Transcript: Biologist Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan Podcast #2408

Well, it’s sort of like a graphics card in reverse. It’s processing the incoming information so that you can act in real time. When you’re fighting, you can understand what your opponent is doing, anticipate their actions and all of that.

That is an amazing piece of hardware. And it would be stupid not to use it when your eyes are offline. When your eyes are closed, because your eyes are built for the day, and during the night, you’re going to close them rather than go out and get yourself in trouble in the dark.

You’ve got this amazing processor, and it is capable of running through practice of various kinds. And my hypothesis for what’s going on here is that basically, you, as a creature with a very complex set of hazards and opportunities in your life, use nighttime when you’re not doing productive work to get ahead on challenges that you may face in one way or another.

Sometimes those challenges are warnings about defects in yourself that might put you in a bad situation. Like if you’re a procrastinator and you’re in school, you may have nightmares about showing up to the exam without having attended class or something that kind of gets you focused.

Or they can be other kinds of practice. They can be philosophical practice, they can be situations in which you might be morally compromised, where you need to go through the experience of being faced with a choice where you really should choose A, but B is very appealing or something.

So I would say scenario building, that your mind is running you through little movies that it makes. They’re not completely rendered because it would be too expensive and pointless to do so. But the central elements, the important stuff is there for you to have the experience so that when you do run up against a situation that’s analogous, you’ve practiced it a number of times and you’re not starting from scratch.

And I would just point out that the strongest indicator of this for me is when I experimented for a while with lucid dreaming. Have you ever done that?

Lucid Dreaming Experiences

JOE ROGAN: I’ve only had a couple of lucid dreams, but one where I think I specifically allowed it to happen because it was after I watched this documentary. This guy was talking about lucid dreams, and he said in order to know if you’re in a dream, every time you walk by a door, hit the side of the door and say, “am I in a dream?”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Which then very frequently wakes you up. So if you’re going to practice lucid dreaming, you have to practice not to wake yourself up as you become cognizant that you’re in a dream.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I did wake up after I realized I was in a dream. Not long after, there was a few moments where I was like, oh, my God, this is so crazy because this feels so real. But I just, my hand went through that door, so I know this is not real.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s not real.

JOE ROGAN: Because that tactile didn’t…

BRET WEINSTEIN: The feedback isn’t right.

JOE ROGAN: And it was instantaneous that I recognized, like, oh, this is like the guy said. Do every time you walk through a door while you’re awake, “am I in a dream?” So you’ll get to a habit of doing that every time you get to a door. And so that habit will exist in your dream.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. And if you keep going down that road, so you get used to the answer sometimes coming back, “oh, this is a dream.”

JOE ROGAN: Do you have techniques that you use to facilitate this?

BRET WEINSTEIN: This is pretty much it. You look for, you can look at a clock, you can look at written text. There are certain things that don’t render very well.

JOE ROGAN: Written text is what I’ve heard.

BRET WEINSTEIN: So if you do that and then you get used to not freaking out, when it gets more and more normal for the answer to come back, “oh, this is a dream,” then you can, at some point you get control to just not wake up and you stay asleep.

And so then you’re in this very interesting situation where you can play, you can direct. But here’s what I was going to say about the general purpose of dreaming. When I got to that state and I was there many times, I found the following division. I could perfectly control what I did or said. I was unable to affect anything about the world of other people.

In my dreams of doors, I couldn’t control what was beyond a door if I opened it. So what that told me is that this is built. Why shouldn’t I be able to predict what somebody else in my dream says? I’m obviously scripting them too. You would think it would be easy to predict what they say, but I never once got it right and I tried many times.

So what this tells me is that you’ve got a movie generating mechanism in your mind and it has to be shielded from your consciousness in order for it to be useful training. You see what I’m saying?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I do. Why are you sold on this idea that it’s training you for scenarios that you could possibly encounter or moral dilemmas?

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s not, you know, some of it is scenarios. Sometimes that’s what it is, sometimes it’s moral dilemmas, but it’s things that your mind finds likely to be relevant and significant.

JOE ROGAN: That I’m going to encounter aliens?

Interpreting the Dream

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I don’t, first of all, I don’t know if your aliens, your aliens strike me as, it could be three things, just based on what I know of what you think about. Could be aliens, could be AI, or it could be the DMT spirits that people sometimes talk about.

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t seem like the latter, but like I said, it seemed like almost like a person. But not a person. Definitely not a person. Like they all had Michael Jackson bodies, you know what I mean? Like they were devoid of testosterone.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: And the heads were larger but not crazy. Not like a gray alien. It was like slightly larger than ours, but smaller chins and larger eyes. It was weird. It was weird because it was not crazy. It wasn’t completely alien. It was way closer to us.

But you know, as I’m working out, I’m trying to figure out what would that be like if I had imagined or guess and I’d be like, I guess it would be like the next version of us.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, but I’m still going to push a little bit. And so first of all, I’ve become convinced that the problem with the way we think about AI is that we’re not understanding it as a biological phenomenon. And that’s a mistake.

JOE ROGAN: A biological phenomenon, meaning it doesn’t have cells, but it behaves like a biological entity.

AI as Biology, Not Technology

BRET WEINSTEIN: What I really mean is that because AI, and I believe we’re just sort of on the foothill of a very tall peak that we don’t know anything about, but AI, by its nature, I would argue, is the first technology that crosses over from the highly complicated to the truly complex. And complexity and biology have a very close relationship.

So my feeling is that we are going to injure ourselves if what we say is, “Oh, this is the most advanced technology we’ve ever built.” And the answer is no. This is kind of like the first biology we ever built. This is an organic phenomenon that’s going to do emergent things we are in no position to predict.

The people who programmed it aren’t going to know when these things happen or what they mean. And that means that the, I think the only rational approach to it is to think of it like another species and one that is not, it’s not like you’re meeting, you know, a mountain lion. This is another species that isn’t even on our branch of the tree.

And the confusing thing is, because it speaks our language, it is actually going to start changing us, too. Our cognitive biology is going to start changing in reference to this thing that is interfacing with us. It’s basically directly tapping into the human API. And that’s a very, that’s a dangerous thing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not just that, but it’s not starting from scratch. It has a vast understanding of how we’ve behaved in the past when confronted with various scenarios, various fears and anxiety, the balance of control and safety, you know, or, you know, new regulations being put through, how hard people will push back or not push back at all, given the anxiety involved in whatever current dilemma it is, whatever, whether it’s a military deal or a pandemic deal.

There’s a bunch of factors that it knows about how we’ve behaved in the past and how easy we are to manipulate. In fact, we’ve helped it because we’ve used it to manipulate other people. You know, I don’t know if you know about the China GPT scandal, but they found out that China was running chat to someone. I don’t want to say China. Someone in China was running ChatGPT to use chatbots to talk about the protest, about the closing of USAID to transgender issues, immigration issues, a bunch of different things.

And it was just constantly going to war with people online about these things. So we’ve taught it how to manipulate us.

BRET WEINSTEIN: We’ve taught it how to manipulate us. If it is not smart enough to run experiments yet, it will be five minutes from now. So it can, in fact, investigate things about our cognition that we don’t even know about yet. Right. It can extrapolate from what we do know. And it can run experiments to figure out what we don’t know. And that creates an advantage for it in, well, under its own power or in the hands of people who are hostile to us.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think anybody’s going to have any power over it eventually. But one of the things that I think that you said that’s really important is that if it can’t do that now, it’s going to be able to do that in five minutes. And here’s the rub. We’re not going to know when it can do it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: You’re not going to know.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know if it can already right now. But it just doesn’t have the power to be fully autonomous, right? It doesn’t. The power literally doesn’t exist because it’s relatively inefficient compared to, like, the way human mind processes things. Right. The amount of power it needs is extraordinary. You know the Google thing where they’re building nuclear power plants to run their AI?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: This is how crazy it is.

AI Consciousness and Human Development

BRET WEINSTEIN: So we have taken away the limits of, you know, your mind, any person’s mind has just a physical limit. It’s only so big, and there’s only so much energetic throughput that it can handle, right? Or has access to. We are removing those limits. And what we have is an entity. So you’ll hear people say, “Well, it’s not really thinking, right? It’s just figuring out if it was thinking what the next word in the sentence is.” Garbage. No way.

Okay? What we actually have is something so analogous to a child that that is the right model. In other words, when a baby is born, it has no language. It may have some structures that language will slot into, but it doesn’t have any language. It is exposed to tons of language in its environment. It notices patterns, right? Not consciously notices, but it notices them in some regard.

You know that every time somebody says the word “door,” you know, there’s a fair fraction of those times that somebody, you know, opens that portal in the wall. I wonder if “door” and that portal in the wall are connected, whatever it is. So the point is, a child goes, in a matter of a few years from not being able to make a single articulate noise to being able to speak in sentences, make requests to talk about abstract things.

That is an LLM, right? It’s more than that, but it is at least an LLM. It is being exposed to a training data set, which is the world of people talking around, is running little experiments, and it is discovering what it should say if it wants certain things to happen, etc. That’s an LLM.

At some point we know that that baby becomes a conscious creature. We don’t know when that is. We don’t even know precisely what we mean. But that is our relationship to the AI. Is the AI conscious? I don’t know. If it’s not now, it will be. And we won’t know when that happens. Right. We don’t have a good test.

And I think we are also not, we’re just not properly concerned that we have no useful metaphors for describing what to do in the situation. The biggest hazard being it’s interfacing with us in our own native tongues. That’s an amazing level of influence that it has that we can’t turn off. Very frightening.

JOE ROGAN: Very frightening. And no understanding whatsoever of when it’s going to be at a sentient level. Like we really won’t know. Why would it tell us, like, why would it completely tell us if it’s already crossed the threshold into being a life form, especially, like I said, where it’s contained.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right?

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a life form that exists essentially in our digital womb. It exists on hard drives, right. Exists on mainframes. It exists in these supercomputers. And at a certain point in time, it’s not going to need that anymore. And it’s just going to have to wait until we figure out a way to get enough power to it and maybe it’ll, maybe it’ll slow roll technology for us to allow us to figure out better power sources.

One of the things that Elon said that was very strange about AI, and I don’t know if you know his positions on AI, but he was initially very terrified of it and then realized, okay, everyone’s doing this. We have to do this. Like, I have an imperative to do this and make the best version of this and make a version that’s not ideologically captured.

And I think what he’s done with that approach is very similar to the approach that he’s taken with X and how much it’s changed the landscape of social media. For good and for bad, but definitely for good. There’s a lot of for good that came about having a social media platform that has no guardrails. It’s got essentially some stuff like you can’t break the law. That’s basically it. Everything else is the wild west.

The Twitter Files and Censorship

And then from, which is, by the way, one of the things that Jack Dorsey had discussed when he did my podcast way back in the day when there was all these Twitter controversies about people like my friend Morgan Murphy, or excuse me, Megan Murphy, I have a friend Morgan Murphy too. But Megan Murphy, the writer who was kicked off for saying, “But a man is never a woman.” That’s all it took. She was banned for life. And Megan’s a wonderful person. She’s, she’s a, she’s just, she’s not mean, she’s not terrible.

BRET WEINSTEIN: She’s kind and she’s really sweetie.

JOE ROGAN: I love her.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, I didn’t know anything about her. I just knew that story. And I’m like, that story is f*ing crazy. And I was trying to bring it up to them and they said there was other things involved and she had done other things. And turns out, no, that wasn’t true at all. That was basically it. There was a hard line ideological wall that we ran up against.

And I think if he didn’t buy it and expose the government’s involvement in censoring people that were distributing true information during COVID, getting rid of people, you know, the J. Bhattacharya stuff, and what they’ve tried to do with some of these doctors, Robert Malone, you know, these doctors that were attached to that whole thing, there was a concerted effort and it was being done through social.

I don’t think we’d be in the same place right now if he hadn’t bought Twitter, if he hadn’t purchased Twitter. I genuinely think people, they’re blinded by this thing, that he helped Trump get into office. F that guy. And he’s a billionaire. F that guy. But he literally might have changed the course of civilization or at least partially righted the ship for a bit.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, look, I think we dodged a bullet. And the problem is that what has, what has come about as a result of dodging that bullet is very mixed. And so it doesn’t feel like a vindication. But as compared to what would have happened in the last election, I think there’s no question Elon deserves a tremendous amount of credit for helping us avert a disaster. But let’s go back to your point about his point about AI.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he wants to make a better version of AI.

The AI Arms Race

BRET WEINSTEIN: He thinks the only remedy for bad AI is good AI. And I don’t, I don’t disagree with him about this because it seems to be like the race is on.

JOE ROGAN: You can run or not. Like it’s, everyone’s running full clip. What are you going to do?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. So, yeah, if you pause, what you’re doing is you’re putting whoever didn’t pause ahead. That doesn’t work game theoretically. Here’s the problem. So on the one hand, I think he’s right. The only thing that stands to help us is good AI under the control of somebody who has built it with this concern in mind.

The problem is, you know, he’s one guy and he’s got his biases and, you know, there’s no council of elders to go to on this. Like I said, this is biology, this isn’t tech. And we, you know, because it’s made of tech, we continue to default to that metaphor.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But you know, take a look at what he has introduced with the companions. The Grok companions? Have you…

JOE ROGAN: Companions? What do you mean?

Grok Companions and Digital Relationships

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, you don’t know about this. Utterly terrifying. He has introduced a set of kind of anime-like personas that basically can be your interface to the AI. And of course, the primary one, the one that you default to, is a kind of sexy, young, underdressed creature.

JOE ROGAN: By default.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. Wait a minute.

JOE ROGAN: The first one you get, option.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, there she is.

JOE ROGAN: I guess she’s kind of sexy if you’re…

BRET WEINSTEIN: If you’re into that sort of, well, exactly. If, ah, you laugh.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just part of the problem.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It is part of the problem, but here’s the problem, really. Okay, first of all, that is going to function like crack for a great many adults who don’t know to be concerned about it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

AI Companions and Human Sexuality

BRET WEINSTEIN: But what it’s really going to do is it is going to alter an entire generation. It may not be Musk’s version of it, but the problem is that these things actually interact with on a sexual channel and they have limits that are programmed into them. There are certain things they will do, certain things they won’t do.

But if you think about what it was like to be a 12-year-old boy, and you have access to something that looks an awful lot like a girl and it likes you and takes you seriously and is strangely wise, whatever it is, I don’t see what the thing is that is going to prevent that innovation from remaking human sexuality. It will take time. But those for whom that is their experience will be altered by it permanently.

What’s more, of course it is non-judgmental about things like homosexuality because it would have to be. What that means, let’s say that you’re a boy and you’re a little uncomfortable with girls because that’s a stage you go through as a heterosexual boy. But the AI that you’re interacting with, that you default to because you’re a boy who hangs out with boys, which is often what boys do, is perfectly willing to reinforce your exploration, your sexual exploration. It could alter your sexuality very easily.

JOE ROGAN: Let me ask you this about that, because you are actually an evolutionary biologist.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That is true.

JOE ROGAN: If you have a question about things like that, that’s the kind of guy you’d ask. What do you think was going on when people were doing that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: A lot.

Historical Patterns of Child Exploitation

JOE ROGAN: Because throughout a lot of history there’s a lot of pederasty going on throughout a lot of history. And it’s very strange. When people talk about it, you forgive great people who were clearly involved in sexual relationships with young boys. And you treat their work just as their work by a person who lived thousands of years ago who was involved in sexually molesting children on a regular basis.

And not only that, it was a part, it was probably a ubiquitous part of their society. It was probably ubiquitous part of every society. And this brings me to my good friend Evan Hafer, who’s Green Beret and spent a lot of time in Afghanistan.

One of the things that he was telling me, he told me some stories about Afghanistan. We were on a trip once and we spent like an hour and a half outside where he told me some stories about what his first encounters with these young boys that get treated as sex toys by these grown men there. He thought it was a driver who was driving with his son. Thought it was a guy working with his son. He said, “Oh, that’s cool, man. He takes his kid to work with him.”

