stock here: This is part 1 of 2 parts. Brett started out the Pandemic as a “true believer” also the “vaccines”. He is the one in 100 that can actually change his mind when presented with new truths.
A-Eye Summary
Bret Weinstein: Hidden Power, Institutional Failure, and the Future of Western Civilization
In this wide-ranging interview with John Papola on Dad Saves America, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein examines what he believes is a growing disconnect between democratic institutions and the people they are supposed to serve.
The Epstein controversy provides the starting point. Weinstein questions the Trump administration’s reversal in its approach to releasing information and raises the possibility that compromising material could be used to influence powerful people. He argues that such influence, if substantiated, would threaten the principle of government by consent.
The discussion broadens into institutional dysfunction, particularly in government, universities, and scientific research. Weinstein argues that organizations can develop incentive structures that reward conformity, discourage dissent, and protect established elites rather than pursue their stated missions.
Papola introduces another dimension: the internet has made institutional failures increasingly visible while allowing powerful networks and communities to operate across national borders. Both speakers explore how technology is transforming traditional concepts of citizenship, friendship, and political accountability.
Their discussion of globalization, immigration, and pandemic policies returns repeatedly to the question of whether governments genuinely represent the interests of their citizens.
The interview’s most important philosophical conclusion concerns the meaning of Western civilization. Weinstein defines the West not principally by geography, nationality, or ancestry, but by reciprocity, individual merit, and cooperation across inherited divisions.
He argues that humanity faces a choice between a future organized around common civic principles and one driven by competition between ethnic, religious, or ancestral groups.
The central message is that a functioning civilization requires trustworthy institutions, meaningful accountability, and an ability to place shared human values above inherited group loyalties.
Important distinction: The interview contains speculative claims about intelligence operations, COVID-19, climate science, immigration, and coordinated political influence. These are the speakers’ arguments, not independently established findings. The broader institutional and philosophical questions can be considered without accepting every factual premise advanced in the discussion.
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|Full Transcript
Bret Weinstein on Epstein, Institutional Trust, Globalization, and the Future of the West
Dad Saves America — John Papola in conversation with Bret Weinstein | Part One | Approx. 88 minutes
EDITORIAL NOTE Edited from the supplied automated transcript; timestamps and most verbal fillers removed, obvious caption errors corrected, and chapter breaks added. The source audio was not independently reviewed. Speaker attributions and uncertain caption wording may require checking before publication. Opinions and allegations are those of the speakers, not independently verified facts.
1. The Epstein Files and Unseen Political Influence | 00:01
John Papola [00:01] Bret Weinstein, welcome back to Dad Saves America.
Bret Weinstein [00:01] Great to be with you again.
John Papola [00:08] I’m sorry that your lovely and brilliant wife can’t join us this time, but we’ll have to do just the two of us and there’s a lot to talk about. So I want to start off with a snapshot because we are now as we sit here, you know, the better part of a year past the halfway point in the first year of this new Trump administration and there was a bunch of stuff going on that seems like it has gotten better and some things that have gotten strange and I’m just curious your take on it because you know you really you really came out and said this election is a pivotal moment for like the course of our civilization. Do you feel like that’s still true? Give me the snapshot.
Bret Weinstein [00:57] Yeah, the snapshot is I very much feel like we dodged a bullet and what we got is a mixed bag for reasons that I don’t understand and I don’t have the sense that anybody fully understands. But I don’t think there was another option. In other words, I’m perfectly comfortable with how I voted and what role I played and that the right choice was what happened. But that said, I feel like we are watching a movie in which there is a force that we know nothing about that accounts for many of the things that we can see with our own eyes. And so what I’d love to know is what’s going on behind the scenes that accounts for the various successes, failures, changes of course that we are all forced to grapple with.
John Papola [01:59] I that begs the question, what is leading you to believe there’s there’s a there’s hidden forces or they might be emergent. They might not be individuals or maybe they are individuals but what do you mean by that?
Bret Weinstein [02:07] Well, let’s take the Epstein situation. Yeah, it was a funny thing to promise us transparency on that issue to make indications that we were headed down that road, that we were going to see something important. And then a sudden about-face in which the administration swears across the board that there actually is nothing to see and that we should be happy with the other accomplishments of the administration cuz aren’t they wonderful? Something happened behind the scenes. Either they discovered something about what they had that caused them not to want to release it or some leverage was revealed that caused them to realize they couldn’t afford to release it. But I guess the point is if they had said nothing and done nothing, I wouldn’t necessarily infer something important.
But having said we’re giving you this and then making the embarrassing reversal of course suggest there’s simply an element of this plot that we don’t know anything about.
John Papola [03:27] Okay, I’ll keep this quick. Be sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell so you won’t miss more Dad Saves America as our videos come out each week. And it also really helps us because when we reach out to guests, they look at how many subscribers there are to decide if they want to come on and share their ideas. So, please subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. And thanks for watching. Now, back to the show. It’s a it’s a very strange story on a lot of fronts because it’s an old story.
I talked about this in a recent video that I think the f the first big piece on Jeffrey Epstein was in the New Yorker in like 2002 and it laid out the story of him as this international man of mystery and there was a cartoon charact version of him and Bill Clinton chummy with Chris Tucker and the act the actor whose name is escaping me from The Usual Suspects who got into a lot of trouble for pestery it’ll come back.
Bret Weinstein [04:42] Kevin Spacey.
John Papola [04:43] Kevin Spacey. And this is this is the article where you know Trump is sort of says, “Oh yeah, Jeff and I are good friends and he likes girls as much as I do, you know, and he and he likes them young.” And even saying that in public is weird in 2002, but you’re a playboy in New York, I guess. I don’t know. But it just keeps on going and keeps getting weirder. So, how do you understand what you know about this story? And why do you care?
Bret Weinstein [05:15] Oh, why do I care is the easiest question in the world, which is the what we do seem to know about the story implies a sophisticated operation to collect compromise. There’s some debate as to whether or not he was a freelancer arranging kompromat for his own reasons or whether he worked for somebody. I think it’s a slam dunk that he must have worked for somebody. But the point is this. I don’t the fact of the crimes committed by Epstein and the people that he was involved with is profound in its own right. But even if you put that aside, the important question for us is what role is the Epstein library playing in our governance of our own civilization? Our civilization to the extent that it is a departure from history is based on the consent of the governed which means that we govern ourselves.
But if something has gotten leverage over important people sufficient to cause things that we want not to happen and to cause things we don’t want to happen, then we are not self-governed and we need to know. It is a top priority for us to discover whether or not the amount of steering that is being done with that material is major which I suspect it is or it’s minor and it is you know and the world is roughly as we imagine it should be. So I don’t I don’t see higher priorities than understanding to what extent the democratic nature of our society is a fiction.
