coming together in a coalition are different than sort of your vision about how to organize society. I see an opportunity for us old school libertarians, new school libertarians, liberty curious libertarians that aren't even sure that we're not crazy, but they're at least willing to give it a test drive, that there's a lot of power in that. I see a lot of searching, but it has to be sort of upstream of politics because, you know, come the next election, because of the duopoly, we're still going to be forced to choose Team A or Team B.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I do have a question about what Team B is going to be. And maybe I'm naive, but I try very hard not to be. And my sense is the Democratic Party has revealed itself to be morally bankrupt at a level that is unrecoverable. The betrayal was so profound. And so I wonder if a maturation of the libertarian movement into a 2.0 phase does not actually poise the Libertarian Party to become the second political party, which I would love to see.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Bret Weinstein]

So I'm hoping that that happens now. I know there are obstacles to it and I know, frankly, I even understand why people who have been part of the libertarian movement for much longer than I have might resent people, people like me showing up and, you know, yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

Who'S this new guy?

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah, who is this new guy? What does he have to do with this? You know, we're the tried and true died in the wool libertarians. But my sense is, look, this is really about a. I will say I acknowledge that I had libertarianism wrong. I own that every time I talk about this issue because, well, first of all, it's important that I be honest with myself about that. Right. That tells me something about how the quality of my model, and hopefully my model is getting better over time. But B, I think it's also potentially a signal to those trying to figure out what to think about this new coalition. You know, is it. Is it a thing cohesive enough to move in the same direction? Yeah, I hope it is.

[Matt Kibbe]

Small, ideologically motivated political movements, I think they're always exclusionary because, you know, you've been so alone with this small group of people and you're probably also bookish, like you've read all the books and you argue about the footnotes. And that's certainly true of the libertarian movement in the Libertarian Party. But I always cite this New York Times article about Bernie's former bros back in Burlington, Vermont, you know, the real socialists. And this was written at a time when Bernie was very close, you know, but for the Hillary Clinton machine and rigging of the Democratic election process, Bernie was very close to taking over the Democratic Party.

[Bret Weinstein]

Oh, I remember it well.

[Matt Kibbe]

And this article is all about these. His former socialist buddies bitching about what a sellout and a failure he is. And I'm like, I would love to be. Be that big of a failure in the libertarian movement at the cusp of taking over a major party. So it's that ideologically purity test that I think comes with every movement. But as you grow into a coalition and a really broad, diverse coalition, which again, is sort of the libertarian social model.

[Unidentified Participant]

Right.

[Matt Kibbe]

We love the diversity. We think there's power in, in different people with different backgrounds and different skills, and that cooperation creates that greater social intelligence. I think those growing pains have to happen and we have to have guys like you, otherwise we're wasting our time.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah. And you know, it is. First of all, there's a reason that guys like me are at a conference like this. And, you know, this is my third year in a row and it's because this is a breath of fresh air. Right. As much as, you know, maybe I disagree with every single person here on some issue or other, but it's wonderful that you have people who are willing not to view disagreement as evidence of a moral defect.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Bret Weinstein]

And, you know, I, I'm sympathetic to the people who feel like they're the old hands. On the other hand, presumably all of this is about accomplishing something. And accomplishing something, unfortunately, forces us into the political swamp. But there's nothing riding on this but the game. There's nothing riding on this but the fate of Western civilization. So if the Libertarian Party is capable of reshaping itself into something that it can tolerate at the level of what it has to embrace and that is actually politically effective, wow. Is that the right thing to do? I mean, you really want to leave the Democratic Party as, you know, one of the two major parties in the country. That just is so terrifying.

[Matt Kibbe]

But no pressure. Just the fate of Western civilization.

[Bret Weinstein]

Just the fate of Western civilization and maybe the planet itself.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

That's all.

[Bret Weinstein]

That's all. Nothing beyond that.

[Unidentified Participant]

Yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

All right, give me some shameless self promotion. Your podcast, whatever you want to sell to us.

[Bret Weinstein]

Sure. Heather and I wrote a book, a Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, about the problem of hypernovelty and the way it is making us sick physically, mentally, socially. I think it's a good read. You can find me on what we now call X, even though I shudder every time I say it. I'm Retweinstein. Brett has one T. There is a Brett Weinstein with two T's. He gets a lot of angry communication directed at me, but nothing I can do about it. And you can find me at the Dark Horse podcast.

[Matt Kibbe]

All right, thank you for squeezing me in, and this was a good dry run for our big public thing tomorrow.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yep. I'm looking forward to it.

[Unidentified Participant]

Thank you.

[Kibbe on Liberty Announcer]

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