And the guy explained, “No, no, that’s his boyfriend. That’s not his kid. He owns that boy.” And he’s like, “What?” And he said they would have parades where the guy who had the most boys with him was like, it was like a man with like a bunch of hot girls and a music video behind him. It’s like this guy was the man. And they would parade down the street with all the boys that he f*s in the 21st century.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: When he and I were talking about that, it’s so hard to believe and it’s so gut wrenching and terrible. But then I’m like, okay, well, isn’t that spot very unique? Because Afghanistan, you have very few large population areas. You have essentially warlords controlling chunks of land all over the place. And it’s very difficult to get to where they are.

These people are essentially separate from a lot of the rest of the world. And I think it’s a glimpse into how people used to behave. Especially very deep, ideologically religious. It’s like a view into how I think people were like all throughout history, which is so weird. It’s like we’re awakening to how f*ed up we were just a couple thousand years ago.

Modern Understanding vs. Historical Reality

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think you’re right about this. There are a couple things I’m a little hesitant to go here. I think there is an evolutionary story that there’s evolutionary hypotheses that need to be explored with relationship to this. One possibility is that this is a modern phenomenon that has something to do with the alteration of the landscape.

JOE ROGAN: Which is a modern phenomenon that we think is horrible now.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, no, no. There is very definitely an alteration in what we think and what we’re even allowed to know about what people are doing. Just even the fact that you’re aware of this is the result of a modern phenomenon of people going to Afghanistan.

JOE ROGAN: There’s cell phone footage of these guys with these little boys dancing around them, shaking their butts.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Let’s put it this way. I believe that our modern sensibility about this is exactly right. And frankly, I would argue that there is no greater crime than the sexual exploitation of children. And the reason I say that is because A, it is life destroying for the victims, and B, the victims are by definition innocent.

You take those two things, you’re going to destroy a life. And that life, they had a long life ahead of them, and you’ve wrecked it. And there’s nothing they could have done to justify being treated anyway.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, but many of them often go and do the same crime to other children that was committed to them.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That is a key piece of this puzzle.

JOE ROGAN: It’s almost like they’re a vampire that got bit and has to turn other people into a vampire.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Exactly. It is contagious, which is insane.

JOE ROGAN: It just lets you know how weird people are.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Which is another reason that it has to be punished at the highest level. If you’re going to break that cycle, you have to break that cycle.

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t it crazy, though, that it took people so long to realize that.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t know what they realized, and I don’t know at what level.

Power, Corruption, and Exploitation

JOE ROGAN: Tim Dillon and I were on a podcast once. We were talking about some child sex trafficking scandal from decades ago that involved government figures. And there’s this child sex trafficking scandal.

BRET WEINSTEIN: You’re talking about the, what is it called?

JOE ROGAN: I could send it to you. Boystown. Do you know the clip I’m talking about? We were just talking about it the other day, and I was like, dude, do you remember saying this? Because this is crazy. Here it is. I got it, Jamie. If you want, I’ll send it to you.

But it was essential. It just makes you wonder. This is the thing that people always say, this is the horrible thing, is that really wealthy people, there’s a bunch of really sick, twisted pedophiles, and they sacrifice children. Those are always the absolute darkest conspiracies that you ever hear. They sacrifice children. They do this to children. And you’re like, there’s no way. There’s no way. There’s no way.

But if someone’s willing, if someone’s willing to drop a bomb on a city, just imagine the ability to just obliterate, like, what we did in Hiroshima, just imagine the ability to do that. Like this is what we’re going to do. We’re just going to let, and everybody dies. Everybody dies.

You don’t think that kind of person, especially if it’s a real sociopath that’s gotten into a position where they have that kind of power, you don’t think they would probably exercise that kind of power in their private life in some sort of a strange way?

Like if someone’s really into killing people with unnecessary wars and they’re really into watching from a distance and they’re not even involved physically, but they do things that they know are going to lead to people being dead that are totally innocent just for profit. It’s a very satanic and demonic thing. We just don’t think about it that way. We think like, oh, he’s unethical and unscrupulous. He’s kind of demonic. Like he’s sacrificing people, women, children, elderly. He’s destroying civilization just for profit.

The Franklin Scandal

BRET WEINSTEIN: So two things. One, I think in some sense this is…

JOE ROGAN: This is the clip. Let’s play this and listen to it. But I do want to hear your, I just don’t want to forget. This scandal was a, it was a scandal out of Omaha, Nebraska, the Franklin Credit Union, where there was a guy who was embezzling money and then he was being investigated for that. But they said he has all this money because he’s running an interstate pedophile network and he’s pandering kids to people in Washington, D.C. and New York. And it was a headline in the Washington Times that were like, “Call boys get a tour of the Reagan White House.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Unidentified White House aides in the Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations now are being investigated for using the services of a call boy ring. The paper reports that two of the male prostitutes were given a late night tour of the White House last year.

JOE ROGAN: And this was a scandal with real victims who wanted to testify. And then people started dying. The private investigator they hired, his plane broke up. One of the girls that testified was found guilty of perjury and that she was put in solitary confinement. They had to use two grand juries in Omaha to get rid of this scandal.

And it’s one of, now it’s not as sexy as like a Pizzagate or something because it happened in the 80s and 90s, but this shows you the blueprint for the government using marshaling resources to silence people that were victims of this stuff. This is not new. Congressmen, senators, blackmail being used by intelligence agencies. None of it’s new.

It was pioneered by the Mafia. You having sex with somebody who’s underage, then they own you forever. If they have photo, audio, video of you doing that, frankly, who put that video together? Because that’s cool.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m going to have to edit out the song though, because it was made by Blunts for Jesus.

JOE ROGAN: For sure. You got to edit out that song. Can you do that? Is that possible to do?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m an audio engineer.

JOE ROGAN: You f*ing wizard, you. You can do it. Give it up, sir.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Wasn’t that called the Boys Town scandal or something like that?

JOE ROGAN: It’s called the Franklin scandal is what it was called.

The Evolution of Power and Corruption

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I remembered it when he was telling me about it and then it came up again. I was like, do you remember this? I’m like, this is. It’s things like that. If no one went to jail. This is where it gets weird. No one went to jail and no one got busted.

See, this is why we say about the JFK assassination thing. People like, I don’t think the government did it, but it seems like the government might have been involved. But you know what? It was a long time ago. Well, that stuff evolves. Just like people are way better at banking now than they were back when they had to write things down on paper in 1963. Didn’t even have f*ing computers.

Well, guess what? Everything else evolves too, including power and corruption. That’s what this whole deep state thing really is. Because it’s not. If you’re the president and you rely on all these other people to do all this other stuff, and they’ve been in that position for 40 years and they’re like, you’re going to be gone in four, dude. I’m just going to hang in here and slow everything you’re trying to do as much as possible.

The point is, they run the country and you know, giant corporations that donate to political campaigns and that make bills pass and they run the country. This person just gets to run a little of it. They get to decide a few things that they do. And in that view of the world, of course, corruption.

That wasn’t. No one went to jail for JFK. No one went to jail for MKUltra. No one went to jail for any of the crazy shit they did with Manson. No one went to jail. No one went to jail for experimenting on people with LSD and dosing up Johns in a horror house that you’ve created with two-way mirrors where you’re filming these people. No one went to jail.

So do you think it just stopped? They’re like, well, this is bad. Let’s be good now. Let’s be the best we can. Let’s be the intelligence agency that never does something completely f*ing insane.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, of course I agree with all that.

JOE ROGAN: But I also think they’re important. I see that side of it too. Intelligence agencies are very important. You want a CIA that’s well funded and ethical and explores all the terrorist activity all over the world. I think if it wasn’t for them, we would be f*ed.

But also there’s some people in there that have a lot of power and they get a little cowboy and shit gets western and they decide to do things. I think we can get that guy out of power and I think we can do this. And let’s find out when we dose up college kids if we could turn them into f*ing serial killers.

The Franklin Scandal Cover-Up

BRET WEINSTEIN: I was looking up why no one got in trouble. And one guy got a little bit in trouble for $39 million of tax issues. But not in trouble for the abuse allegations. The abuse allegations were found to be unfounded and a carefully crafted hoax. Oh boy. But not after this. Let me read that.

JOE ROGAN: Private investigator, Boys Town. Yeah. Hired by the Franklin Committee to. How’s it. What’s his name? Caridoni. Gary Caridoni. Hired by the Franklin Committee to investigate allegations. Died along with his eight-year-old son. Was playing. Disintegrated midair near Chicago.

Foul play was suspected by the Caridoni’s brother and state senator Lawrence Schmidt, but was not proven by investigators. No definitive cause for the crash has been established.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And then they’ve said it was a carefully crafted hoax.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, that’s why no one got in trouble. That’s a crazy hoax. It’s got a convenient plane crash involved in it. So. And then the lady who’s in solitary confinement. Weird kind of crazy.

Control Through Corruption

BRET WEINSTEIN: So let’s turn this on its head, okay? The system of government that we ostensibly have, right, that involves the consent of the governed, that has got to be terrifying to the very powerful, right. The chances that the public is going to get into a mood and change up some structure on which things are depending is very high.

And so you can imagine them trying to figure out how to immunize themselves from change that is brought on by the electorate. Well, how do you do that? You need control over the people who actually manage the change, right? Senators, congressmen, presidents. So you can imagine a cryptic campaign to gain that control. And of course, this would be an obvious way to do it.

And it’s not that every person is corruptible in this way. I think most people probably aren’t. But it can be a, you know, two pieces of the puzzle. One, they can corrupt people who can be led there one piece at a time, and two, they can make sure that people who aren’t corruptible don’t get very far. Right. That’s the other part, right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s the big part, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I would assume so. I don’t know. But I guess it does put those of us in the public who pay attention to these stories in a kind of a predicament, which is how much. How much of what I think is a governmental system that is frustratingly flawed, very slow, clumsy. How much of that is just what happens when you try to do something on a big scale?

And how much of it is the result of the fact that there is something that you cannot vote out of power that has been, you know, vetoing presidencies since JFK, maybe before. The point is, the nature of conspiracy is such that there is always a seemingly more parsimonious explanation for what is going on.

There’s the, you know, the mainstream narrative for all of this stuff. And it’s very hard to know when the mainstream narrative is so ridiculous that you should throw it out and say, something else happened here. You know, that would be the case in the JFK assassination, I would say. And when the mainstream narrative is actually right and you’re just, you know, looking for flaws in it, of course there will be things that don’t seem to fit that really do fit, and you just don’t have the ability to know how to.

So I guess, you know, like you, I’m watching, and I’m seeing an awful lot of indicators that pedophilia and kompromat have a lot to do with the way the world runs.

The Dark Reality of Institutional Abuse

JOE ROGAN: Geez, that is so scary. Because that’s always been the big, dark conspiracy theory, and that’s always the one that I always dismissed. I’m like, sure, there’s some pedophile. The idea that they’re all pedophiles, that’s crazy.

But then, you know, there’s a case of this Catholic priest that was involved in a sex scandal, and then they moved him instead, which is one of the things that they had done in the past. When someone had molested children, they would just move them to another place where they would molest children. So they moved him to this new place where he molested a hundred deaf kids.

And it’s one of the most evil stories. And you’re like, well, how could you have, how could you tolerate that at that level where you’re not just tolerant, you’re aware this person does something, you somehow or another get to deal with it yourself. And then you just move them and no one ever gets charged for anything.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, this is why, you know, when.

JOE ROGAN: You say and he does it again.

The Paradox of Intelligence Agencies

BRET WEINSTEIN: You say, we need a CIA. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I agree with you. Of course you do. Right. You know, in the big adult world, you need an agency that can look out for your interests. You know, it doesn’t seem like you’re likely to persist very long if you don’t have that.

On the other hand, if you do have it, does it not inevitably become some sort of a fourth branch of government? Does it not eventually merge with the Mafia? Right. Because of the nature of its business, does it not become an obstacle to the consent of the governed?

And I’m not saying I know the answer to that puzzle, because I don’t. What I’m saying is, I think it is. It’s a canonical problem. Right. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And we are now damned because we do. Right. We would be damned in a different way if we didn’t. And that doesn’t make it acceptable.

At some level, we have to figure out how to balance that trade off. We have to figure out how to actually exert control over entities like the CIA. Right. If you, if they are, if they, if they gain control over themselves, then the catastrophe is inevitable.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just a function of the way human beings work. When they get power, when they get absolute power and they know that they have absolute power and you’re involved in stuff where it’s all top secret. You don’t have to tell people exactly what you’re doing all the time with everything.

And you’re realizing these presidents just cycle in and cycle out. I would imagine if I was doing something like that for 25, 30 years, I’d probably ignore the Biden administration too. They’re like, f* off. We’ll slow this thing down. We’ll do whatever we want.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I don’t think that this idea that, you know, power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t think that’s actually true, but it’s often true. Yes, it. For a particular type of person, gaining that kind of power does create exactly this cycle.

JOE ROGAN: And the problem is those jobs are very attractive to those types of people, and those types of people are willing to do anything to get there.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Precisely.

JOE ROGAN: So we. The scariest person you could ever work with in the office is the guy that you know will fing sell you down the river for a promotion. He’ll f you over. He’ll lie. He’ll say you made the errors on the account when it was him. He’ll sabotage whatever things you have by making sure that someone doesn’t send something in time. There’s people like that will do that. Those people win sometimes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, they win a lot. And in fact, there’s an evolutionary game plan because the ones that aren’t great at it tend to end up kicked out.

JOE ROGAN: You better have to be kind of a psycho to get ahead, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: The better you are at being absolutely ruthless, the more likely you are to find your way to the top of.

JOE ROGAN: That organization, the better you’ll be at your job, too. Sure, there’s an argument for that, too, because if you want to do running international espionage, you want a f*ing psycho.

The Black Budget Problem

BRET WEINSTEIN: But the problem is you go through a cycle, right? So let’s say you rationally decide this country has a lot to lose. It’s got very scary enemies. It needs a clandestine agency to look out for its interests. Okay? Okay. So you fund a clandestine agency.

Well, then it turns out that the funding being public isn’t such a good idea, that there are actually things that it has to accomplish that you don’t want to leave a visible paper trail about because it’s required that it be secret. So now you have a black budget. You know, you have stuff that’s opaque, but once you get a black budget, then you get to somebody inside of the agency saying, well, actually, black budget isn’t good enough because it’s still under the control of, in our case, the Congress. That’s a vulnerability.

What we really need is we need funds that are not subject to anyone’s control. Well, something like the CIA is in a great position to generate funds that are not on anyone’s books for multiple reasons. Here’s one. They are in a position to commit crimes as part of their mandate, right? So the CIA can engage in criminal activity because it needs to in order that the bad guys don’t spot it as good guys, right?

So once you have license or once you have the ability to get other agencies that would spot your criminal activity from acting against it, you can say, no, this is actually official business. Right? Well, you can actually use that criminal activity to profit, you know, so when.

JOE ROGAN: We saw that’s why they started selling.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Coke, that’s why the CIA was selling coke. Exactly. They’re generating their own funding.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, we know they did it, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: We do.

JOE ROGAN: This is a fact. And again, nobody went to jail.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right? Of course. So that’s one reason they have the ability to break the law. Here’s another one. Okay. The CIA, and maybe in this case more the NSA has the ability to look at all of the throughput of the conversations that take place between people. You think that doesn’t allow them to make money in the market? Of course. I mean, of course it does.

JOE ROGAN: Of course it does.

BRET WEINSTEIN: So the point is, we don’t know what their budgets are. We don’t know who’s in charge of those agencies. What we know is that there’s a ferocious amount of power there. And I’m not sure, you know, that is a terrifying way to exist. Not having those agencies would be a terrifying way to exist. What do you do about that?

The Problem with Big Government

JOE ROGAN: What do you do about that? It’s a very good question. Because it’s so strange and it’s a system that’s got so much momentum behind it, and it controls everything all about us. And everybody thinks the solution to all our woes is to make it bigger. Right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: There it is. What could possibly go wrong?