John Papola [07:04] Well said. The this is one of the elements of the new world we’re in that is so difficult to navigate if you see yourself as a truth seeker which is how when do I know that I have gathered sufficient information to be on the path of truth as opposed to caught in a web of lies. So, so you know, specific to this story, like how have you been trying to navigate that? How have you been trying to under and maybe there’s a some generalizable principles for those of us that open up our phones and say, “Holy cow, I don’t know what to believe,” which is to say all of us. But how are you probing into this? What are you looking at? What are you dismissing?
Bret Weinstein [07:55] Well, I would say I am in the lucky position of having spent my life building a toolkit that fortunately works across almost everything. The toolkit is scientific and I don’t mean by that what most people would mean. It’s not technical. But what I do is I build a model, something often that I just hold privately, and I refine that model based on how it predicts things in the world that I couldn’t possibly know. And to the extent that my model has value, it predicts things well. And to the extent that I’ve added something to it that’s incorrect, its predictive power drops off. And so I think we all do this whether we know it or not.
And the question is how good are you at it? and the idea that the Epstein Library, for example, was deliberately collected to shape world events is perfectly consistent with the idea that an administration that was promising to release this material would be opposed at the highest possible strength. On its way towards attaining the office and that upon reaching the office that there would be a strange turn a turnabout in which the materials would not emerge. So I guess the point is there is hidden leverage and those who have it will do anything to prevent its loss and that means that things will get strange. You will see a kind of distortion around some massive object that you can’t detect, but it will cause things to warp. And that’s exactly what we see every time in the Epstein case.
John Papola [10:05] Yeah. I mean, one element of what has happened with this that is really strange is I mean, it’s historically strange to have this gap between presidencies, right? to have Donald Trump come into office in 2016. And all the facts of his understanding, knowledge, experience with Jeffrey Epstein are already known and haven’t changed since. To then for him to come out of office to be prosecuted and persecuted with what looks like every tool his opponents have at their disposal. I guess save for this one, which is weird. If there is a tool against him that they could have used, why wouldn’t they have?
And then for him to come back into office having already been in the presidency and on the way in making promises about this material, which at in the prior period, he technically, I guess, should have had enough power to know what was there. And now we’re back and there’s this turnaround. And that sequence is really weird because it’s like, well, why didn’t the Democrats use it against him for the past four years? Why would he and his surrogates make promises about releasing it given that he should have known what’s in here in the prior period if they knew they couldn’t do that? So, flesh that out for me, cuz this is this is the part of this that is really kind of crazy, actually. I think this part’s easy, actually.
Bret Weinstein [11:44] Oh, okay. Let’s imagine that the cartoon view of what’s taken place is roughly right. Just broad brush. That Jeffrey Epstein was a front for an intelligence operation. Maybe one intelligence service, maybe multiple intelligence services, probably the latter, but whatever. There’s some hidden entity that enjoys a permanent advantage in terms of information and that it went about collecting specifically useful information through Jeffrey Epstein his connections and his ability to parasitize the worst aspects of human character etc. Okay, so you’ve got a pile of leverage points. First of all, you would want to use them as sparsely as you could.
You don’t want to define the leverage that you hold because somebody who is playing against you, who understands exactly what you hold, has a useful piece of information in its own right. So you would want to use it sparingly. In each case, you would never want to get to the bottom of the barrel where you’ve thrown everything at somebody that you wish to leverage and you have nothing left because at that point the incentives of the person who you’ve gone after with this piece of leverage has nothing left to lose and they turn on you. So you would imagine that there would be a kind of a hierarchy of leverage and that especially with a character like Trump. And I’m not saying that there are things about Trump himself in the Epstein library. I of course have no idea. They obviously had contact.
Maybe let’s just say I’m I’m not arguing that Trump is in there in the way that we fear others are, but like Prince Andrew for example, right? Like Prince Andrew for example. But if you had a character like Trump who had proven that he was capable of leaping levels of the game and changing roles radically and defying expectations, the last thing you want to do is take whatever leverage you have and throw it all at him and hope it works. Because if it fails, now you’ve basically injured the grizzly bear and you don’t have any ammo left. And you would exposed your
John Papola [14:37] tool set, right? That’s the other piece is that you’re in doing that, you’ve now invited the game to be fully revealed.
Bret Weinstein [14:47] Absolutely. So, what you would do is you would have a kind of this is the you know break glass in case of emergency piece of leverage that we are going to hold back if the worst comes at us. What would the worst be? Oh, that the president himself is interested in revealing the leverage war chest and that would be I mean just put yourself in the position of its owners that would be apocalyptic. So you would have something and whether that is a threat, a credible threat or it is a revelation of compromise on people that Trump can’t afford to lose or is emotionally connected to in a way that he would fall on his sword to protect them. Who knows what it might be?
But let’s just say a an intelligence service which would have a virtually unlimited budget to create leverage would know a great deal about what would work to persuade Trump. They would have invested heavily in analyzing him, what wouldn’t work. And you know the about-face Pam Bondi telling us was on her desk and she was ready to go and then Dan Bongino and Kash Patel telling us, “Hey, you know, it all is on the up and up. We’ve looked at the file. He killed himself.” That was such a strange episode. I think the most parsimmonious interpretation is that there was chaos in the administration as they grappled with the fact that something that they had planned to do was no longer going to be done. And I also thought the president’s tweet was profoundly revealing.
John Papola [16:37] Which one?
Bret Weinstein [16:45] So, maybe it wasn’t a tweet, maybe it was truth social and I saw it on Twitter, but he said effectively exactly what you would imagine that the man we’ve come to know would say, which was, “Epstein’s dead. Get over it. It’s in the past. There’s nothing you’re going to get here, but look at all the other marvelous things that you have gotten and are going to get. And would you really want to put that in jeopardy? In other words, he tried to negotiate with us, not understanding that Epstein isn’t just a list of priorities. Like I said a few minutes ago, knowing the degree to which we do not live in a democratic republic and are being governed by dark forces that collect kompromat and you know cause us not to be able to govern ourselves is a different kind of priority, right?
It’s not a it’s not a alteration in our tax rate.
2. The Internet and Dysfunctional Governance | 17:44
John Papola [17:44] This is there’s a bunch of different ways I feel like we’re all grappling with what you’re describing. And if to play this back and make sure I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like what you’re saying is that we are we are in a kind of emperor has no clothes moment. I don’t mean about Trump. I mean about our institutions.
I mean about the nature of at the western civilization America what governs the world what works what’s really going on and there’s a couple things and ideas that have in have scrambled this for me certainly one of which is Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public now he’s a CIA media analyst and so there’s that but I’ve had him on the show he’s a friend of mine now and his basic premise in that is that the internet and its sort of radical information tsunami has stripped the elite in our society of their clothes. So the emperor literally has no clothes and we get to see it. We get to see Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq which we wouldn’t have seen in the prior periods. We get to see people falling out of the, you know, Harrier jet, you know, wheel wells as they abandon Afghanistan. And we watch it in real time.
