This Will Collapse The West | Bret Weinstein PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary: "This Will Collapse The West" | Impact Theory with Bret Weinstein (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 8, 2024
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist, commentator)
Key Theme: Examining the social, cultural, and economic forces threatening the stability and cohesion of the Western world, and seeking to uncover why polarization, narrative fragmentation, and institutional distrust are reaching crisis levels.

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Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Tom Bilyeu hosts Bret Weinstein for a deep exploration of why Western societies are facing unprecedented challenges, comparing today's cultural, economic, and political cycles to dangerous feedback loops throughout history. They dissect themes of narrative warfare, the consequences of institutional failures, the roots and dangers of polarization, and whether there is anything individuals or societies can do to pull back from the brink.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Are We Past the Tipping Point? (01:03–04:24)

• Tom shares his analogy of relationship momentum and the parallels with societal division, suggesting that at a certain stage, the underlying neurochemistry and accumulated grievance make it almost impossible for people to reconnect without conflict.
• Bret expands on this with ethological insights, emphasizing that much of human conflict isn’t about content but about underlying patterns and historical momentum:

  “You'll understand an argument … best if you turn down the sound… You're being carried along with a historical process… If enough of us can figure that out … maybe we can overcome the momentum…” – Bret Weinstein (03:18)

• Both agree the odds are against peaceful reconciliation, but recognition of the dynamic is the first step.

2. Personal Agency and Viktor Frankl’s Model (04:24–08:13)

• Tom references Viktor Frankl, highlighting that meaning and survival depend on how one chooses to respond to adversity—a concept he’s tried to implement in both business and personal life.
• He shares his mission: using narrative to instill growth mindset in children before the age of 15:

  “No one should ever get to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset and encountering it through story.” – Tom Bilyeu (06:15)

3. The Challenge of Rent-Seeking and Elite Capture (10:00–14:10)

• Bret explains that even moral, creative, self-made entrepreneurs are functionally rent-seekers at some level because of how the economic system is structured.

  “You're definitely doing some rent seeking. But the good news is you're not doing it because of a defective character. You're doing it because of the way the market is structured…” – Bret Weinstein (11:38)

• He outlines the “personal responsibility vortex,” where trying to live perfectly ethically in such a system leads to social and economic marginalization:

  “You will hobble yourself… and what that does is it reduces your influence on how society functions. The world becomes more ruthless as you try to make sure that you’re not doing anything … negative…” – Bret Weinstein (14:10)

• The optimal strategy: Use your unique leverage to maximize positive impact, even if perfect purity is impossible.

4. Personal vs. Collective Responsibility (19:05–20:24)

• Bret posits that conservatives intuitively grasp personal responsibility, while liberals favor collective obligation—and both are necessary "yin and yang" for a functioning society.

  “Personal responsibility and collective responsibility are a yin-yang phenomenon ... We have this amazing opportunity. We have a moral imperative to deliver that opportunity to as many people as possible.” – Bret Weinstein (19:05, 23:52)

• The endpoint of focusing only on victimhood, he warns, is societal helplessness and dependency:

  “You're just going to create a helpless, needy population. And... you know how bad an idea this is, right? There's no way it's going to work at a civilization level.” – Bret Weinstein (20:05)

5. Narrative Warfare, Overton Window, and the Dimming of Public Institutions (35:10–43:13)

• Bret and the group discuss how information control is becoming a tool for elite power:

  “There is an advantage that accrues to anybody who has superior information... You can get wealthy by seeing the future... But you can also do the same trick by blinding your competitors...” – Bret Weinstein (36:10, 38:49)

• All avenues of public sense-making (media, academia, the courts) are being undermined, leading the public to withdraw and seek alternative (often unregulated or manipulable) sense-making venues.
• Bret: “All of these public truth seeking mechanisms are becoming dumber by the hour… we can't drive like this. We have to rescue ourselves from whatever it is… keeping us from establishing the basic facts of our lives.” (39:33–41:27)

6. Emergent Forces vs. Coordinated Conspiracy (42:08–51:14)

• The podcast teases apart the degree to which the current crisis is due to top-down collusion (WEF, central banks, etc.) or organic, emergent behavior as individual actors pursue their incentives.
• Bret draws an analogy to climate cycles: The initial input may be small, but system amplifiers (social media, institutional incentives) turn minor pushes into huge effects:

  “The actual collusion may be a tiny fraction of what's going on, but… it's setting our direction. And then these organic emergent processes are causing it to become a terrifying force…” – Bret Weinstein (51:11)

7. The Role of Shame, Polite Society, and Boundaries of Discourse (54:45–62:02)

• Bret shares his experience of backlash for crossing accepted discourse boundaries, such as appearing on shows like Alex Jones or questioning dominant narratives.
• He reflects on “polite society” as the arbiter of which ideas are permissible and argues its incentives are often corrupted:

  “Polite society existed right outside of Auschwitz. It exists in every era. The fact that it does or doesn't invite you to its cocktail party has to be evaluated … in the context of whether or not polite society is doing its job of amplifying the good things about civilization.” – Bret Weinstein (59:08, 61:44)

8. Free Speech, Radical Inquiry, and the Value of Difficult Questions (65:12–73:41)

• Bret defends the necessity of exploring even taboo questions (e.g., rationality behind evil actions, fraught topics in science), provided it's done in good faith.

  “Any honest exploration is contributing to us knowing more about where the dangers are and where the values are. Both sides get credit as long as they're doing it in good faith.” – Bret Weinstein (67:20)

• He makes a nuanced case for pursuing truth, even with the risk of unwelcome discoveries:

  “I'm a scientist to the core. I believe that unearthing the truth is valuable in the end, even if… the process gets us there over time, and it does embolden our best values.” – Bret Weinstein (70:42)

• The group agrees that advancing understanding—even of dangerous ideas—is essential for societal progress and safety.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Bret Weinstein: "If enough of us can figure that out and manage to convey it, then maybe we can overcome the momentum. On the other hand, I think the odds are against us." (03:18)
• Tom Bilyeu: "The meaning of life is to see how much of your potential you can translate into usable skill set... and that skillset should be unique to you… and helps not only yourself, but other people." (15:31)
• Bret Weinstein: "You're definitely doing some rent seeking. ...You're doing it because of the way the market is structured..." (11:38)
• Bret Weinstein: “You're just going to create a helpless, needy population... There's no way it's going to work at a civilization level.” (20:05)
• Bret Weinstein: "There is an advantage that accrues to anybody who has superior information... But you can also do the same trick by blinding your competitors..." (36:10)
• Bret Weinstein: “Polite society existed right outside of Auschwitz... The fact that it does or doesn't invite you to its cocktail party has to be evaluated ... in whether or not polite society is amplifying the good things about civilization.” (59:08, 61:44)
• On rigorous inquiry:

  “Any honest exploration is contributing to us knowing more about where the dangers are and where the values are. Both sides get credit as long as they're doing it in good faith.” (67:20)
  "I'm a scientist to the core. I believe that unearthing the truth is valuable in the end..." (70:42)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:03 — Are we at the point of no return?
• 04:24 — The Viktor Frankl mindset and personal response
• 10:00 — Rent-seeking, systemic incentives, and business
• 14:10 — The “personal responsibility vortex” explained
• 19:05 — Conservative vs. liberal, individual vs. collective responsibility
• 23:52 — The moral imperative to maximize human opportunity
• 35:10 — Institutional decay & control of information
• 42:08 — Collusion vs. emergence as drivers of crisis
• 51:11 — Amplification: From small causes to large societal shocks
• 59:08 — "Polite society" as both necessary and corruptible
• 65:12 — Free speech, radical questioning, and limits on inquiry

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Final Thoughts

Bret Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu, joined in places by other contributors, offer an incisive diagnosis of Western decline, warning that a dangerous “rogue wave” of polarization and institutional failure risks spiraling out of control. Yet, rather than resign to despair, the conversation champions the power of narrative, open inquiry, individuality, and intellectual honesty as the best levers for renewal—and insists that both personal agency and collective commitment are essential to stave off collapse.