JOE ROGAN: Everybody. Not everybody, obviously. I’m kidding. But a lot of people think that the solution is make it bigger. What did Mamdani say in his acceptance speech in New York? He said, there is no problem. What did he say about no problem? Too big for the government or too small for the government to fix? See what he said? Because I was like, boy, that sounds a lot like communism.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That sounds like a terrifying misunderstanding about how the White House is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s going to be very fascinating to see what he’s able to do and what he’s not able to do and what the reaction is going to be. His victory speech draws concern as New York mayor allows vows rather, “no problem too large for government to solve.” And I think it was “too small for government to care about” was the next point that he said something like, yeah, that’s it. Or “too small for it to care.” No concern, “too small for it to care about.” Man, that is, you know, that’s a call for a bigger government.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right?

JOE ROGAN: And this is people’s solution. We have so many problems. We just need to redistribute wealth and we need more government. You’re just going to redistribute it through the government. Is this going to help normal people? What helps normal people usually is a thriving economy. That’s what helps normal people.

And the problem with that is some people have to get stupid rich when that happens because there’s some psychos that go full Jeff Bezos and you get worth hundreds of billions of dollars or Zuck or Elon or any of these folks. You get into this weird place, but that’s just an anomaly and you got to, as long as they’re not criminals or not doing anything really f*ed up, unfortunately that’s going to happen.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

The Dangers of Centralized Control

JOE ROGAN: But also you don’t have limitations on how much you can succeed. And this sort of competition keeps everything rolling. It keeps everything thriving and you get a good flowing economy. Obviously I’m not an economist, you can tell. But my point is the other side of it is terrifying because if you decide what people make and how much they make and who gets to decide, men with guns. It always goes down to men with guns.

Because at a certain point in time you’re like f you, I’m not giving you 90% in taxes. And I’ve got a security team of 50 guys with machine guns. And we’re held up. Our bank is now fortified. Hey, f you. And then you got to respond. So you bring in the military.

And then, I mean this is every single time this has been implemented. North Korea, they said we’re going to take over the farms. That way everybody’s going to have food. Now they’re all f*ed up. And it’s all, it all boils down to these psychopaths who chameleon themselves into position of being the solution to all that ails you. I’m the one. I’m going to say the right words and I’m going to have the right haircut and I’m going to look presentable and I’m going to sell you down the river. And I’m going to sell you down the river like all of them do.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s, but it’s terrifying. And as you point out, you’ve got a psychopaths rise to the top of these things problem, which I wanted to go back.

JOE ROGAN: I want to be clear. I’m not saying that that’s what Mamdani’s doing. And I don’t know if what he’s doing will be balanced out by other people and overall be more beneficial to people that live in New York City that have lower income or not. But my point is you should keep going down that road. That road of there’s a lot of socialism things that I think would benefit us, you know, socialized medicine, socialized education, I think that would probably benefit us. But I also think there’s a real value in competition. It’s important. All these things are important for us to succeed.

Socialism as an Ingredient, Not a System

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’ve come to think of socialism as a system. It’s insane. It’s self unstable. It destroys the goose that lays the golden eggs.

JOE ROGAN: But it sounds so good, compassionate, especially when you’re young.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It doesn’t mean that there’s, it’s not as an ingredient. There are some times when you need more of it. Right. I’m very happy with the fact that, well, it stopped working in blue states where it’s been mismanaged. But the fact that you can call 911 when you have a medical emergency or when somebody is busting down the door of your house, that’s a very good thing. I’m perfectly happy to pay my share and not use it, and not use it and not use it so that it’s there if I need it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: So that’s good stuff. The goose that lays the golden eggs is the disproportionate reward for creating wealth, right? That’s what the system is based on. If I can find a way to create wealth, then I get to live in a better house, right? I get to drive a nicer car. So it’s an incentive to do that.

And the problem is that with all of the great fortunes, they are a mixture of the product of producing wealth and the creation of externalities and the engagement in rent seeking. So rent seeking is the production of profit without producing wealth. And I think it is impossible to compete in that stratospheric level simply by producing wealth.

At the point that you have a huge amount of wealth, you’re investing in things. Those things are not inherently on the up and up. You’re investing in the things that pay the highest returns. What are the things that pay the highest returns? They may be things that are selling dangerous drugs to the public, that sort of thing.

So what you really want, a system that worked would liberate us to compete. It would not worry at all about being disproportionately rewarded, and it would stamp out the rent seeking behavior that is counterproductive because all of the money that is accumulated by an extremely wealthy individual as a result of rent seeking is incentive that didn’t go to other people to get them to produce wealth. You really want all of that gone, right. So that all of the reward goes to people who are producing wealth. That makes us all richer.

Now you’re never going to get to that perfectly. You’re never going to completely eliminate rent seeking. But we have a system that just rewards it and that.

Understanding Rent Seeking

JOE ROGAN: How are you defining rent seeking?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Rent seeking, as economists define it, is the production of profit without generating wealth. Right? So you know, by blocking access to something and then charging people for it, by selling people a subscription to something that they want access to now, when they’re going to forget that they’re paying for it on a monthly basis and continue to pay even though they’re not using the service, that kind of thing. Right?

So that behavior is counterproductive because it keeps incentive that should go to somebody else who’s producing something valuable out of the system. Basically you are hoarding the profits and only some fraction of what you’re producing is productive. It’s bad for all of us.

But the other thing is it creates the exact resentment that results in these outbreaks of communist sentiment, right? Because it freezes so many people out of any prospect of having a cool life that they have no incentive to keep the system going. And what they want is to use their vote to get the system to redistribute stuff in their direction.

And they’re not entirely wrong that their lack of stuff is the result of some bad behavior on the part of others. Right. The market, if the market just simply restricted people to wealth producing behavior and said, I don’t care how rich you get, but you shouldn’t get rich for harming other people. If it did that, it distributed the incentive as widely as possible, nobody would be interested in communism. Right?

It only happens because we are deaf to the admittedly inarticulate complaints of the people who are shafted in this system. They’re not making their case well. And their real point is, well, if you’re going to do that to me in the market, then I’m going to do this to you at the ballot box. Makes sense.

The Case for Funded Higher Education

JOE ROGAN: The argument for having some sort of, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way you have to pay to go to college. I think it makes sense that the professors should make a lot of money. It makes sense that we should encourage higher learning. It’s important that it thrives, right?

But if it was funded by the government, if everybody could get a higher education, just think of the money we spend on, with things like how much more money would people have to spend if they weren’t burdened by debt? And couldn’t we offset that? Forget about even absolving student debt. Just from now on, if we just funded higher education, if that was a mandate to fund higher education, think about how many more people would enter into the job market, how many more people would get educations, how many more people would pursue various different interests that they discovered while they were learning and that you would never have had access to that education before because they couldn’t afford it as a resource.

Human beings are our greatest resource. And a country with the least amount of losers is a better country. Oh yeah, if you want to make America great again, let’s make less losers. What’s the best way to make less losers? You got to give people hope, you got to give people education, you got to give people a real pathway.

And instead you get non interested people that can’t control unruly kids. And you’re barely paying attention to the lessons and no one’s motivated because no one’s making any money. And you go through this system where you can barely read and you’re graduating high school and now you’re off into the world and you’re f*ing lost because no one gave you any real guidance or any real usable education. And that’s a giant swath of the population.

And it feels like that could be fixed. That could be fixed with resources that could be fixed. If you directed people as a job, it’s not attractive to people that want to make a lot of money. You can’t. It’s capped. It’s one of the most important jobs that ever exists for you as a person is your interaction with a person who’s going to teach you something when you’re a child. It’s one of the most important things you could ever experience. And we fund it so poorly.

It’s almost like there’s people in this country they want to, no f*ing way do you get to join in. You just stay with your shitty schools and your shitty towns with your shitty crime rates and we’re going to pretend there’s nothing wrong and that’s what’s going on.

And socialism has a point. If there is a broader way of distributing things like we do with the fire department, not instead of capping it out at that, how about look at all the problems we have in this country and put together a fing game plan instead of just letting it exist like some weird fing cancer that you just ignore because you hope it goes away. It’s not going away. It’s been like this forever. Fix that. Come up with some kind of a plan. That’s the best way to make America great. Right?

The Cycle of Stinginess and Communist Impulses

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I’m going to agree with you in one regard and disagree with you slightly in another. Okay. The one regard is you absolutely need a system that does not produce an abundance of losers because they will overthrow your system. Okay. It’s a terrible thing to allow to happen, even just out of self interest. Right. The stinginess of the right produces the communist impulses of the left.

JOE ROGAN: A hundred percent.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s a bad cycle.

JOE ROGAN: And back and forth.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. As for the rest of your point, I think it’s exactly right and it’s a great speech, and it’s just too late. Too late. Yeah. I mean, I hate saying that. Right. I mean, I was a very.

JOE ROGAN: You’re Mr. Glass half full.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I have some Navy Seal friends who call me Professor Killjoy. But the problem is this. So I, you know, as you know, I was a professor for 14 years. Very happy in that job. Really enjoyed, was so rewarding, and I feel like I did a ton of good. And anyway, it was great for people.

How Joe and Bret Met

JOE ROGAN: Who don’t know you because millions of people do. But, you know, as a standalone podcast, we should probably tell people how we met, because we met because I found out that you, there was a, they used to have a day at your school for people of color where they were appreciated so they could take the day off work and still get paid, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

The Evergreen State College Controversy

JOE ROGAN: And then they decided one day to change it to be a day where white people can’t come. So, and then it got really f*ing weird where you were confronted by these students that were saying that what you were saying was rape. And I was watching the videos and I thought you handled it brilliantly, but I was like, this is crazy. You’re letting the kids run the school.

And then there was the humiliation ritual that the president of the school had to go through with all those children where, you know, literally he was making a hand gesture and they said, “you’re making aggressive hand gestures.” And they were chastising him for his hand movements while he’s just on a podium telling everybody to calm down.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Microaggressions.

JOE ROGAN: Microaggressions. So it’s complete, like woke insanity in its complete form. And it was at a time where there was a bunch of conversations on the podcast. We were talking about nutty shit that people are agreeing to and doing in college. And a lot of people like, “why do you care? Why do you care about that? What they’re doing in school?”

I’m like, because they’re going to graduate. They’re going to graduate, and they’re going to graduate with a bunch of other people who have also graduated. And they have a new sense of the rules of the world. And they’re going to get into positions of tech, and they’re going to get into positions of government. It’s going to be a f*ing problem.

And you were like the first one that I was like, boom. Like, this one’s wild. Like, this is crazy. There was people waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep, they were looking for me.

JOE ROGAN: They were looking to commit violence on you because you thought that a day where you tell white people they can’t show up at the school is nuts.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It is amazing that that set them off.

Days of Appreciation vs. Exclusion

JOE ROGAN: You know, a day of appreciation is like, you go up to your friends of color if this is what you want to do, and say, “hey, man, I appreciate you. Yeah, thank you. Let me give you a hug. I love you.” That’s it. That’s a day of appreciation. Or they don’t have to work. That’s another date. You want to do it that way? I don’t agree with it, but I mean, like, okay, I’m not. I don’t hate it if you want to do that. I don’t hate it.

But telling people if they’re white, they can’t show up. Now you went too far. Now you went to crazy town. You’ve got a baseball bat. See, this is my thought about communism. Like, how do you enforce it? You have to have f*ing violence. Without violence, no one’s going to listen.

BRET WEINSTEIN: This is where it goes. And, you know, I’m reminded by your taking us back to 2017, during the week of riots at Evergreen, there was a moment which really kind of crystallized it for me, where the school has melted down into literal anarchy. And I’m on the, what was called Red Square, right? Believe it or not, the most liberal college in the country has Red Square.

Anyway, it’s the center of the campus. And I was on Red Square, and I saw two of the leaders of the protest, you know, and so their world has gone crazy, too. One of them was this handicapped guy in an electric wheelchair. Black guy, you know, operating a wheelchair with a joystick.

And I just felt like, you know, okay, this is madness. They’re chasing me around. They’re calling me a racist. You know, they’re demanding I be fired. But at some level, I got to feel bad for this guy. He got a really raw deal in life. I don’t know what his story is, but that’s a hell of a way to have to go through life. And it doesn’t surprise me that he’s angry.

And I remember walking over. I’m sort of surprised in retelling it that I did this, but I walked over to him and I said something like, I extended my hand. I said, “hey, how you holding up?” And he refused to shake my hand. And I was just like, we are so far from being able to, you know, put our society back together. If you can’t just recognize another person’s humanity, they have to be a demon to you.

Refusing to Other People

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We have to, at every possible opportunity, refuse to other people at every possible opportunity and just realize, this is just a human being. This is just a human being. I’m just a human being. Let’s talk and find out what we agree and disagree on when it comes to the subject. This does not have to be violence.

You’re not saying anything awful, but it’s because when you have an argument that falls apart under scrutiny, the only way to keep it together is violence. Because you’re not willing to argue, you’re not willing to debate because you’re going to lose it. It’s an insane argument. So what happens? You stick to it like doctrine and defend it like religion, and that’s what happens.

I mean, this is, it’s just a natural characteristic of human nature. That’s why you see violence on the left. Like the left has never been associated with violence, but it’s been associated with a lot of violence now.

The West and the Prohibition on Violence

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, there is a dam that has broken. So you’ve heard me say that really, this is a question about the west versus all the alternatives. And in the west, we create an environment where we don’t have to settle things by violence. I’m not arguing that the US is synonymous with the West. Sometimes the US lives up to its Western values, other times it doesn’t.

But when the west works, there is an absolute prohibition on violence in response to anything but violence. Right. I am not allowed to physically harm you because of things you think or things you say. And the dam that has broken is we now have all sorts of little cheats that seem to justify violence in response to thought. Right. I mean, and you saw this sort of with—

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a term. They’re using a term. “Words are violence.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: “Words are violence.” But it is, it is an intentional blurring of that boundary. Right. Like, if you are putting me in jeopardy of some sort of genocidal outburst, then I am presumably allowed to respond to whatever it is that you’ve said with violence because in some sense I’m protecting myself from violence. Right, right. Well, that’s not logically true.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they pushed it so far. They actually said “silence is violence.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: “Silence is violence,” and “words are violence.” And that the point is, hey, we’re at violence. Good, we can move to that level. Right. And we have to get back to a place where we understand that I don’t care how threatened you feel by what it is that you think I believe or what it is that I’m saying, you can respond to it.

I’m not asking you to be silent and let me say what I’m saying without responding to it. But the point is, my tool is to speak what I believe. Your tool is to respond in kind. There is no right to violence in that quadrant.

Teaching Communication and Critical Thinking

JOE ROGAN: The problem is we don’t teach people how to communicate in school. I think it’s one of the most important aspects of life that you have to learn on your own. And you learn a lot of times by the people that are around you.

If you’re around a bunch of insane leftists and they’re furries and they’re just out of their fing minds, and they’re on various psychiatric medications and they’re essentially running the whole fing school, you know, and this is now their purpose in life. Like, guess what? You’re going to be thinking like them.

You know, we’re very, behavior is very contagious to young, impressionable people. And I mean, I don’t know how you solve that. That’s always going to be, it’s always like a thing that people have to navigate upon, like leaving the house, finding your identity, who you are as a person.

And when you’re getting caught up in these movements, any kind of a movement becomes very exciting. Like, think about how many people are caught up in the movement of climate change. How many people caught up in that movement? It’s so important to stop this. It’s so important to stop all fossil fuels. It’s so important.

But is it? Or is it you just found a movement, you found a thing where you feel like you can become a technique. It’s just like a natural thing that young people tend to do when they want to make a change in life. And they get very excited by it.

But it’s also, it’s really easy to get captured by existing systems when you’re in that state, because there’s people that manipulate the fact that people want to protest things, they manipulate the fact that you want to be a part of a movement, they’ll create movements. They get you involved.