And so this has produced this profound level of distrust in the institutions and the people and the leadership. And it is distrust that is warranted because they’re not trustworthy. And we get to see it. And so there’s two ways I look I think about that. One is they’ve always been this corrupt and what’s new is we’re getting to see it. And that’s a sociological social evolutionary thing that we’re getting hit by kind of like when the printing press came out. And this is just one more example of that. JFK was basically coercing underage girls to have sex with people in the pool at the White House. This is not new being engross. But I think you’re saying something different than that, which is that there’s a change that’s going on. Or are you are you saying maybe it’s not a change?
Maybe we’re just having this the scales fall from our eyes and this is just a really acute way for it to happen.
Bret Weinstein [20:17] Well, like I said, my job is to build a model that predicts. I can say with high confidence that our institutions are beyond catastrophically dysfunctional. That part of the model predicts reality with such consistency that I have no doubt about it. There is a question about how far back that goes. Yeah, I can say I think it’s gotten profoundly worse over my lifetime. I think I’m old enough. I’m 56 and I think I’m old enough to barely remember functional governance. And I think that most of my life, certainly all of my adult life has been lived under what I would call entirely malignant governance, which gives people the impression that actually you’d be better off without government because it’s effectively, you know, a big spreading tumor.
And yeah, you’d be better off without the tumor, but you wouldn’t be better off without the thing that the governance built initially. And you know, I don’t know. Did it does it go back to 1963? Was there a coup in 1963? And the people who took power have never relinquished it. That is one possibility. And in that story, I would say Trump is the possibly unique departure where something that they did not control took power, which legitimately troubled them because they had built emperor-like powers into the presidency and suddenly those powers were going to be in the hands of somebody that they didn’t control. That’s terrifying if you’re if you’re that sort of person. So the institutions
3. Why Modern Institutions Agree on Bad Ideas | 22:07
Bret Weinstein [22:07] are effectively Potemkin at this point that you can be certain of.
John Papola [22:07] And just for clarity because this word we use institutions can become this sort of like empty vessel. What do you mean when you say institutions?
Bret Weinstein [22:25] well I don’t have a ready definition but I would say they are organized efforts to accomplish things and I would say above a certain scale they’re all preposterous you know and at the moment we see something interesting over in you know the NIH or HHS where we have honorable people who have now gotten command of an institution that it was doing the inverse of its mission statement and are trying to figure out how it works and you know turn it around 180° and so you know is that a dysfunctional institution it’s you know I’m hopeful but it will if they manage it that will be that will be the only functional institution that we’ve got above you know 100 people or something like that. But let’s look at you know pick an example universities.
John Papola [23:24] Yeah.
Bret Weinstein [23:29] Okay. We have universities and they if you walk onto a campus, it sure looks like that they’re doing a pretty decent job of educating young people. So they go into the world with, you know, enhanced cognitive capabilities and that they’re, you know, hard at work studying nature and discovering what makes us healthier and all that. If you look at the product and you test it, you know, do they actually make people smarter? No. There’s a pretty credible argument they make people dumber on average. And the quality of the research actually it is almost all unrepeatable.
John Papola [24:09] Yeah.
Bret Weinstein [24:09] And you know, we first we first got wind of this with the replication crisis in psychology and then the social sciences. And we what we discovered was that literally half or more of the results that we thought were true about human psychology, you couldn’t get the same result a second time. Meaning, no, it was never true. So, oh goodness, is that, you know, an embarrassing failure of one field while all the rest of them are humming along? No. Actually, I promise you, point that lens at any field and you will see it. Because what you’ve got at the very least is a competitive environment in which cheaters actually rise faster academically than people who play the game honestly. And so what you have is a system that becomes a test of how well you can cheat.
And so, okay, that accounts for one of the things about the university system that makes no sense. You have all of these collections of people trained at different times in different ways who had different developmental histories. These people should profoundly disagree in every discipline about all of the stuff that, you know, we don’t yet know for certain. And yet, if you go to Harvard, you will get the exact same stuff that you would get at your local community college. It’s like a McDonald’s hamburger, right? It is a perfectly consistent product delivered with very different aesthetics of the buildings. And that does not make sense. A proper university system would not look like that. Harvard’s biology department wouldn’t look like Yale’s, wouldn’t look like the community college, and yet they do.
And what’s more, when you look at what it is that they agree on, a lot of it is just preposterous. Not a single university in the country had its biology department stand up and say, “You know what? We’re sympathetic with people who have profound unresolved gender dysphoria, but that doesn’t change the biological nature of sex and there are only two sexes and you can’t switch between them.” Right? Not a single one, not a single medical school said that, right? There’s no university that departs from the phony consensus on climate change. Not one. Right? So what is going on that basically what you have is received wisdom being distributed as if it was the result of a process of discovery in which fierce disagreements were resolved.
And we now agree on this thing like DNA is the information molecule that governs the production of proteins in the cell. Right? That’s an honest conclusion and we all agree on it for a reason. And yes, there are a few people who might disagree, but that one’s natural. But all of the modern stuff, it is stuff dressed up to look like science and it isn’t. So you know that let me ask you this. Downstream of a university system that is demonstrably phony. Why do we expect the institutions that are inhabited by people who were trained in those universities to be any better and they aren’t?
John Papola [27:37] It is you know you have deep personal experience with this on so many dimensions including its most pathological forms and you know later this afternoon I want to talk to you about that but about the evergreen experience and revisit it for a little bit but I think that the what you’re talking about is so powerful partly because so much of the psychopathy is like the difference between men and women. It is it like we have eyes. Everyone knows there are men and women, male and female. The language of gender assigned at birth is instantly idiotic to every normal human being. And yet the Potemkin village consensus you’re describing holds up. And like the question is how like how does that happen?
Because even on the climate ch change example, there is a story right now and it is a message sort of focus group tested story and that story goes that increasing levels of CO2 right now are giving rise to dangerous destructive and perhaps extinction-level-threatening extreme weather and an increased velocity of extreme weather events. I am pretty sure because the I’ve looked at multiple sources from people that seem like they’re reasonable that just like look at the actual number of incidents of extreme weather events and costs of extreme weather events normalized for changes that you should normalize for. Like of course the cost of a hurricane hitting Miami in 1800 is lower than in 2025 because there weren’t skyscrapers there. So that’s not the weather. Or that’s a change in the value that was at risk.
This stuff’s knowable. So, so we can you can know with relative ease that there’s no correlation currently between CO2 changing recently and extreme weather events. Like that’s known. It’s the data is there from the major institutions that measure it. So, it’s another example of like quickly it’s not as easily getable as there’s men and women period, but it’s not that far off. And yet these narratives persist. So how does that happen?