The episode is rich with analogies, historical perspective, and actionable philosophy. It’s a call to confront uncomfortable truths, resist both emergent and orchestrated forms of control, and do the brave work—individually and together—of re-finding common ground and meaning.

Transcript

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Joe Rogan]

Bret Weinstein, thank you for joining me on the show, man.

[Bret Weinstein]

Thanks for having me.

[Joe Rogan]

There's this feeling that I have that we're in right now in terms of what the brakes are. What are the things that could take us off the path to civil war? Because right now I feel like we're already going at such tremendous pace and there's so much momentum. I'm always telling people in business momentum matters. And there's so much momentum behind an idea that I think is fundamentally designed to disintegrate and to disunify everybody that then the next question is, okay, well, what could counteract that force? And there's this thing where my wife and I will be in the middle of an argument and I will actually call it out when it happens, where I'm like, we have reached that point now where it is impossible to avoid a fight. And I will say it out loud, Brett, in the middle of the argument, I will say we have now reached that point because you get so much momentum behind your positions that until the neurochemistry of that situation changes, you can't re see commonality. You can't feel the desire to connect anymore. And if you don't feel the desire to connect, then you don't behave in a way that will draw you back together. And it is so surreal to me and how you can feel that sort of click over moment where there is some sort of tipping point where now aggression and anger feeling is trumping the desire to hear new information, to sort of relax and remember that you love this person. Do you think that we've hit that tipping point. And if we have, is there something other than a fight that can back us off?

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I love your model, and I must say, it mirrors the way Heather and I deal with things, too, which is there's a recognition. I think for us, it's seated in our training as animal behaviorists. But there's a lot that goes on in human space that isn't really about the content. Right. You think it's about the content because you're human and you're wired to process language because there's so much conveyed in it. But very frequently you'll understand an argument between people best if you turn down the sound so you can't hear what's being said and you just look at what's going on. And the same thing is, I think, true in the larger context, where we are watching a battle that is over very standard stuff, but it's full of very modern, particular content descriptions. The people who are engaged in it think that they're reacting to something much more specific, rather than just the general frustration. So the way out, if there is one, does involve a recognition that you are being carried along by something, that you may have an objective and a focus, but that you are being carried along with a historical process. And if you can recognize what processes this looks like from the past, you'll know you don't want to go this direction. It doesn't end well. If enough of us can figure that out and manage to convey it, then maybe we can overcome the momentum, as you say. On the other hand, I think the odds are against us.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I think that's terrifying. And I hate it when you speak so clearly and terrifyingly because it is hard to argue. And on the streets it feels. It's unnerving. That is the word that I'll use. So when I have. From the perspective of trying to achieve things in my life, I have asked one question over and over and over, which is, all right, if Viktor Frankl is right and I can't control the stimulus, but I can control the response even in the middle of a concentration camp. And that book was just absolutely transformational for me in terms of, like, here is somebody who has lived through the worst atrocity that I can imagine. And I and said, you can predict with, like, accuracy of 72 hours when somebody's going to die because you see them give up on why they are suffering. And he was like, if you understand there's that gap between stimulus and response, and you hold onto that, that you can make radical change in your perspective or the way that you interpret things, which is going to then influence your behavior, which can, in his example, literally keep you alive or allow you to die. So I was like, okay, cool, I'm all for the deck. It may be stacked against anybody, could be, maybe it's stacked against me, maybe it's stacked against somebody else. Maybe that shifts and changes depending on the consequence or the context.

[Evelyn]

But if I can, you know, retain

[Joe Rogan]

some of this control, then I can really get somewhere. And so looking at the world through that lens and coming to this sort of evolutionary understanding of things as you begin to look at the movement that's happening now and what seems to be an innate feature feature. And I don't know if you'd call it a feature or a bug, but the madness of crowds and that, oh God, I forget the exact quote. I'm sure you'll get really, really close. But madness is very uncommon in the individual and basically the default in crowds. And so what we have now is a crowd that is gaining momentum and it's moving in a direction and getting other people to sort of step out of the stream and get the perspective on that of, okay, between stimulus and response, I have a responsibility and I can do something. And so partly because of you and like the things you were just saying, I had this moment when this all first kicked off and I was like, I just want to put my head down and dude, you can't imagine for the last. I mean now it's been 20 years. For the last 20 years, all I've wanted to do is be the next Disney. I just want to make rad movies and TV shows and like inspire people and, you know, like really bring something beautiful to the world. And I only want to tell one kind of story. You're not going to get a bunch of anti hero stuff from me. Like, I want to literally. My stated mission is no one should ever get to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset and encountering it through story. Because saying it like we're saying it now, it hits people logically, but it doesn't hit them emotionally. We need narrative to drive down to the limbic level and really make change. Do it at the age of imprinting. Like, I've got this whole plan and I feel good about it. And then I'm like, okay. The thought of putting my head down in the hopes that the mob passes me by makes me feel like a coward. And since I know the punchline of life is exactly the following, how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. It's all that matters. And I have run the experiment of does wealth solve all of your problems? And wealth is awesome, but it does not solve all your problems. So I didn't want to feel like a coward. It made me step into that. Okay, well what can I do at my own individual level to begin to tease this out so as you. Because you're not somebody who's giving up. So even though you have a somewhat pessimistic view, can you walk us through the things that would have to be true, whether or not you think people are willing to do it? What are the things that would have to be true for this to stop shy of just outright conflict?

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I see a primary obstacle which is that those who see the hazard clearly don't understand where the energy is coming from. And in some sense we have to negotiate a settlement in a, in a middle ground where the ability to navigate

[Sam Harris]

is being systematically disrupted by both sides.

[Bret Weinstein]

So you have call it conservative for the moment. You've got conservatives who are dubious that the objections that the frustration is real and is based on something that actually requires a remedy. And then you have the liberals, or

[Sam Harris]

I don't even want to call them

[Bret Weinstein]

liberals because this is so illiberal the way they're delivering it. But you have the self defined leftists delivering a set of prescriptions that, as I've said many times before, doesn't seek to end oppression, it seeks to turn the tables of oppression and worse, it seeks to turn the tables of imagined oppression so that it's not even being careful about its targeting. And what has to be the negotiated solution has to come in the form of a recognition that, that the system is rigged and that it is rigged in a way that the misfortune is not evenly distributed. You can predict with a relatively high degree of certainty where the misfortune is going to be concentrated based on historical patterns of oppression.

[Joe Rogan]

Can you give me the very specific predictive mechanism you use? Is it zip code? Is it ethnicity? What is it?

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, I would say zip code is by far the best because it does capture the fraction of it that tracks with ethnicity, but it doesn't limit it to that. And of course it isn't limited to that. So what you really have is a kind of opportunity hoarding by what I call rent seeking elites. Oftentimes these rent.

[Evelyn]

Go ahead.

[Joe Rogan]

I've heard you talk about that before. And one of the questions I want to ask you, you had said, because I have generated tremendous wealth in My life. And you said, you know, a lot of people, they'll, they'll. So rent seeking being people that are sort of inserting themselves as money managers or finance people or whatever. They're not actually creating something. They're not adding value to the system, but they're extracting a ton of value. Just as a quick thumbnail. But you said there are people, so I've always felt very good, right, Because I built a business from the ground up. We didn't raise outside capital and we turned it into something. And from that I created wealth. And then you said, there are some people who create something with good intentions, and then they turn into unknowingly rent seeking elites. And I was like, good, am I rent seeking? So now I'm like, what is that next step? Because I have literally dedicated my entire adult life and I'm sort of gambling with my fortune that I can create this narrative vehicle that will help some percentage of people encounter a growth mindset and improve their life. And my mission is to make it so your zip code is not predictive of your future success. But now I'm so paranoid that, that I'm doing some rent seeking that I don't even realize. So what does that look like? Is it just investing my money makes me rent seeking? What does that look like?