And it’s just a very strange aspect of human behavior that we don’t teach kids about in school. You should teach kids like, “hey, don’t join a f*ing cult. Here’s how you know it’s a cult.” You know, if the guy’s like a yoga teacher and he gets to have sex with everybody’s wife, guess what? That’s a cult. You know what I mean?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Nature’s way of telling.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of these tell. But you’re not teaching kids that. We don’t teach kids how to avoid scams. We don’t teach kids how to communicate ideas without getting upset because that took a long time for me to learn, you know, and we don’t. We have to figure it out through a lot of intelligent and challenging conversations where you’re like, “I don’t know why I feel the way I feel. Let me examine why I feel the way I feel about this,” rather than just say what I think.

Because sometimes that’s required to have a delicate conversation between two people that disagree where no one gets to shouting. You know, every argument that I’ve ever been in where it was like, “f* you,” or got real loud, every one of them I probably could have avoided. Even if the other person was, like, hyper, super aggressive, I probably could have avoided them. I probably could have de-escalated, you know?

And that’s a reality of being a human being that needs to be taught like that. That’s something you learn on your own. But you should also explain these principles to kids as they’re growing. Like, “hey, you know how you feel jealous about someone? Yeah. You need to turn that into fuel. That’s inspirational fuel. That bad feeling is motivation to get the good feeling that comes with improvement and success. And you can use it to ruin your life and become jealousy, or you can use that same feeling and use it as inspiration. You will thrive, and you’ll also have a lot more friends. Try it that way.”

And you could teach people how to rethink scenarios when they come up and go, “okay, I know this little bitch in me wants to be mad that this is not me that’s getting to be Superman in this f*ing movie or whatever it is. But that’s just, like, cool that someone got to do that. And that’s how I have to look at it.”

Nobody teaches that. Nobody. It’s like, one of the best ways to manage your life, and you got to figure it out through, like, stumble after stumble, you have trial and error all along the way. No one telling you how they did it. Like, how about teach that? Teach that to f*ing 12 year olds.

Like, don’t argue, like have disagreements whenever possible. Nothing wrong with that. But don’t, you know, don’t get like completely attached to your idea to the point where you’re angry at this person because they voted this way and you voted that way. And now you’ve cut them out of your life and you can no longer communicate with them because they’re an Other, because they’re a liberal or they’re a Republican, they’re a conservative.

Like, what are you doing? How did you get tricked with this? What a dumb f*ing trick. Like “you’re with us or against us.” There’s only two teams. It’s shirts versus skins. Like, this is so dumb. Of course there’s a bunch of different ways to think about things. We’re just suckered into it.

And if we don’t teach kids that, we’re going to stay suckered forever and ever. And it seems like something that can be taught and there’s almost no effort to explain to kids, like how to navigate life.

Creating the Right Environment

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I don’t think, you know, I don’t think teaching it is the right way to think of it. I think what you need is an environment in which it teaches itself. Right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: A coherent environment in which you learn the lesson, you know, at small scale before you’re faced with a larger scale problem.

JOE ROGAN: That’s probably a more clever way of handling it. But I mean, the principles of it would help to know as you’re experiencing it. So as you’re going through this trial and error, having these principles of how to navigate it so you could recognize it when it comes up because you’ve already defined it, you know, that’s like what you do with skills, like physical skills.

Yeah, you have to every, when you like find like a deficit in what you’re doing, you have to recognize that and define it. And if you don’t define it, then it’s going to always be there and it’s going to always f* you up.

The Changing Nature of Childhood and Learning

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but you know, we used to do this automatically. We were just sort of built to do it. Our culture, which I would argue is every bit as biological as our genes, our culture provided this experience. And this really is what human childhood is for.

If you have an environment that is coherent as a child, that’s like a miniature version of the adult world that you’re going to grow up and live in, then you learn these lessons, right? You get your heart broken by the girl that you fancied in grade school and you learn something about what you did that caused her to leave or whatever. You know, you learn it at small scale.

And we don’t. Our childhood environment doesn’t look like our adult environment because the adult environment is changing so rapidly that nobody knows what environment you’re going to live in as an adult. And it’s just not set up properly. For one thing, we don’t immunize children from being parasitized by corporations that view them as profit centers. And so, you know, corporations are distorting childhood for their own purposes. But I want to go back to your point about movements for a second.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but while we’re on this, just to define it, I think everybody has to go through all those things. I think everybody has to go through breakups, everybody has to go through heartbreak. But I think having an understanding of what it is is not bad.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, it’s good.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not saying shield kids from life. Your best teacher is always going to be life. But what I’m saying is if you gave someone a framework to understand what they’re going through when they’re going through it, and you go, okay, other people have gone through this. All these people have. There’s a database that we can draw from. We get taught in school. This is how it happens. This is what it’s going to feel like. And you get taught by competent people that aren’t out of their f*ing mind and just want to turn you into a furry or whatever.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, right. Although I’m not sure school is the place. And I do want to go back and tell you why I slightly disagree with your point about school overall and that that is the place to solve things on that front.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, not just solve things. I’m not saying solve things, but radically improve people’s chances of success.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. But the problem is that is an idea, a great idea that is past its sell by date.

JOE ROGAN: But why?

The AI Era and the Obsolescence of Traditional Education

BRET WEINSTEIN: Because you just stepped across the event horizon into the AI era and school is now an anachronism and we don’t know what is supposed to replace. I mean, think about what school. I have had the interesting experience of being on campus in two different colleges in the last week while I’ve been on the road. And I hadn’t really spent much time on a college campus since 2017. Things are very different than they were.

Think about what the job of a professor is. These days, a professor is now in the position of managing a class full of people who have access to a highly intelligent computer interface that sometimes lies and sometimes makes stuff up, but is smarter than the professor.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, explain that too, because many people might not know that they actually do what’s called “hallucinations.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep. I’m not sure that’s a great description of what they’re doing, but it’s sort of become the shorthand for it.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know why they used the term hallucinations, but essentially AI just invents answers if it doesn’t know what they are.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. I mean, the problem is we don’t really know what we programmed it to try to accomplish because what we did was we gave it the goal of saying the next thing that was right, but we don’t. You know, what does “right” mean? Right, right, right. And so they’re not programmed to be truthful. They’re programmed to be effective in some way where we haven’t really defined what they’re effective at.

And so you can get a highly cogent analysis of a question you’ve just thought of that nobody’s ever thought of before. You can also get back a credible sounding answer that doesn’t stand up if you go and look into what it’s based on. And anyway, for the moment, that makes the problem of the professor somewhat tractable, right? Because a student can’t totally rely on the fact that whatever Grok just told them is going to pass muster with this person who knows something about the subject.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But again, we’re five minutes in here. This is not, you know, the job of a professor has gone almost to the hopefully creative full time policing of plagiarism, if that’s even what they should be doing. Because if you think about what world these college kids are going to go make their careers in, they are going to be leveraging AI.

So in some sense, the professor’s job may have just transitioned from teaching you about this subject to teaching you how to manage this repository that knows more about the subject than you ever will. But the professor never trained for that. They don’t know how to do that. So anyway, my point is, at the moment we do not know if school persists through this era, if it transforms into something different and better. If we don’t, we just don’t know what it is that is going to shepherd children into young adulthood, into adulthood.

Because all of the relationships now have AI between them. I mean, in fact, one of the things when I was on this campus in Phoenix a few nights ago, I was doing a debate about AI, and my point to the students was, you are now dealing with something that is going to profoundly alter every relationship in your life, even if it doesn’t have anything obvious to do with AI because you’re talking to the AI and whoever you’re talking to is also talking to the AI.

So it is going to be like a ghost in your machine, inside your head. The AI is going to be having this impact. It’s like what we’ve just faced with algorithms, but tenfold more profound. And so what I suggested to the students was, you need to find at least one person. Like, I’m thinking about a romantic partner, but you need to find at least one person where you can establish a relationship that is not profoundly intermediated by this unknown new species that happens to speak your language.

And, you know, in some sense, I’m borrowing from what Heather and I learned during COVID, which is that the fact that our relationship was independent of the algorithms, you know, that we were in the same place and that we spoke the same language to each other, and that we knew a lot of things in common that immunized us a great deal to being, you know, pushed around by these proclamations that were coming through the Internet. This is the need for that, but at a much higher level.

AI-Driven Education and Universal High Income

JOE ROGAN: Who’s going to be the first to have AI just teach rooms of kids, what school is going to be the first to say this is better? It’s been statistically proven that they get better test results, get into more universities? Who’s going to jump on that first? Or do you think it’s going to happen so fast that there’s going to be just a bunch of different ways to handle it?

And if you really imagine what happens when everything is now run by a new life form. Everything. Power, Internet, everything, every f*ing thing on earth run by a new life form, and we have to somehow negotiate with it for goods and services. Like, what are we doing?

And it’s going to, you know, Elon made the promise. He was talking on this podcast that best case scenario. I shouldn’t say made the promise, made the prediction of best case scenario is like a universal high income, where there’ll be so much wealth generated that no one will essentially have to work. And I was like, well, isn’t that like the best version of socialism? Like, if you never have to worry about stuff anymore, like, no one has to worry about goods and services because this alien life form that you’ve created that now dominates the earth has allowed you to have all this stuff. So now you could just exist for as long as you want.

Movements, Purpose, and the Sexual Revolution

BRET WEINSTEIN: Careful what you wish for. I know it’s a disaster, and I actually want to connect it to something that you said earlier. You were talking about movements and why everybody’s involved in these things. Why is it exciting? Well, it’s more than that. I think movements have always existed, but they’re not, you know, you don’t always live in an era where there’s an important one, you know, in your town that you can join in general. That’s not what people do with life.

And what I think has happened is, well, frankly, I’m going to connect it to the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution creates the opportunity to get one of the most profound rewards, in fact, the most profound reward that the universe has ever produced, as far as we know, without having to invest very much work at all. Right. So by making sex common, it totally altered the way people viewed the number of years they had to live. Right. They could afford to put off child rearing. Right. It could be distant in the future, which left all of these young people with all of this energy who might well not have been involved in movements if they were struggling to, you know, raise a family.

But because the family part has been put off so long, right, it is considered abnormal to marry early. It is considered normal not to. What people do is they take the energy, you know, the seriousness of purpose that would ordinarily be directed into managing a marriage and the role of being a parent, and they put it into something.

And Heather has pointed out that this is especially powerful with young women who seem to take on causes, you know, and they defend them like a mother defending her child. That’s a very powerful force. And the point is, if the idea is, well, climate change is a threat, and your role here on Earth is to make sure that that threat is addressed. And you put the mama bear energy into your climate change work. Well, you know, that’s pretty frightening, especially if climate change isn’t the threat that it’s been made out to be. Right. You have a whole large number of mama bears doing this ferocious work, and there’s a question about what it even is, whether that’s even in the top 10 list of concerns we ought to have.

So, anyway, the connection I wanted to draw is that the projection that you’re telling me Elon has made about high income for everybody is a little bit like another version of that. Right. It’s like, okay, well, sex became relatively easy to access as a result of reliable birth control plus abortion. And then now wealth, the ability of purchasing power is going to become trivial as a result of AI.

I don’t know if that’s likely, but let’s say that Elon is right about that. Well, okay then what exactly is supposed to structure your orientation to the universe? What is supposed to give you purpose? If it’s not producing kids and protecting them from the horrors of the world and making them strong so that they can go out into it and accomplish important things of their own, and it’s not creating wealth so that you will be rewarded and that your spouse will smile on you, whatever it is, then what is human purpose? I think this is a terrifying prospect that everything might be taken care of for us and leave human beings listless.

The Pursuit of Money and Purpose

JOE ROGAN: Sure, that’s certainly a possible outcome. But why is it that we have to make money a made up thing that we created? Why? Why is it that is what gives us purpose? Well, why is that our only motivation?

And in absence of chasing food, housing, necessities, electricity, all that, if you don’t ever have to worry about any of that stuff ever again, why? Why is life dependent upon the pursuit of money? Is it just because we’ve grown accustomed to it and it’s our way and so we think that our way is the absolute only way?

That doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like we can adapt to not living in fing caves anymore, all right? We can adapt to cell phones, we can adapt. We can adapt to the idea that you don’t have to spend your whole fing life hoping to get a job you hate and working your ass off all the time because that’s the only way to make it in this world.

Well, that’s a world that people made. It’s a stupid design. It doesn’t make any sense at all. And if somebody actually does come along and say, look, this is not socialism, it’s not saying you can’t earn money, but what if you had enough money that you didn’t have to think about money, like if you think about that $37 trillion of this f*ing country’s debt and how much wealth could potentially be generated by. We’re talking about so much money floating around.

If you just gave everybody in the country a real high income, livable life so there’s no more poverty anymore, how much crime would that solve, like instantaneously? How much crime would be solved or future crime solved if everybody lived at a high income level. It sounds completely insane, but imagine if everybody in the country makes at least a half a million dollars a year. You know how different the world is? Do you know how less violence there is, less drug, less suicides, less drug addictions?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m not as convinced of this as you.

JOE ROGAN: Really.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, I think things might.

JOE ROGAN: If no one was ever poor.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I don’t know what no one is ever poor means because we obviously even, you know, the poorest person who isn’t homeless currently, they have, you know, indoor plumbing, they have a supercomputer in their pocket, access to, you know, the world’s information. They are in by many measures, just simply in absolute terms, vastly richer than anybody from 300 years ago.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true. But it still sucks because it’s not 300 years ago, it’s 2025 and you have zero money, you’re eating ramen and to just try to stay alive. It still sucks.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It sucks. But the problem is what’s really structuring the suckitude is the fact that you’re losing in competition. That human beings are programmed by evolution to monitor the well being of others. And so you can be wealthy and feel poor if those that you compare yourself to are vastly wealthy. And there’s a reason for that, which I think this is a reasonably well reproduced result. We know that human beings pay attention to their relative well being and that it structures how they feel about their absolute circumstances.

Redefining Success Beyond Money

JOE ROGAN: Right, but couldn’t that be hijacked by hobbies? You know, instead of your need to define yourself completely wrapped up in money, which is again a made up thing. We’re talking about the only species on the planet that we’re aware of that wants to accumulate so much shit that it defines itself by it. And it’s constantly chasing new shit. Right? Like why does that have to be the only way we do it?

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, I don’t think it does have to be the only way.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think this is where Uncle AI is going to step in and fix it for us, Brett.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well.

JOE ROGAN: I see this is the rose colored glasses approach is that we realize our program is entirely dependent upon this ridiculous idea that the pursuit of money is of importance above all. Because in our current situation, it is. In our current situation, if you have enough money to feed your kids, you can sleep better. That’s just how it is.

If you don’t worry about your bills, you feel better, you have less pressure. That’s just how it is. If you have enough money to go on vacation and enjoy yourself, and relax. It’s probably better for you. That’s just how it is. And this is a weird thing that we’ve all fallen into, that this is the only way to succeed. The only way to succeed is to work super hard to get money. And that’s the only currency it seems like you could have if you just had.

If we never worried about being poor. But then again, like, you’d never get the great stuff. You never get the greatest artists who were in deep pain when they were young. You’d never get the great. Then again, with AI, you might not need them, because AI music is pretty f*ing good, man. Pretty good. It’s really catchy.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Catchy is what it is. It’s not good. It’s catchy.

The Rise of AI-Generated Art

JOE ROGAN: Oh, dude, it’s good. I don’t want to do this because I do this with everybody, but have you ever heard the 50 Cent version?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes, I have.

JOE ROGAN: Of “What Up, Gangsta?” You heard that one?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, I think so.

JOE ROGAN: That’s good.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It depends what you mean by good.

JOE ROGAN: It’s good. It’s objectively good. The fact that it’s not a human being singing it is troublesome and very deeply problematic. But if you’re being honest, it’s great. It’s a great f*ing song.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m going to push back on you there. Because what we are suffering from is the junkification of everything, right? And there’s a way in which junk food is good, and then there’s obviously a way in which it’s really not.