Bret Weinstein [30:12] Well, that’s a terrifying story because how it happens is through very mundane incentive structures that cause departure from these phony consensuses to be punished. And all you have to do is set up a system in which people who question these things underperform and people who adhere to them and even better build them out as if actually the truth is even worse than you think. Those people prosper and so then selection does the work. Right? You’ve got you’ve got a system in which people are evolved to see certain things and evolved to be incapable of seeing other things and pretend that what they see is the product of scientific worldview. And it is it is the exact opposite. And the terrifying thing is that we actually depend on good information.
When I say that the climate change consensus is wrong, that implies something very frightening which is that we have no idea. We are changing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and there is a reason. The Arrhenius equation tells us that will trap heat. Is it trapping enough heat to matter? We don’t know. And so my instinct is no. Probably this is not a significant threat. And frankly, we have other threats that are much greater that we are not paying attention to that science would be very well constructed to reveal. And so for us to be obsessed with climate change in even cases where it has no relevance and to not be concerned with for example the migration of the poles and its relationship to changing solar dynamics is it tells you everything you need to know.
We are not going to pay attention to some very real threats that don’t happen to have humans as the causal agent and therefore do not suggest a bunch of draconian changes to what we’re allowed to do. And we are going to obsess about some claimed threats that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Not only do the numbers require you to edit to a very particular slice of history in order to analyze what the temperatures are, but the places that we have long-term temperature data are severely promoted polluted by the tendency of urbanism to have grown cities around them which put out heat. Some of the places that we measure temperature don’t even seem to be measuring temperature anymore yet it’s reported. So I don’t like to be this guy. I trained to be a scientist.
I want to be able to be a champion of the accomplishments of science and I want to say we need to invest in this because it’s you know it’s not perfect but it is it is making us better off by leaps and bounds. But at the moment the thing that looks like science is theater and that means that the real science isn’t being done. And yes, there are certain things where the science is very difficult and we’re struggling with how to do it or we would be struggling. But then a lot of the stuff we actually know perfectly well how to study many of these questions and we seem to deliberately avoid it. There’s
4. Corrupt the Incentives, Corrupt the Elite | 33:45
John Papola [33:45] the thing that connects our convers our conversation about Epstein and this is that they both point to the world of the elite, the world of a small relatively small group of people who go through in these institutions for you know and come out in a very particular way that seems really strange under this kind of basic scrutiny and really strange to normal people who don’t go through it who whose vision of their life looks something like you know try to get a decent job find a spouse have a family and try to protect that family build that family over time as best you can and enjoy the time that’s enjoyable and not all your life’s going to be that enjoyable there’s going to be plenty of stuff that’s hard but try to make the best of your life you can and it’s not about status seeking We are we all status seek in one way or another, but it’s not like my primary objective is how do I get to be well known or how do I get as many peer-reviewed inbound links on academic review site X? that’s a different mode.
That’s a particular kind of mode to have as your highest order concern. It’s an elite concern. Do you have a theory or do you have a model of the elite or that maybe even is evolutionary in nature? Like how do you think about the is there a unifying theory of elite behavior? You know, Rob Henderson who’s been on the show talks about luxury beliefs. They that seems like one aspect of this that’s some outgrowth of it. How do you think about it?
Bret Weinstein [35:31] Well, let’s leave open the question of whether we know who the elites are, right? We could certainly name some people who are likely candidates, but let’s just leave open the possibility that the elites is a real thing, but that our guess as to who’s in and who’s out is liable to be rough at best. I think you can say the following thing. The idea of a free civilization in which people are liberated to do a great variety of things and where you in general are rewarded for figuring out how to create wealth and the more wealth you create from which we all benefit the better you do. I’m not saying that’s the system will never work perfectly that way, but a system that roughly worked that way is more or less what we think we have or are supposed to have. It’s better than plunder. It’s better than piracy.
John Papola [36:35] Oh, I think it’s marvelous. I’m I am an unashamed defender of the idea
Bret Weinstein [36:42] of the West, which is not a list of countries. It’s a belief that we should level the playing field, liberate people as meaningfully as we can. Everybody should play their cards as effectively as they can. And we should expect and in fact desire people to be differentially rewarded based on how successful they are at creating wealth from which we all benefit. I think you’re not going to beat that system. However you can imagine that for people who have by whatever means through crime or through the production of wealth and doing well by doing good once you’ve attained another level right a level above what almost anybody ever achieves you have a lot to lose. Mhm. And the idea that you might therefore view with some concern all of the various contenders to join and ultimately displace.
In other words, there should be some churn amongst the people at the very top based on the fact that the people at the very top may play their cards badly and disappear from that strata and other people will play their cards well and they will join. And so if you’re in that strata, the question might be, well, what can I do to make sure that I’m always here, right? And you might imagine that collusion would emerge between them and they would say, well, you have the same concern because it’s natural. We’ve attained something. We’d like not to lose it. So, what can we do?
And yeah, there are some, you know, you can be smart and you can play your cards well, and that can stave off your dropping out of that strata for some period, but ultimately, it will dawn on a great many of them that, cheating such that those who are attempting to displace them have a harder time than they might otherwise, would be a reasonable thing. So what I’m effectively arguing is that we little people should, if we’re wise, should want the system that matches the brochure of our civilization, right? A level playing field where everybody has an opportunity, everybody has access to the market, you play your cards as well as you can, and you’re rewarded for making the world better in some way.
And then we’ve got a bunch of people who will naturally wish to conspire against that because built into that description that I’ve just given is a
John Papola [39:24] threat to their position. And I wonder I mean that is really an evolutionary explanation that a system in which everyone is free to join the elites is one in which the elites will take on a perspective in which they wish to limit the scope of that system so that they are not threatened by it. There’s I haven’t read deeply into this the work here, but I know there’s been some interesting writing on that one of the a potentially powerful force in our in human history has been kind of what you’re describing, which is to say fighting amongst elites essentially to protect turf and that and that people who are in a in a good position want to make sure that the people who are immediately at their heels can’t get that next way up.
And then and the and the fallout from the rest of that effort is that a lot more people than just the immediate competitors get harmed by that. But that actually the driving force is the I’ve reached this status point, this wealth status, how I see myself, the circles I’m in. And I don’t want you who are right there two years behind me to take my spot. I’ve seen this in corporate life especially. You know, I worked at Viacom, you know, it’s now called Paramount, but sort of big media corporation. There’s only there’s a very small number of the top spots to become a VP, SVP, etc. And the kind of warfare that goes on inside of that hierarchy is brutal. It can be brutal. And so that is that sounds a little bit like the kind of dynamic you’re describing. Is that is that how you understand it?
Is that another way to look at it?