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah, you're definitely doing some rent seeking. But the good news is you're not

[Sam Harris]

doing it because of a defective character.

[Bret Weinstein]

You're doing it because of the way the market is structured and what rational behavior looks like.

[Joe Rogan]

So walk me through what that is.

[Bret Weinstein]

Your investment portfolio is no doubt invested in things that, if you looked at the details of how they function, are

[Sam Harris]

just simply rent seeking.

[Bret Weinstein]

So, you know, you probably don't even know. You probably are invested in some funds and those funds, you know, are picking and choosing equities and whatever it is. And those, those things are having an effect on, you know, they're maybe you're invested in a company that makes clothing and the company that was chosen for your portfolio is profitable. And why is it profitable? Because it's figured out some way to artificially depress the wages of the people who make the clothes so that when they get to the shop, they're cheaper and people buy them. So anyway, there's lots of places where you can be involved in rent seeking just by virtue of automatic processes in which you're not. You couldn't possibly be aware of all of the things that your money is doing while you're not paying attention. So there's that. And then there's also the issue, probably not for you, because I've heard very clearly what you've said here. Your objective is not only laudable, but it's also, I would say, maybe the important leverage point. You're talking about reaching young people. You're talking about reaching them with developmentally relevant, helpful stories that actually empower them. So my guess is, net, you're in surplus. But does that mean that everything that you're doing is positive rather than negative in this calculation? It can't right for none of us, I'm sure. I'm rent seeking too. I don't have a lot of investments, but enough that there's definitely going to be stuff hidden there. But the good news is you can't really be. If you were to try to figure out what effect you're having on the world in every detail and you were to try to eliminate all of the negative stuff, it would take all your time and more. You wouldn't finish the job. So you'd be left ineffective in the stuff that you're doing that's positive without eliminating the negative stuff. So in some sense, I don't know if you're familiar with my personal responsibility vortex talk.

[Joe Rogan]

No, give it to me.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, the short answer is that game, theoretically speaking, trying to live your principles in an economic context doesn't make sense. You will hobble yourself, you will end up in a cabin in the woods, you know, trying to eke out a living without having negative impacts. And what that does is it reduces your influence on how society functions. So the world becomes more ruthless as you try to make sure that you're not doing anything that you, you don't see as positive relative to your values, you actually limit your influence over the system and the system moves away from your values rather than towards them. So the question is, what is the best use of the power and leverage you have? And for you to be delivering narratives that empower individuals so that they know who they are, they are better equipped to function, and making sure that that happens in a way that your zip code doesn't predict your success in life, that seems not only incredibly noble, but it also seems like the leverage point. And I fully agree with you. Conversations like this are all well and good. They don't move civilization, right. They can inform something that moves civilization. But the stuff that moves civilization is narrative. And so anyway, more power to you.

[Sam Harris]

I don't know.

[Bret Weinstein]

I don't know how well that answers

[Joe Rogan]

the question, but no, it begins to pull at one thread of what feels like a Very tightly wound ball of yarn. But I think this is ultimately how it begins. So now getting into the thing that I always try to hold myself to is I only care about what has application in the real world. And so I'm trying to learn things, chase fascinations, whatever the case may be, that's actually going to make me more capable. So I'll give you a background or a base assumption. This is maybe a better way to say it. So if somebody asks me, what's the meaning of life? I have a very quick, aggressive, ready answer. I don't expect other people to agree more. I think the biggest thing I want people to take away is it is possible to define that and then to act in accordance. So my definition is very simple. The meaning of life is to see how much of your potential you can translate into usable skill set. And that to me, and then you can even take it one step further and say, and that skill set should be something that's unique to you, that you care deeply about, that you worked your ass off to acquire. And it helps not only yourself, but other people. Now, why do I think that's the meaning of life? Because that is, as far as I can tell, given that you are having a biological experience and your brain will kick up neurochemistry that either feels good or bad based on millions of years of evolution. So you're. You're stuck in that there. Yes, you can transcend your biology, but you are in that biology, man. And so fulfillment, to me is the name of the game, right? So fulfillment is often born out of really hard shit. It's doing hard things, right? It is not getting things just given to you. This is why I think the Oppression Olympics is just destined to fail. Because you're. You're creating a frame of reference, of victimhood, of, I don't have agency. It's. I don't know if Coleman Hughes came up with this, but he's certainly the person I heard say it. He was like, you're turning people into weather vanes and you're reducing the black population to. Well, we're pointed in whatever direction the wind of the white man blows us in. And he was like, basically, fuck that. Don't put me in that box. I have agency. Like, I can do things in my own life. And so that, to me, is really where you should be focused, which is how you're going to feel about yourself when you're by yourself, which is a neurochemical experience which is based on all the heuristics that the brain has worked into us. And in my interpretation of that, it's translating potential into skillset and then putting those skills to use.

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[Bret Weinstein]

Beautiful. That's lovely. And actually to me it seems like a key. It's half of a puzzle that I'm focused on. I'm focused on the other half typically. But there is this interesting dynamic between conservatives and liberals where conservatives see very clearly the personal responsibility part of the equation and they oftentimes don't see the collective responsibility part. And liberals are exactly the inverse. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about actually the way these two pieces of the puzzle fit together. And it's a, you know, a yin yang phenomenon. Before I get to it exactly though, let me say the weather veining, I have not heard Coleman say that, but I love it. It's a, it's a beautiful way of thinking about it. The way I think about it is learned helplessness.

[Sam Harris]

That in effect this is just training

[Bret Weinstein]

people to be helpless because it results

[Sam Harris]

in rewards being delivered.

[Bret Weinstein]

And the endpoint of that is fairly clear. You're just going to create a helpless, needy population. And I mean anybody who's raised kids

[Sam Harris]

or you know, even if you have

[Bret Weinstein]

nieces and nephews, you know how bad an idea this is, right? There's no way it's going to work at a civilization level.

[Joe Rogan]

And let me push on that and see if you agree why it's going to be bad. So the reason, as I hear you say that, that it seems self evident to me that that would become a problem is when you are a self perceived idea. I don't think this is true. But when you've created a frame of reference, which we can get into why I'm so obsessed about frame of reference. But when you create a frame of reference that you are helpless and needy, think back to in human, in any one human's evolution, not as a population. The point at which you are most needy and weak is when you're a child. And what is the mechanism that every child very quickly learns gets them what they want? A tantrum. Right. You create so much like external pain and suffering that people want to calm you down by giving you the thing that you want. It's a strategy. Every one of us has tried and reaped tremendous benefits. And then we go out into the world and the world slaps us around and says, stop, you're obnoxious. I don't want to be around you. Right. Jordan Peterson's saying, don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them. I think that's a pretty good steering mechanism. But now when you talk about this horizontal movement, which is one of the more terrifying things that you say, meaning that this, this is already permeated everywhere. And so now you called it a sleeper cell recently. And I thought that was super apt and just way terrifying. And so you have all these people that have learned, hey, tantrums are very effective. And my entire identity is around how effectively I can use a tantrum to get what I want. My placement in the oppression Olympics, which I say with derision. Right. Anybody listening can see that. I don't. I think that that's ineffective. And I should state, I judge everything by whether or not what you're doing moves you towards your goal. And I judge your goal based on whether it will bring you fulfillment. It's very easy to sort of guess how I will interpret something. So if you create that scenario where the only way to win is to throw a tantrum, we're doomed. Is that or something like that what you meant when you say this just won't work?