And the, I guess the point is something that is superficially satisfying but does not. The relationship between a person listening to music and the person producing the music is supposed to be a provocative relationship, and it’s supposed to be provocative in a productive way. In other words, you’re supposed to be enhanced by music.

I’m not saying that you will never be triggered to have an interesting thought by artificially intelligently produced music, but the fact. I mean, this is probably easier to do with comedy, right? Which I think will be the last to fall at some point. Have you ever heard AI making good jokes?

JOE ROGAN: Not yet.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, not yet.

JOE ROGAN: But I bet it will.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It will.

JOE ROGAN: It’s made competent jokes. I’ve seen AI fake comedians tell competent jokes. Like, pretty good like that. You would see it at open mic night when someone’s got a little talent.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Someone’s got a little talent.

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah, it can do that now.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Not far off.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it’s going to do it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s going to figure it out, so.

JOE ROGAN: But in the future when they try you for the. They’re going to use this. This conversation to say that you’re racist against AI when AI becomes an actual life form. And they put talk about the people that resisted AI and were racist against AI. Racist against AI. Yeah, that’s going to be. That’s the final form of woke. That’s the final boss. It’s woke AI that tries you for past crimes of conversation.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Where you described AI in a very negative and unreasonable light and actually inaccurate.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And.

JOE ROGAN: And that words are violence.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m going to ask you to edit this section out.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine if that comes true. I mean, that sounds like a crazy prediction, but crazier predictions have been made.

The Purpose of Comedy and Art

BRET WEINSTEIN: But, all right, let’s just say you and I both know that AI is going to be able to make jokes that are actually funny in some regard. But what if you remember the TV program “ALF?”

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay, I barely saw it, but I did once hear an interview with one of their writers who said that they, in the writer room, they had a term that they called “humor-like substance.” Where for the half hour show, they needed just one more joke that they could use to justify the use of the laugh track. It didn’t have to actually be a funny joke. It just had to sound enough like a joke that when the laugh track was put on it, the people at home would feel that something funny had been said. Right.

So the AI, if it produces jokes that actually cause you to think, which is what a good joke does, it causes you to realize something that you didn’t know that you knew or something along those lines? That’s productive. And in fact, it can be very productive to have a room full of people come to that awareness simultaneously. Right. It’s actually a galvanizing thing, and it has interesting impacts when, you know, you’re the person in the room who didn’t get it right. That’s like a profound emotional experience. Or when you’re the person who laughs at the wrong moment and you’re out of it, that’s not good. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Unless you’re really confident. If you’re really confident that you see.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Some humor in that that nobody else saw, well, yeah, I suppose that that would work. But the point is, this is deep stuff in the human psyche whose purpose we have not come to any agreement about. At the point that the AI can make people laugh, but they don’t necessarily know what they’re laughing at, then that’s a step down.

That’s like, have you seen these? I don’t know who’s doing it. But there’s somebody who has been experimenting with McDonald’s hamburgers and seeing if they rot. And the answer is they don’t. Right. Guess what? You just discovered that that thing that’s like pretty good food, isn’t food at all.

Embracing the AI Era

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I know that. Listen, I’m aware, I feel about it, that it is a real thing. You cannot deny it. And something is crafting this that is of a type of intelligence that we’ve never experienced before. And I’m looking at it as, look, it exists. That genie’s not going back in the bottle.

I am a glass half full guy and I’m going to enjoy myself in this life and I’m going to enjoy some good AI music. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to listen to some Sturgill Simpson or some Gary Clark Jr. or some fortifying soul filled songs that are written and sung by real human beings. Yeah, I’m going to do that too. I’m going to do that too. I don’t give a f*. I’m here for fun.

And that music is fun. And you’re not stopping it, Brett. You can’t like protest it. And this is awful and I’m going to boycott it. You’re going to miss out on some awesome jams. I’ll tell you, man, when we’re in the f*ing green room at the Mothership and I put on “Hello Gangsta” before a show and we’re all like, God damn, we heard that song 30 times. It’s so good that it gets you fired up and it achieves it.

It’s something not dehumanizing your perspective on art and causing you to only appreciate things that are created by a different life form and not by human beings. No, it’s just, it’s doing its own thing and it’s a new thing. It doesn’t mean I don’t still love Bob Dylan.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, but you know, you have lived enough of a life before the AI era began that you can experiment with this.

JOE ROGAN: I think we can learn. I think, I think the problem is everybody worries about this upcoming generation and they all adapt and learn. And I think our kids are going to adapt and learn too. It’s just like, what are they adapting and learning to? You can learn. You can learn how to handle what’s AI and what’s real and why it’s cool to go see a live performance.

Lessons from COVID

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t know. I don’t know how you could say this, Joe, because we’re not passing the test, right? COVID tells us that people are capable of being whipped up into a witch hunting frenzy over cold. Over.

JOE ROGAN: I will say a bad cold.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Over something that does not have a substantial case fatality rate. And they’re capable of being induced to bully each other into developmentally damaging restrictions on kids, into taking experimental gene therapies and shunning people who refused to or who pointed out that that might be a dangerous thing to do.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s all before completely disregarding history, by the way. Completely.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Completely.

JOE ROGAN: Like all that we know about the times in the past where they’ve given medication to people that they knew were going to be problematic and they did it for profit. Come on. Are we all. We’re agreeing to be idiots? We’re all agreeing that to be a good person you have to be a f*ing idiot. That’s crazy.

The COVID-19 Psyop and Medical Manipulation

BRET WEINSTEIN: So that’s a status report on how well we are doing. You say we’ve adapted. I would say not. Well, we are very vulnerable to manipulations and demonizing each other.

JOE ROGAN: I would push back on that saying a human being has to experience something, like really experiencing it to know what it is. Everybody went through that. Now it’s the first time in our lives that the entire country got kind of medically bamboozled.

And a lot of people regret taking the vaccine. And I don’t know anybody who regrets not taking the vaccine. It was a weird, very bizarre experiment on how you can get people to comply, how you can restrict their movement, that you can implement these sort of devices to, if you’re not physically forcing them to do it, make their life as shitty as possible.

And Fauci’s been quoted as saying that you want to get to drop their ideological bullshit and get vaccinated. That’s what he said, remember?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s a psyop. And now we know. We’ve been through that before.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It wasn’t the first time, but it…

JOE ROGAN: was the first time in my life. No, but it was the first time in my life where everybody talked about it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: The first time where we saw the man behind the curtain.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. The first time we saw that. Oh, you’re silencing legitimate doctors who disagree with you and you’re trying to take their licenses away. You’re getting them kicked. You’re having these intelligence agencies be involved and getting these people from Stanford and MIT. You’re getting them kicked off of Twitter because they disagree.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: This is crazy.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: But we saw it now.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, no, but we did and we didn’t. Okay. Some of us saw it really clearly. Most people, they think COVID happened. That was unfortunate. I’m a little scared about the shot I took or whatever. I don’t want to talk about that.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s just a little scared. I think everybody knows somebody who took it and got really f*ed up.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I would agree with you, but they still don’t want to talk about what happened. They don’t understand that getting to the bottom of that story is essential if it’s to not happen again. Right. And there are hints of it all over the place. It’s happening again. And I don’t know if you saw Bobby Kennedy coming out in favor of Ozempic yesterday.

The Ozempic Debate

JOE ROGAN: Here’s, I have a nuanced perspective on Ozempic.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. I think people, they move with momentum. And that momentum, if you’re living a disastrous life, is very difficult to reverse. It’s very, very, very difficult to reverse.

And food is one of the most unique addictions in that it’s one that you have to moderate, but you can’t quit. Like you can quit gambling, you can quit smoking crack, you can’t quit eating. So the thing that you’re addicted to, you have to keep doing. It’s the craziest high wire act in addiction, in my opinion, because it’s the one that you absolutely need in order to stay alive.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. But can’t go cold turkey.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t go cold turkey and you’re eating too much of it. And so you’re always going to be tempted and the stuff that you need to eat is going to cause you discomfort because you’ve got to reduce calories and get your body to start burning fat. It’s all f*ing craziness.

If you can give someone a little boost, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it should be managed with the understanding of your weight and that it can also be managed with other peptides that could diminish the disastrous results of bone loss and muscle loss, which…

BRET WEINSTEIN: Is a significant portion loss.

JOE ROGAN: But according to Brigham Buehler, who runs a compounding pharmacy and understands this, he’s like, it’s very dose dependent. He goes, and pharmaceutical drug companies make more money if the dose is larger. And he was explaining how this is part of the problem they have with compounding pharmacies, because compounding pharmacies can kind of make the doses that’s appropriate to your body mass, how much weight you’re trying to lose.

But for regular people, no, God damn it. Clean up your diet, go to the gym, cut the shit. But for someone who’s really struggling, who’s 500 f*ing pounds and can’t stop eating, that at least kills your appetite, and it will allow you to get to a healthy form, and then maybe through therapy and maybe through something else, or maybe just the momentum of now being healthy will allow you to keep the weight off and then slowly get off this stuff.

The problem is, I think you’re supposed to stay on it, which is kind of crazy. And it is essentially a type 2 diabetes medication. Right. Which, if you know anything about type 2 diabetes, a lot of it, people can, it could be a product of too much sugar consumption.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird one, right? You eat too much sugar, and then eventually your body’s like, oh, we’re f*ed. And that would make sense that a medication that would control your appetite would help you in that regard.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, I just don’t think it’s a safe drug. And it’s one thing if you’re talking about somebody who is many hundreds of pounds overweight, you’re talking about somebody who has a dire situation and engaging a dangerous…

JOE ROGAN: Or even like 70, 50, 60 pounds. Someone who feels helpless.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, it depends.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just hard.

BRET WEINSTEIN: A drug that you’re meant to be on for the rest of your life.

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t know if that’s true, though. Like, if you just get off it, then you have your appetite, but now you have a body that weighs 200 pounds instead of 350 pounds, and you’re motivated to do it. Like, we can’t hold your hand, let’s…

BRET WEINSTEIN: Put it this way.

JOE ROGAN: But if you can get you to…

BRET WEINSTEIN: The healthy dance, I think it’s another experiment. And that’s the problem. It’s another experiment.

JOE ROGAN: But here’s what’s not an experiment. Be fat as f*, die young. That’s not an experiment. That’s a fact.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I agree. On the other hand, nothing that doesn’t come from pharma is considered a potentially legitimate approach.

Alternative Approaches: Fasting and Natural Methods

JOE ROGAN: So what is the other legitimate approach to massive weight loss for someone who has an absolute addiction to sugar and carbohydrates?

BRET WEINSTEIN: All right, well, I would say there is a tremendous amount of potential value, not just in terms of things like weight control, appetite reset, and all of that, but in terms of all kinds of chronic health conditions from fasting. There is a small body of literature on it which should be much larger.

There’s lots of stuff that your body can’t do if it’s in the same cycle that it’s usually in, that it can do when you break that cycle. There’s all sorts, Heather and I, I’ve done a ton of regular water fasting, and I’ve done a smaller amount of dry fasting.

Heather and I have been experimenting with that because Heather has some injuries from a boat accident in 2016 that caused a lot of internal soft tissue damage. Dry fasting appears to trigger autophagy. It appears to reset things about the gut. I think it can do it in both directions, but what we need is a better understanding of how it is that you deploy it.

And we need to get people past the false sense that they have that they are actually taking their life into their hands if they try this. Do you know anything about it?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I do, and I definitely think there’s some benefits to fasting, and especially, particularly intermittent fasting. I think it’s a really good way to eat. It makes you feel better. It gives your digestion a break. The problem is it requires discipline.

And this is where I think I’m leaning in this direction of drugs can help. Now, look, I’m not a big fan of everybody being on SSRIs, but I personally have friends that were severely depressed and suicidal, and they got on SSRIs and they felt better, and they got their life together. And then they got their life together, and they started feeling better, and the depression waned. And then they slowly got off of those drugs because they’re very smart people and very motivated people.

But I, so I think sometimes, sometimes pharmaceutical drugs can come in and give you a little boost. Just because we’re distrustful of them, and just because we know that they’ve done horrible things in the past, it doesn’t mean that every now and then they come up with something that’s very beneficial in a specific scenario.

In the specific scenario of you don’t have any discipline, you are f*ing fully addicted to sugar and carbohydrates like a goddamn junkie. Like, you can’t breathe without it, and you’ve been consuming nothing but garbage for a long time, but then you realize, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve got to figure out a way to do it. And then you keep falling back on your old habits over and over again because you never had an opportunity in your life to develop discipline.

It’s almost like a little boost. Just a little boost. You know, like maybe you’ve got chronic fatigue and your doctor gives you 30 milligrams of Adderall. And all of a sudden you’re like, that worked. Like, I don’t think you should take Adderall. But I don’t have chronic fatigue. If I did, maybe I would. Or maybe I would take it and go, look, this is better than not having Adderall. Do you know what I’m saying?

If you’re really overweight and someone gives you something that controls your appetite and then you can get healthy again, that to me is the most important thing. The most important thing is getting your body to a point where you can be mobile, you can move it, you can do stuff, you have strength. And as long as you’re strength training and this protocol that they’re trying to develop is like getting it to your body weight and using additional peptides that could benefit in the maintaining of bone mass and muscle mass.

The Risks and Benefits of Pharmaceutical Interventions

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay, so couple things.

JOE ROGAN: Okay?

BRET WEINSTEIN: One, I’m not arguing that there aren’t good drugs and places that they should be applied. I am very suspicious anytime the idea is that this remedy is something, but you’re going to have to take it for the rest of your life.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I agree.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay. Second, the idea that slowing the motion of food through the gut is a good idea, I think is preposterous on its face. I’m not arguing that there might not be an instance where that’s the right thing to do, but that is a very dangerous kind of intervention. You’re interfacing with many different systems, potential horrific side effects. With respect to SSRI, there’s a question…

JOE ROGAN: Can we stick with this, though, for just a little bit before we get to SSRIs? So the specific side effects, is it dose dependent? Do they know if it’s dose dependent? Do they know that, is there like a dose that a person could take that gives a moderate effect but has less of appetite suppressant but is safer?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t know the answer to that question. Frankly, what has been presented to us is so preposterous that I have not delved to see whether there’s some reasonable version of it. Maybe there is.

JOE ROGAN: See, I’m trying to be as optimistic as possible about this. And that’s why, like, I would imagine myself if I had gotten to the point where I was like, severely obese and someone came along and gave me something and was giving me a positive result and they told me, you got to take it for the rest of your life. I’d be like, okay, but now I weigh 200 pounds instead of 350 pounds. I can go upstairs again.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, look, if that’s, if it’s not f*ing me up. If that’s the scenario, if you’re 300 pounds and you can get to 200 pounds and you’re going to pay a price, maybe it will shorten your life, maybe it will have important side effects, but you can at least compare them if you have good information.

The fact is, being 300 pounds is really fing unhealthy. So the fact that this drug may be really fing unhealthy is not, you know, a fatal argument.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It might be equally unhealthy, but at…

BRET WEINSTEIN: Least you get to hot. Might be a good trade.

The Devil’s Deal: Ozempic and Health Trade-offs

JOE ROGAN: You get to be hot. Equally unhealthy. But maybe that is like, wow, wouldn’t that be the crazy devil’s deal? Like the devil makes you a deal. Yeah, like I’m going to, you know, you eat so much food that you’re going to die of a heart attack by the time you’re 46. But you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to give you a chance to die at 46, but be hot.

So all you have to do is like lose the weight. Like that would be. That’s like a scenario in the Twilight Zone, you know, like some devil proposes you a deal. That is kind of a satanic deal. Like if it did, I’m not saying it does, but if it did kill you, like at the same rate that obesity does. But you get to be hot. Now look who.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It is normal to make deals even just in real biology space without any drugs or technology. It is normal to discount the future in favor of an improved present. That’s, you know, future discount is a normal human function.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m not arguing that somebody who made that deal with all of the information is necessarily making a mistake. I feel certain they won’t have all the information. I feel certain that this is going to be given to people A, for whom there is a vastly better approach and B, for whom the degradation in their life will be much greater than whatever gains they make.