Bret Weinstein [41:35] Yeah, makes perfect sense. And you can imagine in a corporate context, it means that you might expect the head of a division to hire the most promising people and you might be surprised that’s not what happens because of course the most promising people are in a position to outshine you. And so anyway, you would you would imagine that those institutions have a built-in obstacle to refining themselves in that there are perverse incentives for those who inhabit them. But of course, our democratic republic isn’t supposed to work like that at all. Right? We are supposed to effectively be the hiring authority who puts people into a position and if they don’t do our bidding in office, we’re supposed to throw them out.
Of course, the way the game evolves in the case of our democratic republic, we are effectively prevented from having reasonable choices so early in the process that we are forced to choose between unreasonable choices, all of which are effectively acceptable to the elites that haunt our system. And we it would we would be wise to break out of that dynamic.
5. Can the Constitution Survive Globalization? | 42:54
John Papola [42:54] Yeah. One of the in the case of something like Viacom as an example or even in theory universities although the universities represent an alternative argument but maybe not you have you have laziness self-defeating prisoner’s dilemma nonsense that gives rise to people protecting turf and ultimately not producing value for others the way they’re supposed to. And what leads that to die is that it still is a boat inside an ocean of competition. And so the Viacom boat runs aground because along comes YouTube and or whatever or the next thing. You know, Microsoft was the most feared monopoly because of its wind its Windows operating system at the end of the 90s early 2000s.
And as we sit here, Microsoft doesn’t manufacture an operating system, design, develop, ship an operating system for phones, which is the far more dominant computing platform. And so the market at large is like that ocean of competition that keeps these sort of corrupting forces inside of a hierarchy from polluting everything. It’s like, okay, well, Microsoft, you got fat and lazy. Steve Ballmer, you laughed when the iPhone came out and said, “Well, it doesn’t have a keyboard, so it’s not a good email machine.” And you turned out to be wrong and lazy and stupid and you got destroyed. Our politics doesn’t work that way at the national level because there is no competitor. Those are just called other countries.
And as the best I can understand of what our founders tried to do is say, well, that’s why we should keep the federal government really small and contained. Have there be inter interdep departmental competition? This the separation of powers and federalism decentralize power and authority to these 50 well at the time less but now 50 states such that we’re trying to exploit competition as best we can with a rule set that’s supposed to keep that like within a bound that we still we’re still the country. We don’t fly apart at the seams. But California gets to be crazy and Texas gets to be less crazy and people vote with their feet. Isn’t that still what’s happening? Why is that gone? Why does that why do those forces seem to have started to break?
Bret Weinstein [45:24] Well, I mean, I do think this goes back to the Epstein question and not directly, but my sense is we little people suffer from informational disadvantage that is now being fully cultivated by some force whose name we don’t know. And what that means is that when we look at a map and we see countries with names that we are familiar with and we see borders and we think this is a people and it is governed by a structure, we are effectively signing up for a fiction that does not mirror the reality of what governs this planet. So for example, I cannot answer the question having spent a good fraction of the last 5 years on the puzzle. I cannot answer the question why were we partnered with the Chinese on bioweapons technology.
It does not make sense to me if I think of what I understand to be the Chinese Communist Party, its relationship to the nation called China, the relationship of the nation called China to the nation called the United States. None of these things add up. It makes no sense that we would have been partnered in this way. So what I’m forced to conclude is that there is some entity who I can occasionally detect the action of that unifies some part of the Chinese power structure with some part of some American power structure. Maybe something within the Democratic Party that caused a pandemic scenario that I know to have been mostly fiction to unfold which then allowed a lot of things to be done that had meanings.
You know, I can detect that there was a very smart business play inside of pharma in which a technology that they owned, the mRNA technology, which could not be brought to market because it has a flaw that causes major harm to people who take the technology. Well, they needed an emergency. And so the pandemic, whatever it was, created an emergency that allowed this very profitable technology to become normalized in the public. That is downstream of some collaboration between Anthony Fauci and something he’s connected to and the Wuhan Institute of Virology and something.
So basically my point is imagine that you just had a globe on it with no markings and that somebody was going to sit you down and say let me tell you about the real power players on this map and they were to say the real power players are you know you’ve got people in these five capitals who are collaborating in a some sort of a consortium and this is its this is the name they call it and This consortium has an interest in these five speculative positions in markets that they expect to emerge and it fears the seven things that are owned by this other consortium, right?
Somebody could sit you down and they could tell you, “Here are the real lines on the map and here are the real alliances and every time you say China, you’re being stupid because China is actually divided between three parties, right? you know, there’s the heterodox Chinese Communist Party, there’s the Orthodox Chinese Communist Party, and then there are the Chinese anti-communist or something like that, right? If you knew, if you had just that, you know, day one, you know, here are the real players, here’s what they own, here’s what they think is going to happen, and here are their partners, here are their enemies, right? If you had that, oh, then we could say a lot about why things unfold the way they do. If I have to invoke, well, what do the Chinese think?
That’s like asking, you know, why are the Americans taking the position that they are in Ukraine? And the answer is, I’m an American and I have no idea why we take the position we do in Ukraine. I think the people who know that are somehow they have captured the Democratic party and you know, and half of the Republican party and they’ve got their own reasons. And I have no idea whether this is about resources or it’s about bioweapons research or it’s about a long-term play to create a need for weapons. I don’t know. But I know I know that the lines on the map are misleading me.
6. Are We Evolving Toward Virtual Community? | 50:24
John Papola [50:24] Gosh, that makes me think of so many different ways of thinking about that. But when you describe it that way, there’s like one place to push is time and technology and here’s what I mean by that. So we if you go back to the founding of the country, you go back to the founding fathers and try to imagine you’re there. Here you are in this in these colonies and you’ve we think about it like they’re British. We sort of make these sort of modern assumptions about life and about connectivity that aren’t weren’t true. So in reality, you have been there and your family’s probably been there actually for a while, long enough that this is your own home and your connection to Britain is literally letters. There’s no telecommunications. The ship to get you there, the chances you’ll die on it are pretty high.
So you’re not doing that. And if you do it, it’s going to take months. And so your notion of country is very fundamentally physical and embodied and geographic. And it’s in and it’s woven into things that have been part of the human experience forever, which is like family, community, you know, religious, physical practices. It’s physical. It’s a physical reality. We are countrymen in a physical space. It’s geographic. And so you then end up with we want to be our own thing. We don’t like you across the ocean. Now we’re going to be our own country. And we’ve actually kind of been our own country for a long time, which is why this works. And that has been the way humans have lived for forever until you get modern telecommunications.
And now you start to have this ability to have to see and especially in our modern age you can see your community your culture your pe your people my people in a you know cutting AC it’s non-physical like I can be part of a group of people that goes to Davos and my WhatsApp and Signal and iMessage threads are all the people I see in Davos and I could I could pick any group on left right that you know I have groups of things like this of people all around the country that I talk to on a regular basis and that’s and so now I think of them as my people I have my local community but frankly I spend less time talking to my neighbor than I do interacting with people halfway around the world and so that’s a totally new type of social organization I haven’t really thought about it this way but it is it’s like it’s a non it is It’s globalism.