[Bret Weinstein]

Oh, exactly. And not only does it not work for the individuals, but ultimately they're going to tear down the entire structure. Because a structure of people that gets what they need through effectively the kind of terrorism that children engage in against their parents, that structure isn't capable of producing anything. So exactly how is it going to survive in the world? And this actually brings me to the other half of the very eloquent personal responsibility portrayal that you delivered a couple minutes ago, which is. So you see the imperative as basically taking what assets you have and making sure you convert them at the maximum rate into capacity that's meaningful relative to your. Your values, which I agree, absolutely. But the other thing is, I think we collectively have a responsibility to recognize that being a human being is an incredible experience. Right. It's such a gift. And you could, you know, if you were any other creature, the degree of that gift that you would have would be much less in the case of the next nearest creature, or none in

[Sam Harris]

the case of most creatures.

[Bret Weinstein]

And so we have this amazing opportunity. And it seems to me that we have a moral imperative to deliver that opportunity to as many people as possible. And what that means is that actually we have an obligation to preserve this. This really isn't about our generation and whether we're satisfied or anything like that. This is about how long can we keep this running. So the maximum number of human beings has that experience. And what's more, if you are hobbled by a cruddy educational system, if you are constrained by the requirement that you spend your time in a stupid job that has no meaning to you because it's the only way that you can afford a roof over your head and get your health care paid for and all of that, if that's what you're obligated to do, then we're squandering your human potential. And we should be seeking to liberate people as much as is humanly possible. So as many generations as can be as liberated as possible. That seems to me our collective obligation. And how do you do that? Well, you have to enable people individually to take advantage of opportunities to spot them. And it just so happens that these two things fit together rather perfectly. They describe what the objective of the whole exercise ought to be. So anyway, we're a long way from there. You know, we have a system that just does not do this very effectively.

[Sam Harris]

But we can see it from here.

[Bret Weinstein]

And. And then this goes to the last part. We were talking about momentum and we were talking about the danger of despair, effectively recognizing that the likelihood of us

[Sam Harris]

fixing the problem is pretty small.

[Bret Weinstein]

But I always think of it in terms of being on a. I don't know, a canoe or something, headed for a waterfall. At what point is the chance that you can paddle out of the path of the waterfall and get to shore before you go over so low that it's not worth your time? And the answer is there is no point at which it's so low. Right. If there's any chance at all that you can get to shore. A fraction of a percent is enough. Giving up would be stupid if the result of giving up is that you go over the falls. So to me, this is where we are. I don't know how likely it is that we'll succeed, but I think the

[Sam Harris]

thing is it just makes sense to

[Bret Weinstein]

take the best shot you've got. And sometimes you're surprised. You take the best shot you got and it's good enough. So what the hell else are we doing right? Why would we invest in anything other than trying to write our course and avoid another tremendous calamity of history?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's very well said. And one of the things that I think will help us, in fact, one of the things I think that must happen if we're going to get enough people rowing in the right direction is something that Heather, your wife, Dr. Heather Heying, brought up in one of your episodes. She read directly from the book tribe. I have a rule, when you encounter something powerful, you should immediately go into it. So I literally, after hearing that quote, got the book, read it that day. And the punchline is, hey, boys and girls, you have a two party system, which is exactly as you just laid out, Brett. You've got people that err on the side of this compassion, empathy, collective moral obligation to lift up as much of humanity as humanly possible. And then on the other side, you've got people who are about individual responsibility, not wanting to be taken advantage of. And I see a very. Not they don't. It doesn't break on the same lines, but an equally important dichotomy in business, which is the visionary and the executor, often known as the coo, the operations person. And there is friction between the two in both cases. So you have friction between the compassionate people who want to help everybody and the people who are like, come on, personal responsibility, I don't want to be taken advantage of. And then in a business, you need somebody who's a visionary and is not worried about the consequences and just new ideas, crazy ideas, big ideas. And you need somebody who's like, hey, motherfucker, you have to ground this in reality. And if we just spin off on all these crazy ideas, nothing will ever get done. And it's like, it was a huge breakthrough for me in business when I realized I'm a visionary because I live in it. I see it from that perspective. So again, my obsession with frame of reference. So as a visionary, my frame of reference is big ideas are how you end up building a Big business and creating all the wealth for all the people. Being able to pay people salaries and be generous and give them vacations and all that. I remember once looking out my window and There was like 20 cars in the parking lot. And I thought, fuck, I've created something that has allowed everyone to pay for these. Like, that's crazy. Like, you're really helping. Helping people do rad shit in their lives. But until I had respect for the need for this other person to help me, right? And there's a great quote. I think it's John Ford who said. Or Henry Ford who said, airplanes take off against the wind, not with it. And the example I hear in business a lot is you need both the kite and the string. The kite without the string just flies off into the ether. The string without the kite just lays on the ground. So once I said, okay, wait a second. This is exactly what's going on in our political discourse is you have each side. Both sides are necessary. So if you're conservative and you have any temptation to alienate or hate the other side, like, you're missing the fundamental point. You are one half the equation. If it's just you, it slides towards tyranny. The other side, if you don't recognize that you need the other side, that it is the friction between the two. You said it perfectly. Yin yang, right? If you don't understand the need for that balance, you slide off into madness. And until both sides go, hey, it's cool for me to really stand for my part of this, if I show respect and have this really insane desire to have the other side, if we did that, then, okay, like, people can say, look, I'm just. I'm wired for. I can't have people stealing from me, right? The taxes is theft. And then the other side, like, we can't let these people, like, starve in the streets. If they both value each other and recognize, okay, this is an interplay between the two, I think we get somewhere. But we're so being forced into these factions. Factions, factions. And because I'm a personal responsibility guy, even though I do not consider myself conservative at all, because I'm freakishly compassionate, but when I, I think it. Jordan Peterson said it the best when he was like, when you fractionate and fractionate and fractionate, you ultimately realize that you end up with the ultimate fraction. And that's the individual.

[Evelyn]

We have this thing, you'll often refer to it as Goliath, but whatever an entity, the elites, the whatever, whatever government, whatever, we want to label that thing as is trying to blind us. But I don't think that they care about the efficacy of the vaccine. Like that doesn't feel. That feels like it's the symptom, not the thing they really care about. What they really care about, I think, is they want to make sure that you comply. And compliance is the game. And if you can see that they're fallible and talk about it, then it's much harder to get compliance. Does that feel right?

[Sam Harris]

An element of it feels very right. But they left us with a mystery. They had a technology on which to build something that they called a vaccine. Very deceptively, but they used that term to place it in our blind spot because most people, myself included, had the sense that vaccines were tremendously well tested, that the, the risks that come along with them tend to be small. Covid has forced a rethink of that. But if the entire point had been compliance, they would have been smart enough to recognize that the technology that they were using to make these shots was extremely risky and that it could well backfire because the range of pathologies that you could in principle trigger with such a shot was huge. So the question is, if the real point was can we, can we make you take a shot? The smart thing to do would have been to give a shot that was effectively neutral. That was a placebo. You know, maybe you could have such low concentrations of the active ingredient that it wouldn't have had any impact. And if they had done that, I think they'd be in a lot better position today because people would not in general have a list of friends who had some severe negative reaction to these things and they would be able to play the same games they play with statistics to claim that they had been effective.

[Bret Weinstein]

And if they had done that and there wasn't a pattern of pathology, then

[Sam Harris]

all of those of us who were

[Bret Weinstein]

worried about what we were told these,

[Sam Harris]

these things were going to do to the body would look foolish and their

[Bret Weinstein]

ability to get people to comply in the future would be that much greater.