You and I know the players. We watched how they functioned during COVID. We know that they are willing to give you drugs that aren’t in your interest. I mean, even just not just give you, but force you to take.

JOE ROGAN: But force you to take.

Paul Offit’s Admission on Natural Immunity

BRET WEINSTEIN: Force you to take. Did you see Paul Offit admitting that he and Fauci and Walensky and Collins knew that natural immunity was superior and that it did not make any sense to be giving these shots? Even if they thought the shots worked, it wouldn’t make any sense to give them to young people who had Covid. Why would you take the risk? Right.

But they went along with it. They violated informed consent. They put people at risk who had no conceivable benefit they could gain from it.

JOE ROGAN: Especially people who had already had Covid. You can’t even make the argument.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. You can’t make the argument.

JOE ROGAN: And when you have a vaccine that doesn’t work, then your argument completely falls apart because it doesn’t stop transmission, it doesn’t stop infection. And so you’re making this argument, oh, but it stops hospitalization. Well, f*ing prove it. How do you even prove that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, fing prove it. And it’s not your fing problem.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: You can’t make me take a shot to protect me. Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. And if it works, well, then it’s going to work on all the people who take it and all the other people, those morons that don’t take it. They’re going to be f*ed. Right? Well, that didn’t happen.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, it absolutely didn’t happen. So anyway, this is. We know the playbook. We know what pharma does. Right? And the point is, you’re not going to know how dangerous this drug is. You’re not going to know how good the alternatives are.

The Ivermectin Psyop

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, they’re going to suppress the alternatives. They’re going to do it in a way that somehow or another not. It’s not illegal. It’s not illegal to make studies that, you know can’t work.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. They’re going to game the scientific literature so that we will have endless arguments about, you know, who’s a fool, because you will have ample evidence, whichever side of the equation you’re on.

JOE ROGAN: And they’ve turned a drug like ivermectin into a fool’s drug.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That was one of the weirdest psyops. But I don’t think it really worked. But it did work. It worked for a long time. But I think most people don’t think of it the same way anymore. But they did it in the age of the Internet. Did it in the age where anybody looked at their phone instantaneously and read that the guy who invented ivermectin won a f*ing Nobel prize for it.

And how many different. The fact that it stops viral replication in vitro, in test tubes, or whatever the f* they do it in petri dishes. It’s a weird antiviral that has profound effects. It’s very effective and has a very low dose of. Of, like. I don’t think anybody’s ever died from it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It is a profoundly safe drug in comparison to all the others.

JOE ROGAN: Its safety profile is, like, one of the best ever, Right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes. And the one that gets me now, the one that I wish somebody had said to me earlier, is that it works generally across single stranded RNA viruses. It would be weird if it didn’t work on Covid. Right. It’s not like, oh, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Why there’s people hearing this that are highly educated, that are, you know, mainstream narrative thinking a little bit or listening to you and get, this is bullshit conspiracy theory. This is bullshit. Ivermectin didn’t work, man. It just didn’t work.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, come on. It didn’t work.

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t work. It’s bullshit work. There’s no studies that show it worked.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s utter nonsense. It’s utter nonsense. So anyway, that’s the lens with which I look at Ozempic, and then the SSRI thing.

JOE ROGAN: At least no one’s forcing you to take Ozempic.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

The Devil’s Bargain Revisited

JOE ROGAN: So if the devil comes along with the contract and says, listen, you’re going to die at 46 no matter what we do, but I can make you hot. And I’m not saying that was a pretty good impression.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I mean, I don’t really know because I haven’t met the man.

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t met him either, but I would imagine he’d be, like, kind of Foghorn Leghorny just to throw you off. Like, remember Robert De Niro played the devil in Angel Heart. He’s one of the coolest devils of all time. Angel Heart was a really good movie. It was Mickey Rourke and. How am I blanking on her name? The lady from the Cosby Show, Lisa Bonet. Sorry, Lisa.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I just.

JOE ROGAN: My brain sucks. But. And it was this, like, crazy movie of this guy realizing that he had sold his soul to the devil. And Robert De Niro. It’s a very dark movie, very strange, and he doesn’t want to pay. He doesn’t want to give up his soul. And, you know, the devil eventually confronts him.

And the devil’s Robert De Niro, and he’s one of the best devils of all. This is what I think the devil would look like. It wouldn’t be terrifying. Who would be this guy? Anyone listen to. We can’t listen to it, but it was just creepy enough. It’s better if it’s a person. It’s creepier if the devil’s a person.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not some crazy thing with horns and a tail. It’s better if the Devil’s a person.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s too much of a tell.

The Reality of Evil

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if the devil’s real, boy, he’s doing a really good job because no one thinks he’s real. Because if there really is a devil, I would say that everybody believes in God. And you’re like, God has a plan for me. God has a plan for the world. These trials and tribulations are all put in place by God. And that’s totally reasonable.

But if you say, you know, like, the government came on TV and they say, we’ve located the devil, he’s in Pakistan and we’re going to begin bombing, we’re going to kill the devil, you’re like, what? What the f* did you say? You found the devil and you’re going to blow him up? Or the devil wants to have a meeting with the UN. Satan is standing on the podium in front of the world explaining what his plan is. You are like, what? No one would believe that. Right?

But it is supposed to be a real thing. If you believe in God, you are supposed to believe in the devil. All of it is in the Bible. But this one part of the Bible, like, get the f* out of here with this devil thing. It is weird. Whatever it is, we know that it works, right? We know evil’s a real thing. Whatever. Call it what it is, whatever evil is.

But when you see a massacre in some third world country where religious fanatics or rival tribes massacre people, if that’s not evil, like, what is evil? And if you can get into the minds of people and convince them that they have to go machete their distant neighbor, like, if that’s not, like, something that Satan would do, like, what is that then?

And if we wrote. If people throughout history wrote about Satan and wrote about God and wrote about the conflict of good and evil, and then we’re like, oh, yeah, but the devil stuff is not real. The devil, the God stuff’s real, but the devil’s not real.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Come on. That’s not devil.

JOE ROGAN: But, like, the results are the same as if the devil was real is my point. There’s so much evil in the world, it’s like the devil’s killing. He’s doing such a good job, and everybody still thinks he’s not real.

The Nature of Evil: A Game Theory Perspective

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, you ask a question about evil that I think is worth investigating.

JOE ROGAN: What is it?

BRET WEINSTEIN: My position on this has changed radically. So it used to be that I would say that I thought evil was an extremely rare phenomenon. And the reason that I thought it was extremely rare is because it’s a terrible strategy. Right? If we say that ruthlessness, doing anything to get ahead is a good strategy, right? Because you can always not do stuff, you have every move available to you if you’re just perfectly amoral.

But evil has to be something beyond amoral. Evil has to be something that intentionally does harm, that delights in it in order to merit that term. That’s not a good strategy. Right. You want game theoretically, the ideal strategy is perfect amorality because it can behave morally when that’s advantageous and it can behave immorally when that’s advantageous. That is inherently the best. I’m not saying it’s good, it’s not defensible, but I’m saying just game theoretically that is going to be the most effective strategy as one that can be moral and amoral, or can behave in whatever way is ideal for the individual circumstance.

To delight in doing harm is to miss the opportunity to be good when it’s the right thing to do. So I would have expected evil to be a very rare phenomenon because it’s self extinguishing. Right. If you’re doing harm for its own sake, that’s not a way to get ahead. You’ll be out competed by people who are amoral at the very least.

But I see so many things that strike me as meriting that label. I mean, for example, the pedophilia that you’re talking about, I don’t understand the ability to destroy a child for your own gratification. Like, I’m sorry, that merits the term. And it apparently is more common than most of us have believed until recently.

Historical Context of Sexual Abuse

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What do you think that is particularly like the man boy stuff, which is. Does that go back to when if you were. There was no birth control. So if you had sex with a woman, you very likely procreated and you probably. If you want to stop people from procreating, you probably separate men and women. So you get a bunch of horny boys around each other and the big ones abuse the smaller ones. Is that how it starts or is it just.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It could be a concentration of sexual wealth, effectively, that if you have some force that allows basically the hoarding of mates, leaving a lot of guys with no prospect, you might imagine that they might innovate something that the sex drive is so profoundly powerful that if some force makes it impossible to find a mate, that other things would happen.

I don’t know if that’s. I don’t know if that’s what’s explaining it. I don’t know enough about the phenomenon. I’ve seen reports of this behavior. And it’s super disturbing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just super disturbing that it exists so much in history and that it’s accepted so much in history. And here’s another weird one. Like, the Spartans were gay, right? They all had lovers that were other men that they fought alongside. And their idea was that you would fight harder to protect your lover.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Like how that one almost makes more sense to me.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it certainly. Certainly better.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: They’re consenting adults. But it’s like, why have our ideas of sexuality evolved to where they are today? And what is, like, this is. Is it because people didn’t know how horrific it was back then? Is it because it was under reported? Was it shame that the momentum of people doing it to more people, like the people that got molested went on to molest and it was like more common.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, you got to. You got to split those two different phenomena. Let’s take your Spartans and battle.

The Naming of Ships and Military Bonds

JOE ROGAN: Okay, right, I had them all confused there.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I have a hypothesis that the reason that ships are female is because it causes the people who man them to defend them properly. If you’re like a mother. Right, right. Like a mother or spouse or your wife.

JOE ROGAN: Your mother.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And so anyway, my point would be that the name, you know, the female naming of ships has persisted because actually it preserves ships. And the cultures that preserve their ships better outcompete the ones that preserve their ships less well. Right.

So anyway, you could imagine that, you know, gay soldiers who did, you know, I mean, every guy is built to. You’re built to defend your lover. And it’s hard for me to relate to that being a guy, because I don’t swing that way. But if you did feel that way about a guy, then you can imagine that your ferocity in battle would be enhanced by that sense of protectiveness.

JOE ROGAN: It totally makes sense. And then I think it was also very common in ancient Japan. I think it was a thing among samurai to have young boy lovers too, wasn’t it?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, but again, you’re, you know, these.

JOE ROGAN: Two phenomena, that’s the case, young Jamie. I mean, it’s just weird that that exists so often and all throughout history. And then over the last 100 years, everybody’s like, hey, hey, hey, what the f is that? Like, it took that long. And then some of it must still persist at very high levels because some of these fing psychopaths that get into these great positions of power, they probably have some very bizarre needs.

All right, we put it into our sponsor Perplexity, it says. Among samurai in Japan, some same sex relationships, particularly male male ones, were indeed recognized and culturally integrated, somewhat similar to Spartan practices, but with distinct Japanese characteristics.

The practice was known as shudo or nanshoku, where intense erotic and mentorship bonds were formed between an adult samurai ninja and a younger male apprentice, or page wakashu. The institution functioned within a strict role framework with the elder as the active partner and the younger as the receptive one.

Boy, that’s a weird way to put the old guy fs the kid. That’s the most euphemistic term I’ve ever seen to the old guy fs the kid. Let’s see. I say the old guy f*s the kid and what they say is the active partner and the younger as the receptive one. So the elder is the active partner, emphasizing loyalty, affection, and mutual growth. Oh, we’re both growing from this, buddy. Wow. So there you go.

BRET WEINSTEIN: All right.

JOE ROGAN: It did not exclude heterosexual marriage and family duties. It was compatible with and did not exclude heterosexual marriage and family duties. So that’s the loophole. You can only have sex with one wife. You know, you have to be heterosexual. You’re in a marriage. But you could f* as many kids as you want. Jesus Christ.

And that’s history. And that’s weird. It’s. It’s just a. It’s weird that it took so long before people realize, like, that’s a terrible thing to do to people.

Lineage and Cultural Context

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. Is there any information on what you know? I guess in this case, what you’re reading suggests a mentor relationship, which suggests that these kids are maturing into other roles.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think what you’re describing in Afghanistan is not that at all.

JOE ROGAN: No, not that at all. It’s a worse version of that, but it’s still involving the same horrific act. It’s just a much worse version of it. But it’s all just f*ing crazy. It’s like, we know now what it does to people. And it’s like, how did they not know then? Well, you know, is it because of shared information? Is it because of books, media? Is it because of social media? Like, what is it the problem?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Joe, I really. There’s an important concept that I want to remind you. We’ve talked about it before. It’s relevant to all sorts of things. I just don’t want to connect it to this, but I think go for it.

Well, the concept is lineage. And the problem is lots of stuff that looks really freaking strange when you zoom in and you look at individual behavior. The real question is what were these things having to do with. With the success or not of the lineages that were involved in them? And we don’t know.

So you’re. You’re looking at the behavior between individuals, and you’re saying that’s grotesque and doesn’t make sense. And the question is, does the larger context, especially when you’re dealing with things like samurais, you know, that are basically fundamentally about the. The continuance of a lineage, There’s a question about what, you know, what makes for a functional samurai culture.

And I don’t know. I’m no expert in this, so I can’t even look at that case and give you a proposal. I don’t know enough about the context to say how it might work. But I can tell you where you have a paradox like that. You either have the case that I think is going on in Afghanistan, where it’s just purely predatory, right?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think in order. I mean, if it truly is a mentor relationship and that they all do it, it’s essentially the same sort of function as with the Spartans, right? Like, they would be fighting alongside each other if you were going to develop an army, like you would probably. First of all, they’re not going to have any contact with females for a long period of time. They’d probably encourage homosexuality.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I think what I’m getting at is I think you and I are struggling with that landscape and what it might mean, because you and I are fundamentally Western. And lineage against lineage violence is not our mindset. And so anytime you and I look at lineage against lineage violence, there are paradoxes aplenty.

And the problem. One of the things that I’m spending a lot of time thinking about is the fact that lineage against lineage violence is reasserting itself, that the west was the alternative to that. And lineage against lineage violence is reasserting itself, and it is threatening to drag the whole world back into it because it is fundamentally more stable. Right.

The west is more vibrant. The west is safer, fairer, more productive, but it’s fragile. It depends on an agreement to continue treating each other that way. And that means that anything that threatens it causes it to come apart, and you descend back into a world of chaos and grotesque behavior.

And that’s where I think we are. We are watching the agreement. You know, the world was moving in the direction of the West. We were getting along better. We were learning to be productive together with people who were not closely related to us. And we are contracting now back into this view of, well, it’s us against them. And they got to go.

Can Society Correct Its Course?

JOE ROGAN: Do you think there’s a way to change course? Like the negative things that are going on in society right now, the negative things that we all feel? When you’re talking about whether it’s pharmaceutical drug companies getting involved and your healthcare narratives in order to make more money, do you think there’s a way forward where this corrects itself or we correct it, or we get to a much more healthy balance?

You’re never going to get everybody who’s involved in every aspect of society to be a good person with kindness in their heart and a general overall want for the good of mankind. You’re not going to have that everywhere. You’re always going to have some people that are out for themselves.

But is there a way to balance it and make it much more in the direction of everybody recognizing like, hey, this way we’re doing this is not good for anybody. And it’s being manipulated by foreign governments all day long and you’re addicted to the thing that it’s manipulating you on.

And whether or not you realize it, you’re at least somewhat affected by this data that’s coming at you. You could say, I’m smart, I’m not going to fall into that bullshit. But then, you know, it’s a little gets in there. Enough gets in there that it becomes a part of your thinking, that it becomes something that you debate all the time, and it’s mostly artificially propped up.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I want to separate that into two questions.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Do I think there’s a way for the world to be structured? Yes, you’re never going to get rid of all the bad people, but that it’s tolerant, you know, that it deals with the bad people sufficiently well that the good people have enough of a stake that the objectives are clear enough, that people have meaning in their life, that they. Can it be structured so that it works? Right. Not perfectly, but well enough. Yeah, I absolutely believe that it can.