It’s like we’re now globally connected. So, we can have global organizations and global affinity groups. So, it makes perfect sense that, oh yeah, we’ve got these lines we drew from the before times when we were this geographic embodied creature. But, you know, if you get to a certain point, you can you can almost be already be a kind of transhuman whose community is virtual and that you see from time to time when you fly a private jet to Switzerland. Is I mean, how much of that is what is what’s at play, do you think?
Bret Weinstein [53:53] a lot. And I remember I was talking to Heather about this a few days ago. I remember the very predictable articles that were written when Facebook destroyed the meaning of the word friend, right? and it tells a kind of story that we need to know. It’s far from the only example of this. But when Facebook adopted the word friend for somebody that you agreed to connect with, it rendered the idea of friend preposterous because you could have a thousand of them. And the problem is that in the old meaning of the world word friend, you wouldn’t want a thousand of them because you can’t tend a thousand friendships and that means they’re all thin as can be, right? So, Facebook used the wrong word.
But the interesting part of this is that later on we really did evolve into a creature that has honest to goodness virtual friendships. And it didn’t happen all at once. But the number of people in my world who I actually care about and know well who I haven’t yet met in person is not zero. Yeah. Right? You can develop real friendships. You can develop trust because the modality has gotten richer. And so it’s like Facebook stepped on the foothill of something and it was roundly mocked for its use of this term. And I think in some sense should have been because it pretended that those connections were more than they were.
But it hinted at something that happened in the future, you know, a decade or two later that is profoundly important and does explain like imagine that you’ve got the cognoscenti who are the people who realize that the lines on the map are antiquated, that they’re you know some archaic way of viewing social relations and they are enlightened in the sense of oh well my country can be diffuse and here’s its governance structure and here are the people that we care about and try to take care of and that it exists among us. That would that would fit very well with the world I think we detect.
John Papola [56:22] My I mean some of this is not only not harmful but good, right? So, you mentioned you’ve got people that you really care about that you don’t see in person. My son has a friend that left that moved to London when he was in fourth grade and their friendship has been maintained and he doesn’t see him frequently, but he has seen him since. And their way of maintaining their relationship has been through Discord and World of Warcraft or and occasionally playing Magic the Gathering, you know, o over Discord with his webcam looking at his looking at his table. So, that’s great. That’s a that is a good thing. It’s good that’s that was possible when I was a kid. You know, somebody who left the neighborhood to go 30 minutes away because their parents moved, they might as well have vanished.
Like, they ceased to be like I remember I had a friend, Seth, and his parents moved not that far away. Seth vanished from my life and I never saw Seth again because it he they just were outside of the zone of what was like normal ongoing contact that constituted friendship in the halcyon days of the late 80s early 90s. So are we dealing partly do you think with a kind of you know technological social evolutionary process that was inescapable? I want to come back to the question of like forces that are specific and intentional, but leaving them aside just for now. How like what percentage of what we’re grappling with now that sprouts up with things like Epstein and weird globalist stuff is emergent is an evolutionary result of technology and social change.
Bret Weinstein [58:14] Well, I believe we modern humans are confronted with a picture in which we are constantly out of our depth because we have departed from any environment that looks anything like the one we evolved in. Hyper. Not only that, yeah, hyper novel. Exactly. But not only that, it’s hyper novel because the environment that we grow up in isn’t even the environment that we’re adults in. So we’re constantly fish out of water. And the problem with that, as you allude to in bringing up the concept of hyper novelty, is that you struggle to know how to react to things.
And so what you’re describing is a world in which you know am I glad that I can have a honest to goodness friend group that is distributed around the world and that is composed of the people who I think are most I don’t want to say interesting or useful but the things that cause you to want to spend time with somebody I can now pick from a world of people rather than people who just happen to be in my town. Is that a benefit? Yes. However, it comes with the same technology that causes me to lose sleep over the possibility that my kids will get sucked into a totally counterproductive eddy, whether it’s porn or video games or whatever it is that might cause them to tap into some reward structure that is counterproductive, right? That’s not a hazard that we evolved to deal with. And you know, it happens.
It inhabits the same screens. So, I think the net effect of all of this is quite negative, but some of the benefits are so spectacularly positive that it’s hard to realize all that we’ve lost.
7. When Governments Turn on Their Own People | 1:00:23
John Papola [1:00:23] there be this morning as I was sort of prepping it for this conversation somewhat off-handly I brought something up that I don’t understand that seems like an example of exactly the dynamics you’re talking about and that is it appears to be the case that in the United Kingdom a land whose indigenous people are indeed English and Scottish and Welsh and they’re white they’re Irish they’re white people I don’t care about the lightness. That’s not the point, but it ties into this. You have a dynamic going on that seems shocking and impossible to understand, which is you have a disproportionate amount of fairly heinous crimes in the form of sexual abuse taking place perpetrated by immigrants. And I am Mr. Pro immigration. Every time I talk about immigration on this channel, my viewers are like, “Shut up.
You’re like a liberal.” but it does appear to be a fact that you have largely, frankly, Muslim immigrants in the UK often being forced into small towns, then committing fairly heinous acts with young girls, often in gangs, these grooming gangs. And the police are going after the people complaining about their daughters being raped by Ethiopian and Pakistani immigrant groups who are all basically military-aged men who came over on a boat and were given a check and put up in a hotel at taxpayer expense. And that’s happening enough that you now have movements, which again is also crazy, where across the country, they’re flying their own flags, the flag of their country, and they’re and their local governments are tearing them down because they’re saying it’s hate speech to fly your own flag.
And one other thing I saw recently was they’re sending female police officers around being trailed looking to catch people cat calling them, which is not a crime, but they want to intimidate people. But they’re not doing it in any of the areas that you where that’s actually happening, which are these areas that frankly involve a lot more of these immigrant groups who are coming from cultures that are more misogynistic and treat women more like property. You know, they’re going through like the working-class white neighborhoods and how do you what the hell’s going on? Like, how is the how do you how does your local police person wake up in the morning and do that? Like, and why would the leadership do that? Like, none of it makes any sense at all. You’re it’s it’s England. It doesn’t I don’t understand.
But it but the one explanation is that the governance leadership of that country right down to the level of local small hamlets sees itself as being part of something that has nothing to do with that geography. It’s got some other shared ideology or something. That’s one that’s one explanation. It’s like well this you’re you’re thinking about this like peoples that live in places but that’s not what’s going on. What do you think? What’s going on?