[Sam Harris]

So I don't have the sense that a simple game of forcing people to comply could possibly explain the shots. For some reason, they wanted people to take them.

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[Evelyn]

Okay, so I want to start teasing two ideas apart. So one, I want to figure out why they want to blind us. While I think it's overblown to say that America is declining like the Roman Empire, when. If you're thinking the Roman Empire declined quickly when in reality, I think it's probably a very slow process that we may or may not be in, we may get better over the next 10 years and, and then collapse. Who, who knows?

[Joe Rogan]

Or drag it out forever, whatever.

[Evelyn]

So I think it is important for people to understand when they're talking about you or anybody else in that group that I see sort of being attacked now in a way that they weren't for five or six years ago to understand. When you're saying I think this is worthy of exploration and when you're saying I've explored a lot of stuff and this one I'm really going to plant a stake in the ground because I have a feeling we're going to touch on both in the conversation today. Okay, so going back to the question I really want to pin down, which is why blind us?

[Joe Rogan]

What's the point?

[Sam Harris]

Let's talk about the issue of blinding, and I'll just tell you my own thought process. I come from a background studying complex systems. I'm a biologist, I'm an evolutionary biologist and I'm very interested in levels of analysis. So I come to questions of how human societies function through that lens. And a hypothesis in such case tends to be actually a nested series of sub hypotheses.

[Bret Weinstein]

And you build them out.

[Sam Harris]

And the more that they stand up to to new observations, the more truth they are likely to contain. So I build up a model and if I see something next week that's inconsistent with it, my point is my confidence in that model is pretty low. But if I have a model and it goes a year or two years and all I see are things that actually fit with it, I tend to get the Sense, maybe it's, it's right or it's analogous to something that's right.

[Bret Weinstein]

So the question of why they are

[Sam Harris]

blinding us here is what I have become increasingly confident of. Again, it is a hypothesis, but it's amazing how well it predicts events and phenomena going forward. We are locked in competitive struggles all the time inherently. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it's the engine that makes Western civilization work. It just needs to be placed in. I used to think of it as like the explosive energy in an internal combustion engine cylinder. Right. An explosion isn't a productive thing, but in that context it can be very, very productive. But when you are in a competitive system, there is a, an advantage that accrues to anybody who has superior information.

[Bret Weinstein]

And

[Sam Harris]

what I mean, this almost feels too obvious to me at this point for it not to be on everybody's mind. But we proceed by imagining that there is a level of patriotism that we share with other people in our system, that surely they have the same sense of America or the west being this marvelous structure in which to accomplish new things, to innovate, and they must therefore want to protect it as well. And we have a harder time grappling with, well, what if they don't see it in those terms? And what if actually there's a group

[Bret Weinstein]

of folks who's very powerful who views

[Sam Harris]

democracy as a frightening mechanism that can upend whatever it is you're attempting to accomplish based on the whim of a public that may not know what it's doing? I mean, I actually, I understand that concern. Democracy can do things that are destructive. And so if you had a position

[Bret Weinstein]

of power, you might view the fact

[Sam Harris]

that the public can throw out leadership and install somebody who's saying things that resonate with them with a certain amount of trepidation. So if you didn't have the sense that the west and its, its obligation to the consent of the governed was a positive thing, you might start playing against people that we would tend to think they would be playing alongside. They would be a building up a whole range of topics in which their superior information allowed them to get ahead

[Bret Weinstein]

at the expense of others.

[Sam Harris]

I mean, this is. If we think about a financial market, economists talk about the greater fool. How do you make money? You find somebody who understands less than you do and you trade things and basically you take advantage of what they don't understand and their wealth is transferred to you in so doing. And that actually can be a positive force if what you understand is something about the Future that is not clear to others. If you're really insightful, then you can get wealthy by. By seeing the future with greater clarity. But you can also do the same trick by blinding your competitors, by making it so that the information that they would use to figure out what's coming is not available to them. And what would that look like?

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, this is where the rubber meets

[Sam Harris]

the road with this idea. It would look like an attack on all of the things that allow us to navigate all of the sources of public truth seeking. It would look like an attack on all newspapers. It would look like an attack on universities and science.

[Bret Weinstein]

It would look like an attack on journals.

[Sam Harris]

It would ultimately look like an attack on the courts. And that just simply matches the evidence that we have. All of these public truth seeking mechanisms are becoming dumber by the hour. And what that is doing is it is putting people in. People who, who see this problem are correctly recognizing that they are much better off to unplug from those institutions and attempt to figure out what's going on outside of them. But what many of them do not realize is what a poor substitute for public truth seeking that actually is.

[Bret Weinstein]

You know, I mean, might be good

[Sam Harris]

for people like you and me. It brings an audience that wants to hear a conversation that hasn't been sanctioned by one of these lobotomized institutions. But from the point of view of

[Bret Weinstein]

the average person trying to figure out

[Sam Harris]

what to make of the advice that their doctor is giving them or the FDA is telling them about nutrition, it's a poor substitute. And it is. The reason that I fear collapse is that I don't. You know, you can put on a blindfold and you can keep driving down the road for a time, but at some point there's going to be a curve, and we can't. We can't drive like this. We have to rescue ourselves from whatever it is, whatever force, whether I'm right about its nature or not, that is keeping us from establishing the basic facts of our lives.

[Evelyn]

Okay, do you see this as a wef super conspiracy, or is this just emergent behavior of people who get into positions of power, whether economically, like somebody running a big company or politically, and they think, huh, I like what I'm able to do better in this position. And so there's, you know, whatever 50,000 people that just have that slight inclination of, ooh, this would be a little better for me if I had a little bit more control. And then the emergent behavior starts to look like a coordinated attack. But in reality, it's just A lot of little people trying to make their own lives a little bit richer, more controlled.

[Sam Harris]

I have substantial confidence that it is going to be a combination of both things. Now, I look at the WEF and there's a part of me that thinks that's too dumb and too obvious to actually be the entity that maybe it stands as a front for whatever actual thing is colluding behind the scenes. But I do, I do think that there is a component that is quite obviously colluding against public understanding. But there are also numerous mechanisms that will cause people to innovate in the direction of that force without ever being contacted, without being paid by it. They will simply do it because a system of incentives causes them to move in the same direction. And we see this on topic after topic. If we try to establish the basic facts, for example, of climate change,

[Bret Weinstein]

what

[Sam Harris]

we find is fields full of people, presumably most of them are well intentioned, concerned about what they see as a real emergency and doing their best to elucidate it so the rest of us can see it. But if you, if you've lived inside the academy, you know also that a field like climate science at the moment will not welcome countervailing evidence. And what that means is that the evidence you see doesn't have the implication that you think it has. Even if the studies you see are accurate, you're not seeing the studies that weren't done that would have provided a different view. And across all of these questions, our ability to have an open, frank conversation in which all of the evidence is aired is fundamental. It occurred to me the other day that this really is the reason that free speech and the free exchange of ideas is so tightly bound with the other rights of the west, is that the consent of the governed means nothing if the governed can't have a discussion that would allow them to vote in the direction of reason. So you can, you can wreck a democracy by wrecking speech. Even if people are perfectly free to vote for whatever they want, you don't need to game the election itself if the public mind is confused by being starved of actual information. So that's what I'm seeing, both in the informal sphere and very much in the institutional formal sphere. It is, it's hallucinating is what we're seeing hallucinations that will cause a person with suspicions to see them rendered in elaborate form. I don't know if I fully answered your question about emergence versus collusion.