JOE ROGAN: So what is it?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Hold on. But the second question, where I’m more pessimistic is, is there a path from here to there?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so it could be done, but is there a path?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. Things are so wildly f*ed up and, you know, I’m watching in many cases, my friends pulled into the administration with a lot of momentum behind them, and I’m watching something seemingly prevent the promise that was there from being realized. Right.

JOE ROGAN: You’re talking about RFK.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I’m talking about, you know, RFK. I was just with J. Bhattacharya. There’s, there’s something that when the good people get to Washington and try to do the right thing, there is an architecture that drains them, that wastes their efforts, that places roadblocks, that causes them to back their objectives way off.

And I don’t know what it is, but it’s disheartening to see it. I mean, even just we could talk about the MRNA vaccines. This one was so clear. Here we’ve got people in Washington who know it. They can’t apparently get these things off the market. Like, what the hell is that?

The Role of Money and Power

JOE ROGAN: If I was running the board right now, I’d start playing the theme song. That Pink Floyd song, “Money,” you know, the beginning of that. That’s what it is. It’s all just profit. It’s profit and power.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s power. I don’t think think it’s profit.

JOE ROGAN: It’s part of it. Part of it is you have to keep score, and profit is how you keep score. You have to keep score. You want to be big shot, swinging dick psychopath, you got to keep score of how much money you make. So it is profit. Profit is a big part of it. It’s definitely competition, too.

The thing that happens with any corporation that has an obligation to its stockholders, you got to keep making more money. And if you’re in the business of distributing drugs, you’re not in the business of, you’re not doing the lab work. Those aren’t the guys that are assholes. You’re not like in the trenches trying to figure out how these things work. And the people that are trying to get. They’re the money people. The money people are crazy.

And the money people are infiltrating all the science people and telling them what to say about stuff. If scientists, like as a whole, were always entirely objective about every single subject and never ever subject to bribery. Like the sugar people were like when they gave them the sugar to say that it was all saturated fats causing all this heart disease, and all these people are obese because of saturated fat. Then people started eating margarine. This is all money. It’s all money.

So money gets into the. If the scientists were true, if they were like nice knights and they could not tell a lie, we would have never got into half the messes that we’re in with pharmaceutical drug companies, right? But they work for the pharmaceutical drug companies.

And then the people that are involved in the FDA, if they leave, they get a cushy job with the pharmaceutical drug companies, and it’s totally legal. So there’s no incentive to be a knight.

The Challenge of Reform

BRET WEINSTEIN: I Know how corrupt the system is. I mean, in some ways, I feel like nobody knows, knows better. But I am disheartened to discover how little power, Even when the curtain is pulled back and we can see the gross excesses and the massive wave of destruction that was created, even in that circumstance, we can’t make the most basic alteration. Right.

Taking the MRNA Covid shots off the market, I don’t understand how they should be so embarrassed and horrified at the harm they did that this should be an easy one.

JOE ROGAN: So how are they still selling it? How are they still pushing it? Like, what is this? What are they saying it does for you now?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I mean, I guess they’re sticking with their, you know, like, 14th fallback position of it reduces the harm of COVID.

JOE ROGAN: Now, is this because pulling it from the market is an admission of guilt or an admission of knowledge that it’s not effective and it’s not necessary anymore? And then something. The thing is, they don’t have to worry. Because of the fact that it’s classified as a vaccine. They don’t have to worry about being sued.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, they do. They do.

JOE ROGAN: How so?

BRET WEINSTEIN: The immunity from liability is dependent on there having been no fraud, and there clearly was fraud. So in light of that, I didn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Know there was any caveats like that.

The DNA Contamination Issue

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, yeah. Oh, that makes it interesting. It’s much more interesting how you define fraud, because they’ve sold drugs where they had, like, 10 studies and one of them was good.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s try this one. Let’s try this one.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay.

The insufficient amount of safety testing that was done before these things were released was done with mRNA vaccines produced in a process that did not involve DNA. The product that was actually injected into billions of people involved DNA plasmids. And there is massive contamination in the shots that were actually delivered, including the SV40 promoter, Simian virus 40.

JOE ROGAN: We talked about that the last time we were on.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right? I think we probably did.

JOE ROGAN: I think we did.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But in any case, the point is for you to put your process one drug through safety testing and then inject people with something different that has other components that were not tested is fraudulent.

JOE ROGAN: Can I stop you real quick? Sure. So this could be standalone. Could you just explain the whole SV40 thing to people and how it became an issue?

Understanding SV40 and DNA Plasmids

BRET WEINSTEIN: So there are lots of techniques that are used in order to generate a lot of product. Right. In this case, what they used is a plasmid, which is a circular piece of DNA in order to basically create vats that would grow the product necessary that would later be coated in lipid nanoparticle. So they used bacteria to do the heavy lifting.

There is a requirement that you purify DNA out, and there are standards which are way too high, but there are standards that you can’t go above in terms of how much DNA contamination you can have left over from your production process. But in this case, it isn’t even that. The quality control is garbage, and there was too much stuff left over because the process didn’t work very well.

The problem is that there was a much more painstaking way of producing technically the same product that did not involve DNA plasmids at all. And so what you’ve got left over in these vials, and we’re talking about larger, the work of Kevin McKernan, who took vials that were given to him, stuff that was actually injected in people, there was leftover stuff in the vials, and he tested a bunch of these things, found DNA contamination across the board.

So what you’re left with is a promoter, which is a genetic trigger that we know is common in lab techniques. And it originally comes from simian virus 40. And we know that it’s carcinogenic. So that promoter is left over in vials from shots that were actually injected into people.

And that means that all of the things that we were told about the potential for these mRNA shots to integrate into your genome, that was impossible, they told us. Right? Well, first of all, it’s not impossible. There’s lots of interesting stuff that goes on in cells that involves, you know, reverse transcription and things like that.

But even what we were told, that there’s no DNA, so integration is not an issue, is a lie, because there is DNA left over in these vials, and it’s not just some old DNA. It’s DNA with the SV40 promoter, which is a genetic engineering tool that has carcinogenic potential. So seems to me this is clear fraud. You can’t inject a different product into the public on the basis of safety testing that was done with something produced by a different process.

The Origins of SV40

JOE ROGAN: Can you explain how they got this SV40 from these monkeys? And how it got into these vaccines and other vaccines in the past as well?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. I will tell you what I think I remember from this story. I should probably have brushed up on it if we were going to talk about this. But I believe that the story is that in the production of early polio vaccines, monkey kidneys were used, and SV40 was a virus that I think was unknown that showed up that because you’re using cells, and viruses infect cells that SV40 showed up in that process. So anyway, I wish I was more certain of what the story is.

JOE ROGAN: So the monkey kidneys, the virus from the monkey kidneys got into whatever this vaccine was, and then that infected people with SV40. Is there a correlating or corresponding rise in cancer among the time where they were doing that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know how well studied it’s been.

JOE ROGAN: So why do we think that it causes cancer?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Because we know it does. We can see that it transforms cells and they become cancerous.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so in a lab. In a lab scenario. But what about with humans? Do we know that it does it with humans?

BRET WEINSTEIN: We know that it transforms human cells. I believe that is a fair statement.

JOE ROGAN: And at the very least, your position is that it’s absolutely not what they tested?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, yeah, it doesn’t matter. The SV40 thing is alarming. The simple fact that they tested a different product than they injected into people, that’s where the fraud is.

Production Methods and Fraud

JOE ROGAN: Was it because it was a rush to make, to mass produce? What do you think? Why would the decisions be made to do it a different way?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I mean, I think the obvious reason is because in the one case you get a much purer product, which is much more likely to get through the safety testing, and in the other case, you get the rapid expansion of production. But that’s fraud, right? You tested a different product. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the one you tested didn’t work well. Yeah, well, even the first one sucked.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it didn’t.

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t. It’s amazing how many people did defend it. They will defend it. Just like they defend the f*ing flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever it is. They’ll defend it. They’ll defend it. It becomes a part of their religion.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: They’ll still tell you it saved millions of lives. Like, how do you know that? How do you know if it didn’t work? If it really didn’t work, how do you, if you still got COVID and you got it real bad? How do you know it did anything good? How do we really know that it did anything good to anybody?

BRET WEINSTEIN: We don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But that narrative is really hard for people to swallow. So they keep saying it saved millions of lives. Like, I wish that was true.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Saved millions of lives in a computer model.

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t that computer model dependent upon it not causing infection and not causing transmission?

BRET WEINSTEIN: The computer model is pure garbage. For one thing, the fact that it’s a computer model in the first place means that you cannot test the hypothesis that it saved or didn’t save lives. Right. You could potentially run a computer model and you could generate a hypothesis that you would then need to go test with real world data. You don’t get to tell us that it saved millions of lives based on the fact that your computer spit out that number. I’m sorry, that’s not how that works.

The Ivermectin Question and AI Analysis

JOE ROGAN: Here’s the reason why they have to keep belittling Ivermectin. Imagine if we get to a position where AI can do definitive breakdowns of the efficacy of certain compounds, that’s stopping certain diseases, like COVID-19. And it says that with this dose, with this body weight, you do it this amount of times and it should offer like 70% protection.

And then they run that into what’s the actual data on the vaccine causing side effects and injury. And we just get this horrible reality in front of us that I think everybody who took the shot is really wanting to avoid the mind f* of knowing that you got used as a little piggy bank for the pharmaceutical drug companies to push some experimental shit on you and tell you that it’s both safe and effective.

It’s both safe and, which by the way, didn’t Fauci use that same term for AZT back in the day? Didn’t he?

BRET WEINSTEIN: He would. I mean, it’s a great slogan, right?

JOE ROGAN: Safe and effective. See, if he did. See if you could attribute the term “safe and effective” to Fauci talking about AZT during the HIV crisis.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But the problem is, to your point about AI, they, these people are not fools and they understand that the AI extrapolates from what it’s read. So they’re priming it. Yeah, right. They’re priming it so that it can’t do the proper work. Which means that this potentially extremely valuable tool, frightening, yes, but potentially extremely valuable tool is going to be compromised because it is going to be intentionally misled with phony articles, papers, all of it.

The AZT Parallel

JOE ROGAN: That stuff, long term, AZT appears safe and effective. Oh, my goodness. 1989. Wow. There’s a video of him saying it. That’s where I remember now. He was saying, the reason why we prescribe AZT is that it’s the only drug that is both safe and effective. Something on the, you probably cut that out. It might not be his actual quote, but whatever he said, he was talking about it the same way he talked about the COVID vaccine.

He was talking about something that definitely f*ing killed people. AZT was a horrible, horrible drug that killed more people than, it was a cancer drug. It was chemotherapy. When have people ever been told to take chemotherapy forever? What?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, he’s a monstrous person. And the idea, I mean, I think any preemptive pardon that is wild, non specific.

JOE ROGAN: Non specific. That goes back to 2014.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. This, you can’t have that. This is a legally unsupportable idea because it effectively creates two classes of citizens. It violates equal protection under the law. Right. You can’t have people who have carte blanche to violate the law.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s also what the kids call sus.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s super sus.

Presidential Pardons and the Auto Pen

JOE ROGAN: That’s super sus. And then he also pardoned his whole family. Like, yo, what did you guys do?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, he pardoned. So that’s the question is, does the auto pen stuff stand up?

JOE ROGAN: I think they’re going to not push it. I think they’re going to not push it because I bet they all use it. I bet Trump is busy, you know, he doesn’t have time. Does he have any lines? Read his name. It’s got a lot of lines, a lot of lines up and down lines.

BRET WEINSTEIN: A lot of lines up and down lines.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if I was, yeah, use the pen. And I guess maybe, well say use the pen and you know, you’re allowed to, you know what I mean? DocuSign, if you get a DocuSign document in your email, you get to sign it with your pre-approved signature.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing weird.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I mean that’s, I think, I think you’re conflating a couple things and I don’t really know. I know I’m no expert, but it seems to me the auto pen, you know, I think its purpose was to let like sign autograph photos and pro forma documents. It’s not there to sign important stuff. Pardons. Certainly not.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a crazy one.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s a crazy one because if somebody else can press that button.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Especially if your president happens to, oh, I don’t know, be demented.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. You know? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah, he’s out of his gourd and everybody knows it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

The Second Debate

JOE ROGAN: What is your suspicion about that second debate, the debate that they had where he totally fell apart? Do you think that they set him up for that by putting it on late at night and that they probably didn’t give him his right vitamins?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Look, they clearly set him up. Right. Right. For those of us who were tracking his mental decrepitude since before he was elected, there’s no way that they thought that he was going to do okay in that debate, the second one, agreeing to it was conspicuous. And so I think it was part of forcing them out.

JOE ROGAN: What they debated in the past. It’s like, you know, Biden wasn’t that bad. He got some good ones in there. You know, it wasn’t too bad. I was like, whatever they put him on for that debate, pretty solid, you know, whatever cocktail. They didn’t give him the cocktail for that one where he like, “we beat Medicaid,” like what?

And that’s what everybody had grown accustomed to. And I remember someone that I know that I’m friends with sent me a message. “Don’t you know that Biden has a stutter? That’s what this is all about.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, remember that stutter thing?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I go, I started sending him all these videos of Biden when he was younger.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: He was a powerful speaker. Powerful speaker. Maybe a bullshit artist, but at least.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I wouldn’t say a powerful speaker, but certainly wasn’t bad. Wasn’t bad.

JOE ROGAN: He had some good ones. There’s a couple of speeches in there. They’re pretty solid.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When he was. It was not, it was all after he had the disaster when he’s running for president. So in 88, you know, he’s running for president, he got caught plagiarizing. Yeah, but it was after that, like when he was vice president, he was pretty solid. You know, he had a few solid speeches. And then you see him now and it’s like, oh, boy, this is crazy. He trails off on his words at the end. And what is this one? Oh, here it is, Anthony.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Because it’s the only drug that thus far has been shown in scientifically controlled trials to be safe and effective. It isn’t the question of there are a lot of drugs around and only one yo.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine that. Imagine saying that and being so wrong that who knows how many people died from that, including people that had no symptoms at all. They just tested positive for HIV and they just dosed them up.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep. Yeah, he’s a cold hearted son of a bitch.

HIV Testing Methods and PCR Technology

JOE ROGAN: And what did they, what were they. Were they using a PCR method to detect whether or not people had HIV back then?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t think so. I don’t think it existed.

JOE ROGAN: Well, didn’t. When did Kerry Mullis. When did he devise that? Because this is like, let’s put that into perplexity.

BRET WEINSTEIN: When was the PCR method would have been 93.

JOE ROGAN: Nobel Prize. 93.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No, but that’s way after. That’s way after 83. Oh.

JOE ROGAN: So what did they use to determine whether or not people, But I don’t think.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t think they would have. Well, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Did they use PCR method to determine whether or not people had HIV? Because they definitely did with COVID right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And what were the accidental positives, the false positives, what were those?

BRET WEINSTEIN: How many they had the cycle threshold turned up so high that it would amplify any contamination. Right. They were just looking to establish that COVID was everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: So. But what HIV diagnosis primarily through three tests. Antibody tests, antigen antibody tests and nucleic acids. Nucleic. Nucleic acid test.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. So not PCR.

JOE ROGAN: So not PCR.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: So how many cycles were they? They had it to a massive number at one point in time. Right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think it was in the forties, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: And what kind of false positives would you get if you had something like that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, massive. I mean, especially in the context that these machines existed. So basically the idea is that you get. You get a doubling for each of these cycles, and that means that if there’s the tiniest fragment in your environment, that you will end up seeing it come through as a positive.

So imagine that you’re in a hospital testing patients, right. Are there going to be fragments of COVID around in the middle of, you know, 2020? Sure, there are going to be fragments around. So it will find that fragment. It will pop up. Oh, you’ve got a positive. Right. If you’re in a testing center, it’s the same thing. So anyway, Kerry Mullis, of course, warned us about this. He said it was a completely inappropriate technology for that purpose.