Bret Weinstein [1:03:48] Well, I see that story exactly as you do. It’s unthinkably strange. Horrifying, too, but unthinkably odd that the players would allow it to unfold the way it does. And I want to step back a second to COVID, just because I think this is in some sense the clearest glimpse that we’ve gotten at something. During COVID, we were told a large list of things that we were to do and another list of things that we were to avoid almost to a thing. The lists were reversed.
John Papola [1:04:31] Right.
Bret Weinstein [1:04:32] Right. They wanted to lock you indoors where most people get COVID and they closed the beaches and the hiking trails. Where should you have been? Beaches and hiking trails. COVID didn’t transmit outdoors. The sunlight exposure would give you vitamin D, which was terrifically successful at preventing people from getting COVIDVID. Every single thing was upside down. You can’t get every single thing upside down through incompetence. It just doesn’t happen, right? Incompetent people can’t succeed in figuring out what the correct list is and flipping it. So the point is there’s a reason that you’re getting the inverse of the correct advice at the point that your civilization is doing the exact inverse of what it should be doing if it wishes to be a civilization 50 or 100 years from now.
If it’s one thing, you could say, “Oh, that’s stupid.” But if it’s thing after thing, then the point is well, as they say in military circles, once is an accident, twice as a coincidence, three times as enemy action. And I think the clear message of this is something hostile to what we think of as England has gained an awful lot of control over the governance of the thing we think of as England. And what they want I don’t know but if you just simply imagine well imagine that imagine that England’s enemy had decided to undo England but you know war is too obvious then it would do something like this right I don’t you know how dumb do you have to be to invite, incentivize, and coddle immigrants to your country who hate you. Right? I mean, my feeling is, you know, I have I have mixed feelings about immigration.
My feeling is there is some number of people. I don’t know if we’re above the number of people that we need or below the number of people we need, but there’s some answer to that question. We would be collectively better off if there were more people. Fine. If that’s the answer, legal immigration. Let’s bring in people at the right rate. Let’s not bring them in so that they don’t assimilate because we bring in too many from the same place all at once and so they end up creating a community that doesn’t intermingle. But okay, so you bring in some number of people.
But my first concern would be, do you bring in people who want to be part of our project, who like us, who aspire to earn their way here and will be proud, or are you going to bring in people who literally detest us and would like to see nothing more than our destruction? Right? It’s so obvious. I can’t imagine a well-intentioned structure making this error.
8. The Battle Between “Us” and “Them” | 1:07:39
John Papola [1:07:39] It’s it’s it’s it’s a place I find myself thinking about that’s like I had stopped thinking about which because I was in New York for 9/11. I was working in New York City. I wasn’t actually in the city physically on that day. I was in the bus. I was on the bus on my way to New York City from my girlfriend’s house at the time who happened to be a very lovely Orthodox Jewish family. I’m Italian Catholic, but this was my Orthodox Jewish girlfriend. And so I watched the towers fall from their living from their kitchen cuz the bus stopped. I saw them smoking.
I saw the tower smoking and then turned around and I hitched a ride with a lady that was on the bus with me back to Pam’s parents’ house and watched this happen and in horror and like the rest of the country became deeply worried about this Islamic terrorism and al Qaeda and these forces etc. And then after the grinding sort of nightmarish failures of Iraq and the military adventures that followed became sort of disillusioned and came to feel like well maybe this fear about Islam isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be and I don’t really think I trust the people saying we should go into and do all this stuff. So I turned inward and said I don’t want to be involved in any of that.
I got excited about Ron Paul and I put the question of like Islam and all of that kind of out of my head and then along comes October 7 the specifically the responses to it globally on college campuses which suggested things that are really dark. This is before there was a response to October 7. And then I see what’s happening in Europe with the way these kinds of crimes are being handled and the way the governance in Europe is responding to this what seems like fifth column in their society. And it makes me think that whatever this force or forces are they that they have there’s some allies at work. There’s some alliances at work that I also don’t understand.
For example, I don’t understand how anybody could have more than two brain cells and see themselves as both a LGBTQIA plus two spirit whatever activist and be in favor of any Islamic regime or even or ever like how do those two things coexist? How do you get queers of queers for Palestine? That seems like something like some manifestation of a dark alliance that I don’t understand because it doesn’t it doesn’t hold it doesn’t work. Is that part of is that part of this conversation for you? Is that on the radar? Like I know I’m sort of I mean in talking in generalities, but this is this is the lens I’m looking at some of this stuff through and saying like how could this be happening?
Bret Weinstein [1:10:54] Well, look, I know how this is going to sound and I don’t like it any better than you do, but my sense is most people do not have any idea how to think about the present and so they are failing in some number of ways and I don’t get terribly focused on the particular way that people fail. The real question is can we is there a way to think about the present that doesn’t cause you to fail, right? Is there a way that we can be that we can stay grounded and start concluding things that aren’t that are correct and predictive without accepting too much and finding ourselves in that same bucket of failing modes. So look, I see the world through a particular lens that I think is doing that. And unfortunately, it runs a foul of almost everybody, right? Like I have almost no partners in this because well, you’ll see.
Yeah. Okay. The basic idea is we are caught in a battle. It is very definitely a battle of us and them. It’s a battle to the death. I want to be careful to make it clear that I don’t think there should be anybody in the them category, but there are plenty. The battle involves a recognition that human beings can collaborate at the level of civilization based on two principles. One of them is the principle that the west is based on and I want to reserve the right to come back and define the west in a personal way rather than the way most people might. But the west is based on reciprocity and it puts aside genetic lineage. It doesn’t ignore it entirely.
But the basic idea is you should partner with whoever you should partner with because of the characteristics that they bring to the table, not because of where their ancestors come from. The alternative to this is the more ancient form, the lineage-based form in which you are part of a branch of the tree of life and specifically the human branch of the tree of life. And we are divided into different lineages. And the good people are the people from your branch and everybody else is a threat. And you might partner with them, but you partner with them for the purpose of advancing the interests of the branch of the tree of life that you and your kin are from. That’s the old ways. The old ways, they are not the same. The future depends on us embracing the cosmopolitan west.
It depends on us putting aside issues of lineage versus lineage because the lineage versus lineage stuff ultimately involves the displacement of lineage A by lineage B. If you have a planet that’s as technologically advanced and connected as we are and you start playing that game where lineages are attempting to displace each other, it will end with our bloody painful annihilation. So I see the embrace of our willingness to partner with each other irrespective of lineage as the only hope for our future. In that light, the US are the people who are on board with that idea. Yeah, I don’t want to care about where your ancestors come from. If it’s interesting where your ancestors come from, I’m perfectly happy to hear about it.
I’m happy to study who your ancestors have been and what they might have learned, but I’m not going to decide whether you’re good or bad based on who they are. Right? If you’re on board with that, you’re part of us. If your point is not so fast, those people are awful because they believe in this or because they practice that or whatever it is, then you are a threat to humanity until you get over that. So what I see in the Middle East is two parties that have control over their civilizations that are interested in displacing each other. And there are no doubt people in both of those civilizations who given the choice would far prefer to put lineage aside and be prosperous and not fear people based on what language they speak or what gods they pray to etc.