[Evelyn]

Well, so you did, in the sense that you said it's going to be a combination of all of them. What I want to do is start pursuing what exactly that looks like in reality, because we may be saying exactly the same thing or we may be saying something different. But my take goes something like this. You well know what I'm about to say, because you're the one that taught it to me. But the Earth, its rotation, it changes. Its tilt changes. There's like these three different things that add up, slight variations over different timescales that cause the Earth to cool and warm. And so we have, long before humans were here. Ice age, no ice age, Ice age, no ice age. And it went back and forth, back and forth because of these slight perturbations that change, that determine how much cooler things get in the summer, how much snow then accumulates over years, which then turns into an ice age, and then it wobbles back the other way and. And a little bit of snow melts and a little more and a little more until you warm back up. Okay, so it's. It's these huge macro trends that are basically colliding waves, and every now and then they hit it just the right way and you get a rogue wave. And that's what I think is happening right now. I. Yeah, there's probably a little bit of collusion.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Evelyn]

There's probably just the authoritarian desire for power.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Evelyn]

Some people probably just aren't intellectually powerful enough to hold really nuanced ideas in their head. And so when you're dealing with social media and there's just a massive velocity and volume of information, I just need something.

[Joe Rogan]

So I'm Team Blue. I'm Team Red.

[Evelyn]

Nice, Simplistic. Just tell me what to do and I'm going to do it just so that I don't have to think through all these problems. And what this moment feels like is a rogue wave. I have no sense of how big the rogue wave is. I just know it's the biggest wave in my lifetime. So certainly possible that compared to the Civil War, this is nothing and we're super safe and all is going to be well. But what I want to begin teasing out are what are those elements that are coming together now? So we've talked about whether it's the wef, but just like elites actually colluding. And I will say the Fed, the way that banking is run, all of that guaranteed, even if they're just out in the open, it is a group of people that have an agenda and they very much control what you know, what you understand, what they tell you when they tell you they want to make sure that you understand as little about printing money as possible, so on and so forth. So you definitely have the, what I'll call official collusion. Maybe with the best of intentions, maybe not. But nonetheless, then you get things happening at the local level where at the school board level, there's movements there that are taking over, where they're trying to ice out parents, and they've got the FBI investigating parents as terrorists. And so you've got some weird sort of local thing happening. Then you've got what's going on at the social media level where people, the platforms are being pressured on what to show, what not to show, on and on and on we go. But each of those feel to me that they are driven by the same sort of it's all humans, but slightly different things. Like the Fed to me is not the same thing that's going on at the local school board.

[Sam Harris]

Two things, and I don't want us to get lost, but your example, the Milankovitch cycles that cause the oscillation between ice ages and interglacials is well chosen and it illuminates actually the way to reconcile your presentation and mine. But I think your audience are gonna have to indulge me in order to make it clear why. So we have these three orbital oscillations. We have the obliquity of the orbit, we have the precession of the axis of the Earth and we have the degree of tilt. These things are independent of each other and they oscillate on separate time scales. We have a hundred thousand year cycle, of 41,000 year cycle and a 21,000 year cycle. Each of them has a very tiny influence on the amount of solar radiation that actually reaches the Earth. Even together they have a small impact.

[Bret Weinstein]

So if I was to push a

[Sam Harris]

button and cause them all to go into the phase where they cool the earth for one year, you wouldn't be able to tell that year from any other. It might be slightly cool, but it would not be decidedly cool. What happens though is that when these patterns align such that they cause the amount of ice that remains in the northern hemisphere over the summer to be slightly larger, they turn the Earth slightly whiter because ice happens to be white. And white surfaces reflect energy back into space, which causes the following year to be slightly cooler. When the following year is slightly cooler, slightly more ice sticks around through the northern summer. The year after that is slightly cooler. So almost all of what causes glaciation to happen is the result of this amplifier. It is not the result of the Milankovitch cycles, which set it in motion. It is the amplifier that does the work. Right. It's like if you imagine a, you know, Mick Jagger in the Rose bowl singing his heart out. Nobody in the back row would be able to hear very much. Right. It's the mechanisms that amplify his voice, but they're not adjusting the content of his voice. He's still Mick Jagger. He's just having a huge impact based on all of the things that amplify his voice and then project it to all of the people at home who weren't there.

[Bret Weinstein]

That is likely where we are.

[Sam Harris]

The actual collusion may be a tiny fraction of what's going on, but it's like a navigational fraction. It's setting our direction. And then these organic emergent processes are causing it to become a terrifying force, rather than, you know, a joke where 10 apes gathered in a room and decided to steer the world in some direction. That sounds preposterous, but given the capacity for markets and fields of study to amplify thinking, to amplify motivated reasoning, we get the same kind of puzzle. So I don't disagree with you that the majority of it may be emergent, but I don't think that's the. That's the place to concentrate if we want to fight back. But the. The way to understand where we're headed is to focus on the part that is doing the steering. And that's not so easy to do because, of course, we're not invited. We have to extrapolate from the pattern on the outside.

[Evelyn]

Yes. But I think we'll be able to describe the phenomena of. Okay, we're being blinded, we're being censored. There are things. The just massive attempt to shrink the Overton window so that so many things were not allowed to be switched. Spoken about. Which, again, from where I'm sitting, that feels like the. The emergent phenomenon. More than just. Just overlords, because this really gets complicated. I've been over here trying to, like, write down all the things that I think create this. So the current variations of the Milankovitch Milankovic cycle. But. So you've got. Growth has stopped. We probably need to talk about. You've got just the Internet and social media again, going back to that idea of velocity and volume of information. You've got the nanny state, which I guess Jonathan Haidt wrote a new book about. Not read it yet, but I'm super eager to see the consequences of that. You've also got. I forget who wrote the book, but about therapists now just affirm, affirm, affirm, and how that's creating additional spiral of this like sense of I need to be protected. And then you've also got just the post modernist thinking that has swept through the institutions that now is as we have a generation of people that have been taught that they all have TikTok and Instagram accounts and they're just like blasting this stuff out there as fast as you can. And now it's from my thinking, beyond the collusion, those are the things that are creating this moment. Do you think I missed anything?

[Sam Harris]

Well, you, you mentioned it in that last piece, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure it's highlighted well enough yet. There is an aspect of social media that causes a totally unnatural amplification of very natural human tendencies. And I've been thinking more about the Overton Window and the fact that it

[Bret Weinstein]

has,

[Sam Harris]

it has an analytical connotation to it. Right. What are the ideas that are beyond the ones we're ready to contemplate? But then I started to notice I've become increasingly suspicious of what I call polite society.

[Evelyn]

Tell me more, what does that mean?

[Sam Harris]

Well, polite society, at the risk of causing your audience to think me crazy, I, I took up, I accepted Alex Jones offer to come on his program. And that caused an interesting freakout. Most of what, most of which was not actually about what I said on Alex Jones program, but it caused what I said on Joe Rogan's program to be scrutinized in a way that was new and I think quite mean spirited

[Evelyn]

because people think Alex Jones is off his rocker. If you've gone on his show, you must be off your rocker. Let me go look at what you said and prove it.

[Sam Harris]

Yes, but I also think there is a concern, I think going on Alex Jones program would have made less sense before Tucker Carlson had interviewed him. That, that actually brought Alex Jones into discussion where it had formerly been possible, formerly been possible, just to simply dismiss him out of hand. And the problem with Alex Jones from the point of view of polite society is that he's not just simply wrong about everything that would be easy to deal with, but he's often right. And so what does one do with somebody who has simply given up on staying within any bounds, is willing to explore any idea that's very dangerous to certain folks. So my going there, you know, I'm, I'm a Ph.D. in biology. I've made a couple contributions to my field and if I'm talking to Alex Jones, it creates a question, causes a

[Bret Weinstein]

Re exploration of the question of whether

[Sam Harris]

or not one has to actually take him seriously. So that became the moment at which it was important to come up with reasons not to make take me seriously. Right. So that that question could again be sidelined. And what I realized was that I was getting a lot of pushback from people who were driving up the cost for me doing what I did. Right. That I there, there was content in

[Bret Weinstein]

what they were saying, but the real

[Sam Harris]

message was actually, you shouldn't have done that. It was a don't go there, girlfriend kind of a moment.

[Bret Weinstein]

Right. And so I started to think about

[Sam Harris]

what that was made of. And I realized that polite society, which to me takes the form of, you know, like a fractal set of cocktail parties. The people that you want to like you, that they have the ability to steer you by threatening not to invite you to the next one. And my feeling is I no longer care because these folks have gotten so much, so wrong that it's not obvious why their sanction should have value. And the more I thought about that

[Bret Weinstein]

question, the more I realized that polite

[Sam Harris]

society exists in every era. And I leave open the possibility that it might have a positive amplifying effect in a good era. Right. That it might spur people to accomplish great things so that they could, you know, be heralded at the next cocktail party for their, their insights. But I realized you've seen there's some photographs that were discovered somewhere in the last couple decades, a Nazi photo album that had been languishing in somebody's attic. And it revealed, not the stuff that we're so familiar with from the Holocaust, but it, it revealed the, the private recreational lives of Nazis outside of Auschwitz.

[Bret Weinstein]

You know, the.

[Evelyn]

I heard something about this, but no, it's remarkable.

[Bret Weinstein]

And there are a couple photographs that

[Sam Harris]

I find just absolutely chilling where there are these, you know, well dressed Nazi girls. One of them, they're enjoying blueberries, right? Bowls of blueberries, like right outside of Auschwitz.

[Bret Weinstein]

Woof.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's wild. And I guess my feeling is, look, actually no, I want to turn the spotlight back on polites society and I want to ask the question, which is why should we care what you think at this moment when you, you know, okay, polite society is very committed to the idea that we have no choice but to vote for Joe Biden because of the, you know, the terrifying prospect of Donald Trump being elected again. Well, if polite society was making any sense, it wouldn't be running Joe Biden as a hedge against the reelection of Donald Trump, it would offer up somebody serious. It would, in fact, sideline its influence peddling racket. So that that was not an important argument against voting blue in this election. If it cared about us, that's what it would do. And the fact that it doesn't do that suggests that actually it's as cynical as it ever was. But it wants the little people to jump based on a fear of Donald Trump. That is irrational, in my opinion.

[Bret Weinstein]

Right, so when that's the game afoot, when polite society wants to turn, you

[Sam Harris]

know, its gaze on me and say, you're out of line, but it's not looking at the DNC and saying, what the hell are you people doing? Do you realize what you're playing with? Joe Biden shouldn't have been elected in the last election. The idea of running him again at this even more advanced state of decrepitude is insane, and yet doesn't cause the, the Democratic machine to blink. So, anyway, my point, again, I think, I think this is important to say clearly I'm not accusing anybody of Nazi, like, defects. That's not my point about the Nazi girls and their blueberries. My point is polite society existed right outside of Auschwitz. It exists in every era. The fact that it does or doesn't invite you to its cocktail party has to be evaluated. The meaning of that has to be evaluated in the context of whether or not polite society is doing its job of amplifying the good things about civilization

[Bret Weinstein]

or if it's doing the exact opposite

[Sam Harris]

and actually making us worse, making us petty and superstitious. And that is exactly what I think it's doing at the moment.

[Bret Weinstein]

So I guess I'm, I'm, I'm gladder to be outside of it and not

[Sam Harris]

welcome at those parties than I would be continuing to attend them.

[Evelyn]

Okay, so again, this is something that I concretized after listening to you, but the idea that shame has its place, You've said you don't want to throw that out. You have to understand it. You use pain oftentimes as the example. If you go to a doctor and they think that pain is in and of itself a malady that is to be gotten rid of, you've got a problem because pain is signifying there's an issue that you need to address, and it is adaptive, not maladaptive. I would say the same thing about polite society, though I will agree with you that you, you don't want to blindly accept polite society. So I'm going to take that as the shame mechanism and I'm going To say, okay, I don't, I'm not going to discard this lightly. But the thing that I disagree with and what you just said is that I don't think polite society will ever be its own policeman. And so this is why we need the. You call yourself, I think, a reluctant radical. So it's like we need, we need, reluctant or otherwise, we need the people that sit outside of polite society to also work their thing. And so while there's always going to be friction between polite society and the radicals, my whole mission in life is to get people to understand that you need to exist in dynamic tension. Like you, you don't want those two things to conform to each other. I would not want polite society to give up their sense of like this is how things should be. And I would not want the radicals to conform to polite society. So they're, they're, you need both of those things. They, they serve well only when they're in juxtaposition. Now, getting specific about Alex Jones, okay, so one thing that as I watch you, you are very much a part of my sense making apparatus. People can take that how they want, but you, Sam Harris is a part of my continued sense making apparatus. And I know people have beef with him. And my thing is like I'm not gonna believe everything you say or he says or anybody says. I think everybody's job is to take the best information they can get, discard the stuff that they think whatever, for whatever reason isn't bang on, and then synthesize their own thing. And if you can't think for yourself, you already have. So when I think about, okay for you, is there knowing that you use this hypothesis thesis dichotomy, is there a limit to what you think is a hypothesis that you will put out there? Do you have a governing matrix paradigm in your own thinking that says this hypothesis I will present publicly, this one I won't. Which will then tie into whether going on Alex Jones may have been. I haven't seen it, so I have no idea if you were like the voice of reason in the room. I think of him as somebody who has absolutely no Overton window. He will talk about literally anything. And so I would not want to see him censored because hey, better let me sort the wheat from the chaff rather than that be a top down decision. However, I put him in a very specific box because he has no, seemingly no self governance around what he will talk about. So do you have a thing that governs what hypothesis you will and won't Publicly explore.

[Bret Weinstein]

That's a great question, and it's odd.

[Sam Harris]

I don't exactly know the answer to it.

[Bret Weinstein]

Let me tell you how I think about it, though.

[Sam Harris]

There are certain properties that have a paradoxical nature. Free speech is one of them. We could waste the rest of both of our lives parsing the various examples of where speech has had some implication and whether or not the effect was negative or positive at a net level. But at the end of the day, the right answer is speech needs to be essentially perfectly free and the net outcome of that is positive. Likewise, I would say I've been engaged reluctantly in a battle with a person on Twitter who has been a very strong and I think not forthright advocate for the standard narrative on things like Covid vaccines. He wishes continued engagement. I don't want to further engage him because I don't believe that he is actually working forward from evidence to a conclusion. I believe he's working backwards from a conclusion. And so I don't think it's an honest debate. But my point would be this. In an honest debate, let's say that we have an honest debate over something that matters a great deal, like whether or not these shots are safe enough to give to a human being.

[Bret Weinstein]

Do I say, well, either the shots

[Sam Harris]

are going to kill more people or not taking them is going to kill more people. And if I have an argument with somebody about it and I'm. I'm saying, hey, I think the shots are going to kill more people, and it turns out that the shots save more people than were killed, am I then responsible for those deaths? Absolutely not. The way this works is anybody on either side of an honest exploration is contributing to us knowing more about where the dangers are and where the values are.

[Bret Weinstein]

Both sides get credit as long as

[Sam Harris]

they're doing it in good faith. As soon as somebody steps out of the realm of good faith, they no longer are in that position. They actually own the downsides of their argument. If you're going to argue that I'm responsible for the deaths, if I misunderstand something, then the point is, well, if

[Bret Weinstein]

it turns out you're wrong, you're responsible for those deaths because you chose that argument.