So each of our cultures is a mixture of people who are of these two different modes and our survival depends on hopefully persuading all of the people who are interested in lineages displacing each other irrespective of their story about why in this moment our lineage must displace those other people. We have to either persuade them to join us or defeat them. And my concern about what’s going on in the Middle East is that the lineage versus lineage perspective is dragging the rest of the world in. Which side do you do you side with? And now we’re back to lines on a map, right? Well, is it the people on this side of the line or the people on that side of the line? And my answer is it’s not people on either side of the line.
People presumably on both sides of the line who are on board with the future and then there are people on both sides of the line who embrace a way of seeing things that is hostile to the future and I want those of us who are interested in getting to the future and understand the problem of the other viewpoint to join forces. So what do we do with the LGBTQ person chanting from the river to the sea? Well, that’s a ridiculous failure mode. And you know, we should look at them with some pity because they’re not smart enough to realize that they are completely incoherent and should be embarrassed.
On the other hand, I don’t like the rationalizing of the destruction of an entire population to go after a terrorist organization that the leader of Israel actually argued needed to be financially supported in order to cynically divide the Palestinians. Right? That’s a different failure mode. I don’t like it any better. And so anyway, now you can see why my perspective makes no friends anywhere because the point is whoever you’re signed up with, I don’t like them. I think they’re missing the boat. And the real boat, the one we need to be on, is the one in which we reject. Anybody who’s pushing lineage as the enlightened perspective because it isn’t. It’s dangerous. It is always a threat and we have to reject it.
John Papola [1:18:51] That is that is some thick soup you just served. It is rich. It is thick. It is not watered down, but it is a little coated. And so, I want to I understand exactly what you’re saying. In plain terms it’s like look the whether it’s Israel versus the Palestinians whether it’s sort of you know European Englanders versus inbound you know Muslim immigrants the it is tribal it is it is it is clanish genetic tribalism that is the enemy is that a decent way to summarize it is that how you’re seeing it that if you’re on board with the old ways of clan as defined by my genes and my historical background that’s that is the engine of trouble.
Bret Weinstein [1:19:56] You’re basically right, but I want to make what we’re talking about is so explosive it’s it’s important to get it precisely right. Yeah, we are evolved to displace each other. It makes perfect sense that we would be in light of what we understand about evolution and genes.
John Papola [1:20:15] And when you say displace each other, what literally do you mean? This has nothing to do with humans.
Bret Weinstein [1:20:22] Okay. When a dandelion finds itself spreading into a valley and taking resources, those resources are being denied to the other plants that were growing there before. It’s just simply displacing them. And evolution is a de facto game of discovering exploitable resources and capturing them. So human beings naturally because for the same reason that we don’t have we’re not confused if a father rushes into a burning building to save his offspring. Right? In fact, we can explain that in very simple genetic terms. But the point is that same tendency to view your own offspring with such favor that you will risk your life to preserve them works for populations also. Now I would argue it is good in the case of a father saving his child and it is lethally dangerous when it comes to modern populations of people.
That was necessary in the past. And you will find basically the logic of protecting your genetic kin in biblical texts. If you look at Moses’s laws for war, they line up very well with a recipe for spreading your genes. But you will also find in biblical texts things like Jesus’s story of the good Samaritan in which he basically argues that an individual who would in the past view have been seen as other and not worthy is worthy and should be taken care of despite the distance in his level of relatedness. Right? Should you rush into a burning building to save him? Well, that’s not what Jesus says, but he says two days wages and you know, bandage his wounds. He says, you know, he’s a human being. He’s entitled to be treated as such. And, likewise, the story of, the golden rule, right?
The golden rule is the it is a description of how to view people reciprocally. And you’ll notice that in that telling there is nothing about you know treat people who share your dialect as you wish to be treated. It’s people.
John Papola [1:23:04] So that’s why I mean that’s and it’s high I mean it’s also you know Christ is asked well you know do you accept the laws of Moses and he responds as I understand the text and as I understand the gospels there’s really only two rules really. There’s love God and love your neighbor as yourself, which is a rearticulation of that golden rule, but delivered as a command as a this is what the moral code is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. So yeah, I mean it’s very deep.
Bret Weinstein [1:23:43] It’s it is deep and it points towards a future in which we do put lineage aside. We are going in the reverse direction. Mhm. When we are fostering this, you know, I hesitate to say tribal because tribe isn’t necessarily lineage, but in general, they overlap. But when we allow these tribal narratives to justify the destruction of and the displacement of other people, we are falling back into a mode that is very natural in humans. Like I said, it didn’t start with us. It, you know, it’s true of all living creatures, the tendency to attempt to displace.
But the problem is, if you play the human game at this level of technology and this level of interconnectedness in an effort to displace other people with different genes, a you’re doing something stupid because why do you care what the spelling of their respiratory enzymes is? You know, your respiratory enzymes care because that’s how they got into the present. But you shouldn’t care. And so we can turn the amazing story of humanity into a stupid redundant story of genes displacing alternative genes. Right? There’s nothing interesting about that. It’s not honorable. It’s not productive. It is just simply bloody. Or we can say, you know what, evolution played the displacement game. That did make us who we are. It built vulnerabilities into us that we need to be aware of.
But it actually also did something else, something spectacular, which is it endowed us with a capacity to reason and a capacity to hold values that we understand and that can guide us. So we are a unique creature. Our ability to have a value that says actually we prefer peace to war. We prefer others not to suffer irrespective of whether or not they are close kin. That capacity allows us to define a different future and we have been attempting to do it. The reason I don’t like defining the West as a set of nations is that all of the nations that you might put on that list routinely fail to live up to the promise of the West. And sometimes they shine and they succeed at it. And my point is what I’m interested in is here’s what the West is supposed to be.
And I’m interested not in a group of nations that claim to believe that thriving. I’m interested in everybody who actually does believe it pushing their own governance structures in the direction of doing it better so that we can get as close to that ideal as possible. I don’t believe we will ever achieve it perfectly, but we can get close. And one of the things, maybe the prime thing that we have to do is resist the immense gravitational pull of the old ways back into lineage versus lineage displacement games.
John Papola [1:26:56] All right, folks. This is actually part one of a two-part episode. So, next Thursday will come my conversation with Bret, part two. And it is a good one. We dive into his really interesting and unique and frankly somewhat solitary takes on the Middle East and the impacts it’s having on America, American government, American culture, and his own experience of being an American as someone of Jewish descent. They are surprising takes that he’s got and there’s a lot more there and so we talked for a long time and it’s two bites at the apple. So stick around. If you aren’t already a subscriber, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you won’t miss next week’s episode with Bret Weinstein.