[Sam Harris]

But if you're willing to participate with me in exploring this and we can take up contrary positions, and at the

[Bret Weinstein]

end of the day, we both get

[Sam Harris]

credit for making the question clearer. That's a world I'm. I'm happy with.

[Bret Weinstein]

So, again,

[Sam Harris]

is there a limit to what I will present? Well, if there is a limit, it is a threshold. Very different from most people. And it has been. I can trace it back at least to college. In college, taking an evolutionary biology course. My final paper. The course was taught by Bob Trivers, very famous and influential evolutionary biologist. My final paper for the course was an exploration of the question of whether or not Hitler was in fact an insane maniac or whether what he did could be understood in. It's obviously as immoral as you get, but could it be understood in rational terms from an evolutionary perspective? Now, that is something I've been told is a question we must not explore. And worse, I've been told that it can't possibly be true. Right? People don't want it explored and they wish to lodge an answer to the question without exploring it, which I can't respect. But the fact that, you know, since I was in college and would have been 1991, I guess I've been exploring questions like that tells you that I'm willing to go places others won't. Now, I do so knowing that I do so carefully, that I bring tools to the table and that I. I have an obligation not to say things I believe are untrue. And I am trusting in some sense that the reality that I will end up unearthing is a valuable thing to have awareness of. If it is worth exploring the possibility that genocide is a rational objective. Immoral, but a rational objective. My belief is the likelihood that we will actually be able to prevent future genocides is increased if we understand that connection. Could I be wrong about that? I could be, but I'm a scientist to the core. I believe that unearthing the truth is valuable in the end, even if, you know, even if I die believing something that turns out to be reversed later on, the process gets us there over time, and it does embolden our best values.

[Evelyn]

All right, this is really interesting. Um, I firmly believe that everybody has a worldview. It's what I call whole life. Beer goggles. So everyone sees the world through a distorted lens, and we all get to distort that lens in whatever way we choose. Most people don't realize that. So they're born with something. They live in a value system. They just adhere to whatever they grew up with. Uh, but that. The warping of that lens is a combination of what you believe, your values and your genetics. What I'm hearing is a mapped value system from you that makes a prediction. So you're willing to explore whether Hitler or anybody else that commits a genocide is acting rationally immorally. You were very clear about that. But Rationally, some people, as you said, are going to say that's beyond the pale. Because if you find out that the answer is yes, the world gets a little worse. Because now I can't just lop him off at the knees and say, completely beyond the pale. It's all bad. It's only evil. The second you see it evil, react, go crazy. So the value that I think what you just said predicts is that truth and understanding trump even grotesque, detrimental results.

[Sam Harris]

Well, it depends if I understand what you just said. I am not saying that the value of knowing the truth is inherently greater than whatever harm might come of it,

[Evelyn]

but how will you know until you explore it?

[Sam Harris]

I won't. I could try to parse every instance of speech and figure out which. And I do. Obviously, the right to say anything is not the same thing as believing that you should say everything. But the exploration of studyable patterns, I believe, in the end inherently produces more value.

[Evelyn]

I'm beginning to understand how you get yourself in so much trouble. Are you, Mr. Weinstein? Yes. Okay, so it's interesting, though, and I think I'll be able to represent what you're doing in a way you will recognize. But if I go wrong, let me know. Okay. This all started because I'm trying to map the way that you think. And what you said about Hitler exploring genocide as a potentially rational, immoral, but rational act was to, I think, explain the underlying value system that you make these decisions on. Because we're trying to figure out what hypotheses would you or would you not explore. Okay, so I said that truth in understanding trump grotesque and detrimental results. You said, no, that's not quite right because you said that exploring that thing does not outweigh the potential damaging effects of knowing said thing. So if that's true, then in the Hitler as potentially rational example, you don't think that the knowledge of that will create a negative outcome that is worth shutting down the exploration for?

[Sam Harris]

Okay, I think I now am seeing this more clearly.

[Bret Weinstein]

Do you have further. You wanted to go.

[Evelyn]

If I've already gone off track now you should bring.

[Sam Harris]

No, you haven't gone off track. I have just completed Bobby Kennedy's new book on. It's called the Wuhan Cover Up. It is just like his last book, the Real Anthony Fauci. It is mind blowing. It's really shocking. It's an encyclopedic exploration of a quest for bioweapons that I had almost no understanding of before reading this book. The bioweapons question allows us to See the answer you're looking for because I would not argue that the simple fact that there are viruses in nature that could be enhanced in ways that might tell us something about possible human impacts on health from future pandemics or that might be enhanced in ways that would tell us something about weapons. We cannot continue down this road. Right. The degree to which our exploit exploration of those questions in the lab will result in massive human harm.

[Evelyn]

What if you never made the virus but you just explored gain of function theoretically?

[Sam Harris]

Well, that's the question is my sense is a. There is no mechanism by which you can prevent people from thinking about these questions. Nor should you. Because if you open the door to telling people what they can and cannot contemplate analytically. Okay, but my point is no, analytically

[Bret Weinstein]

we have to be able to talk

[Sam Harris]

about these things just as I have to be able to talk about the actual evolutionary meaning of rape and genocide. Right. Doesn't make those conversations fun. It doesn't mean, you know, could somebody hear a discussion of that and be inspired to go spread his genes, I suppose. But the value of understanding that pattern, the value, frankly, for women understanding the pattern, the degree to which it empowers them to make themselves safer from this hazard is significant enough that one can't parse. If you focus too much on the possible harms, you will miss the fact that there is effectively a related rates problem that makes the benefit of understanding these things exceed the cost. But I would not take that to the level of experiment. Right. The level of experiment has all kinds of perils that we should not engage. But the level of abstraction, I believe we are simply better off becoming as informed as we possibly can on every topic that has implication for human well being.

[Evelyn]

Have you looked at the IQ literature?

[Sam Harris]

A little.

[Evelyn]

What do you think about that? That's another hyper fraught, purely ideological. It's just the thought, just an idea. Man, does it freak people out.

[Sam Harris]

But here's okay, but I wish I

[Bret Weinstein]

had a better example for this, but

[Sam Harris]

when I was a kid there was a children's book that we read in my family. It was called the Monster at the End of this Book. Do you know the Monster at the End of this Book?

[Evelyn]

I don't, but I can make a lot of guesses based on the title.

[Sam Harris]

The Monster at the End of this Book is a book in which Grover becomes afraid because the COVID of the book tells you that there is a monster at the end of the book. And he attempts to prevent the turning of the pages because every page you turn brings you closer to what at the end of the book is going to be a monster. And of course you turn all the pages of the book and the monster at the end of the book is Grover. Nothing to be worried about right now. My point is we can look at all of these topics and we can spook ourselves about the danger that one of these topics is going to put us in some terrible circumstance we can't get out of and that we should try to imagine in advance without knowing what is at the end of the book. We should try to imagine in advance which of these topics should be taboo

[Bret Weinstein]

because you don't want to go there.

[Sam Harris]

But in so doing you are more or less saying, oh, I know what's probably there. And we can't afford to know that in any factual way. So that can't possibly be right because

[Bret Weinstein]

how do you know if you haven't

[Sam Harris]

gone down that road?

[Bret Weinstein]

So here's the thing. I'm not afraid of this IQ discussion.

[Sam Harris]

I think I know about where it lands.

[Bret Weinstein]

It could.

[Sam Harris]

It could have been far worse than I believe the evidence actually suggests. And I'll tell you where I think it goes and there is a bitter pill. But what is the net impact of understanding the implications of the IQ literature? I believe it is actually liberating for all of us humans. It is not going to be the

[Joe Rogan]

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