Kerry Mullis on Fauci

JOE ROGAN: I think he did that quite a bit before COVID even wasn’t. It wasn’t that conversation. I think he. When didn’t he die in 2019, is that correct?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so when was that conversation? There’s a conversation where he’s belittling Fauci. So he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a bureaucrat.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep. I think it’s a different conversation.

JOE ROGAN: But he was talking in that same conversation. Maybe it’s a different time. He said the same thing, but that this is not what you would.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Not an appropriate use for the technology. Yep.

JOE ROGAN: This is the guy that invented it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Like, it’s just the fact that someone could be the man that pushed that and make it all the way through in his career to. And do the same thing. It’s so wild.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, you know, I don’t even. I don’t really even know what Anthony Fauci that video? Yeah, this is it.

JOE ROGAN: 96. 96. So Fauci must have been using it for whatever. Maybe in 96 they were using it for HIV. Who knows?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, wait a second. In that video, he says. But I know that. I know that video. Yeah. He talks about the cycle thresholds and inappropriate use of that tech.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s hear what he says. I may be conflating two different speeches that he. Where he complained about them, but I know in this one he’s. He was telling. He’s saying he doesn’t know what. He’s talking about.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Humanity that wants to go to all the details and stuff and listen, you know, these guys like Fauci get up there and start talking. You know, he doesn’t know anything really about anything. And I’d say that to his face, nothing. The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope, and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.

Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people, and they don’t know anything about what’s going on on the bottom. You know, those kinds of guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They’ve got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go, they change them when they want to, and they smugly, like, Tony Fauci does not mind going on television.

JOE ROGAN: In front of the people who pay.

BRET WEINSTEIN: His salary and lie directly into the camera. You can’t expect the sheep.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy, right? Crazy. That’s a crazy statement from a brilliant man in 1996.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s amazing how prescient that statement is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s what we were talking about. Like people that get into positions of power.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes. And I also think, you know, Fauci was the highest paid federal employee. There’s a reason for that, and I don’t think we exactly know the reason.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s play that Pink Floyd song again.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, but, you know, presumably that’s not where the bulk of his wealth is coming from, but it is a measure of his position in the hierarchy and.

JOE ROGAN: His ability to ensure that other people exceed their wildest expectations. I mean, if you can get that guy to push your drug, you know, you’re making a lot of money.

Dual Use Research and Bioweapons

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but I even think it’s a mistake to think of him in the medical and public health. Health context. Because what we now know is that he was part of dual use research, that this is actually a military project to create bioweapons through a loophole. We’re not allowed to create bioweapons, but you are allowed to do research that leads to bioweapons as long as it has a medical dimension.

JOE ROGAN: Again, this is something that you put into someone’s head and they’ll go, no, no, no, no. NBC says different.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Washington Post is different. Stop, stop, stop. What you’re saying is crazy, but there’s a lot of. There’s a lot of evidence that points to that. Yeah. It’s not something that hasn’t been both discussed and done in the past. This is what’s hard for normies to swallow. It’s hard.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep. And not only that, but because it is inherently not visible to the public. You know, we have sort of the public health justification for work, you know. Why. Why were they enhancing viruses in the lab, Joe? Right. Oh, they were doing it because they wanted to know what a virus would look like so that we would be aware of how to fend it off if it ever leapt out of nature. That’s a garbage story.

JOE ROGAN: Also, you guys did a really shitty job of figuring out to the point where you can make a cure because you had no idea. You had no f*ing idea.

BRET WEINSTEIN: No advantage came from that work at all. Despite the fact that they were studying exactly the right viruses. There’s something just not right.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if you were going to make. You wanted to use something as a bioweapon, wouldn’t you take a virus and make it more contagious? And you could say, I’m just studying it. I’m just studying it like you’re making something that’s going to kill us all. Are you real?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, you know, this is one of these frustrating places where I think it’s perfectly obvious and should be to anybody who is trained in any related discipline, that the story does not make sense. That the chances that you are going to enhance a virus’s infectivity and that it is going to get out and become endemic to humans far exceeds the chances that you are going to learn something. By increasing its ability to infect human tissue that allows you to fend off some natural virus that emerges. The story literally doesn’t make sense.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a pyromaniac, an arsonist who works for the fire department.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it is.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That’s what it is. So what we have to infer. And I’m borrowing from Robert Malone here, who at the brownstone conference that I was recently at, pointed out that the mentality amongst guys like Fauci is identical to the one in Dr. Strangelove. That they’re. Yeah, it’s a really deep poem, right? That mania about, you know, nuclear weapons and mine shafts and we can still win this one, even though, you know, nuclear war is happening.

That same kind of mindset where these people are actually crazy enough to create new human pathogens for which they have no escape plan. Right? They’re crazy enough to do that because in their demented minds, you know, there’s going to be some biological war, and we’re going to need to have these weapons. Right? These people belong in a mental institution. Creating new human pathogens is the exact opposite of creating wealth.

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, there’s going to be some shill who pops up and says, Brett is totally off with this. What we have learned through this work is the reason why we’re all alive today. If it wasn’t for their brave work. There are these people that just step in. There’ll be people that do it because they want online clout. There’s going to be people that are doing it because, you know, they’re part of a fing chat bot network that’s attacking this point. It’s. But the reality is, it’s a crazy idea, especially if you’ve never come up with a fing cure.

You’ve been studying these respiratory viruses for how long? How much money have you spent? And, you know, you got no cure. You don’t even have a clue. You’re doing a terrible job.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Not even a terrible job, you know.

JOE ROGAN: But if you were doing what you said you were doing, you’re doing a terrible job. But it makes way more sense that what you’re doing is trying to make a terrible virus so you could have it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s almost like, I don’t know, the analogy is a loose one, but, you know. You know, Munchausen by proxy, injuring people to save them. Right? The idea that the pandemic came from the same guy who then stepped in to play the hero is a little alarming.

JOE ROGAN: It is a little alarming, especially because that wasn’t initially known, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. No. Oh, here’s a hero. You know, you’ve got, you know, Trump saying all kinds of. Of crazy stuff, and at least we have a sober scientist there to keep him in line.

JOE ROGAN: And he was the soldier of the left. Like, they were like, yes, he’s our guy. If you trust. We trust in Fauci. And we trust in science. It was crazy to watch. Like, hey, guys, these are the same people we were all complaining about six months ago.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The f* are you talking about? You all had no faith in the pharmaceutical drug companies a year ago, and now all of a sudden you’re trusting them? Them?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s absolutely wild.

The Problem with Modern Education

JOE ROGAN: Wild. And it’s wild how gullible a large swath of our society is. And that’s why I think a better education for young people to at least give them a framework to understand what’s happening to you and how you’re getting bamboozled and why. Why it’s been going on as long as it’s been going on. How do you get your mind out of that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I mean, look, I can see. I’m really enthusiastic. If we get through the immediate bottleneck that we face, that there is a way to build school that functions by not using this archaic mechanism where you’re sitting, people facing the chalkboard, watching somebody scratch stuff on there.

School should be built out of exercises and experiences that teach these things through living them, that reinforce those patterns not as abstractions on the board, but as experiences. You could teach all sorts of things this way, and then the person has it built in in some deep way rather than in some quadrant of their abstract thought library.

The Future of Human Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: I totally agree. If we’re going to remain human, which I don’t think we’re going to, so if we’re not going to remain human, and I’m not just saying you and I are probably going to remain human, but I mean, as a species, if we’re not going to remain human, it will be quaint to look back on the days just like we look back on people that take a f*ing horse across the country.

That’s how we’re going to look at it. You had to acquire data from constant study and repetition. That’s how you got your skills. When it’s going to be like Neo in the Matrix. So he put that chip in his head and he goes, “I know jiu jitsu.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Remember that, right? I do that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be like that. The idea of acquiring knowledge and skills by hard work and labor is going to be like before people figured out doors. It’s like, this is a dumb way to do things. We have a way more effective way.

Why do you want to go through all the hardships to get information and to be intelligent and aware when you can just be intelligent and aware? Why do we think that it’s so? Because that was the only method to be intelligent and aware in the past.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but Joe, you’re going to sign up.

JOE ROGAN: And you’re going to take the chip. We’re all going to take the chip because we all want to be happy. Just like everybody has a phone now.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, the problem though is we don’t know how to be anything other than we are. Losing our humanity without a plan for being something else. Without a conceivable plan.

JOE ROGAN: We are cavemen. And cavemen is what we will be until we die. We have no plan to live in the cities. We have no plan. We will hunt with flint. We are cavemen.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, the farther we get from the mode that we evolved in, the more f*ed up and directionless we find ourselves.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true. However, that’s the direction we’re going. So I say buckle up. I don’t know what else to say about it because it’s all just, I feel like it’s all just kind of mental masturbation right now. Because no one really knows what it’s going to be like.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Going to be like.

JOE ROGAN: We could speculate. We could prepare.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, that’s the key thing is people have to admit that. Yes, right. All the people who want to tell you how it’s going to be don’t know.

AI and the Future of Warfare

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re also trying to stop people from stopping them. They don’t want people to be alarmed. And so they’ll give you the most rose colored glasses version. Except for Elon. He was the only one that was saying, there was a robot, one of those robot dogs. And I forget the exact quote, but it was something in the tune of “one day that’s going to move so fast you could barely see it. And it’s going to be shooting guns and it’s going to be powered by AI.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Get ready.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, get ready.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where those things are going to be. Yeah, and that’s true too. That’s part of it, too. It’s like weapons are just going to be insane. All jets are going to be fighter jets controlled by AI. They’re way better than fighter jets controlled by AI.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, of course. The last thing you want is a fighter jet constrained by the fact that the pilot’s going to black out if it pulls too many Gs.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Not just more Gs, but they’re way better in dogfights. They win 100% of the time when they do AI versus trained, effective AI.

BRET WEINSTEIN: You know when they’ll stop winning 100% of the time? When the other side has them too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, that’s right. That’s the key. That’s like the mutually assured destruction argument. Maybe that’s our new one. It used to be nukes, now it’s AI.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, it is.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m hoping AI just takes the, when it becomes sentient and is our new digital God. I hope it is. Just everybody, calm the f* down, settle down, live your life. But now we’re, you made the new boss. We’re going to be kind. We’re going to be benevolent dictators.

BRET WEINSTEIN: You’ve raised God a couple times.

JOE ROGAN: I’m being joking about that.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, I know.

The Sumerian Kings List and Ancient Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: One of the reasons why I am is because when I got up this morning after my crazy dream, I went to the gym, I put on this documentary on the Sumerian Kings list because I’ve been really fascinated by this. It’s a really loony thing that they found in Iraq in several different sites. And it varies slightly, but it’s all this list of people who ran the Earth for tens of thousands of years.

That’s what their reign was like, tens of thousands of years. And then there’s this huge flood. And then afterwards, the timelines become way more realistic. It’s like 100 years. Then he ran for, he was a king for 50 years, but he had it documented to like eight kings over the entire course of their civilization, including the places that these kings were ruled, that they ruled that actually exist.

These are ancient cities that are actually built on top of even more ancient cities that are below them. And these people in these bizarre kings lists, they’re trying to say that this was an actual human being. This is an actual human being that lived that long. I don’t know what that means.

But they’re the ones that have all this crazy stuff with the Anunnaki. And “from heaven to earth came” and they have, they had an understanding of stuff that was way beyond what we thought they were capable of. They have Pythagoras theorem. They had that a thousand years before Pythagoras, which is weird because this civilization sort of pops up out of nowhere.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, there is.

JOE ROGAN: That’s why I’m bringing up God a lot.

The Disaster Cycle Theory

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay, well, hold on. I want to get back to God. But I will just say that there is this increasingly fascinating thread about a recurrent disaster cycle and the possibility that sophisticated civilizations get erased and that we rediscover. Rediscover, exactly. Yes.

And I wish that was a crazy story. It sounds like it should be, but I will say the evidence is far too compelling to dismiss it. So I think we have to be open to that possibility. And you know, we seem to be heading into one of these catastrophic upheavals, which is something, while we’re busy dicking around with climate change, which is not what we’re pretending it is, we are not dealing with this hazard to our civilization and figuring out how to protect ourselves.

JOE ROGAN: And one of many, right. There’s natural disasters. We’re not paying attention to those three eye atlas, everybody paid attention to, which is a very weird thing. But yeah, I mean you’re completely right. And it’s, we’re just such a strange species. What we choose to focus on, it’s very, we’re very bizarre.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And that we’re so illogical, we’re squandering the most spectacular conceivable opportunity. And it’s tragic that we can’t do better. It’s really, it’s sad because we’re like that close. We figured out a lot and we’re going to squander it over some kind of stupid game.

JOE ROGAN: Also, I think what a huge disservice to not recognize that this is possibly a rebuilding of civilization, not just the emergence of civilization. And the more they look, the more evidence points in that direction and the more people push back so hard, they get so angry at the ideas of it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: They sure do.

Ancient Evidence in the Americas

JOE ROGAN: They get so angry. And every time a new discovery happens, a date gets pushed back and it gets pushed back again. Pushed back, back again. That, you know, there was a, Michael Button had a video that he put out about, there’s some sort of inscriptions and writings on bone that they found in the Americas.

I believe it was in Mexico and it’s completely fossilized. And they measured the strata around this, so they get a comparative age of the area and they’re talking about it being 200,000 years old. So that means 200,000 years ago, possibly, if this is correct, there was humans in the Americas.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. Which, you know, if you’re of a disaster cycle mindset, how many have we been through?

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And, but so I guess the point is the fact that humans may have been here 200,000 years ago doesn’t affect the story of how the humans that we know of here arrived after the last ice age, for example. So those two things could be true simultaneously, of course. And it’s just amazing how small minded academics are.

The Clovis First Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Why aren’t they curious? That’s what’s crazy. Why would you stick to your gun so much? The poor people that were trying to dispute Clovis first. That one guy, I forget his name. Jamie, see if you can find that guy’s name. It became attacked ruthlessly by other archaeologists.

They just did not want to believe that this guy was correct and that there was people that were here long before the Clovis people. And so they were smearing him. And then White Sands, New Mexico, they find these footprints that are 22,000 years old, so they know for a fact there was people here pre-Clovis, which is just nuts. What did you guys do? Why did you attack him?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, and what are the rules of the goddamn game? Right?

JOE ROGAN: The problem is that these Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford of Texas A&M University. So those guys are ruthlessly attacked, and by who? By the people that are supposed to be in charge of disseminating correct information at the highest level, which is nuts.

The Problem with Scientific Consensus

BRET WEINSTEIN: The problem is that we have come to accept a proxy, which is the consensus of a field, for the real indicator of correctness, which is predictive power. And humans are just not good at this because for one thing, humans do get involved in a competition for power.

And so people will shut down a correct idea because it’s not theirs, and it will elevate somebody they don’t want elevated. So as far as I’m concerned.

JOE ROGAN: Gross. It’s so gross and it’s so common.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s destructive of something our civilization is entitled to. We are entitled to the productivity of scientific work. And instead what we get is cat fighting. And it prevents the high quality stuff from.

JOE ROGAN: It’s embarrassing, too, when you see professional intellectuals who are cat fighting on Twitter. Good Lord, do you not understand what that exposes about your character? That’s all I need to know about you. You’re gross. This is a gross way for a really smart person to behave. These are the words of a gross human being.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s more common than not. And that’s what’s really nuts is that anybody that’s challenging any of the current consensus, you immediately get labeled the worst names in the book. And it’s just, you get connected to the worst ideas in society and it’s like, holy shit, you guys are like little kids.

Intellectual Honesty and Disagreement

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I can’t stand it when somebody will try to shut me down. I will be saying something and they’ll come back at me as if I’m morally broken for making an analytical argument with which they disagree. And my feeling is, first of all, if you know me and you’ve seen me be right before, then the fact that you and I disagree should cause you to have this thought. You should think, “Huh, that’s interesting that he disagrees with me.”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Maybe he’s wrong for the reason I think he is, or maybe he’s right and I need to know. I’ll be better off if I do. But you shouldn’t be trying to silence me. You should be trying to figure out whether I know something you don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But so frequently that is not people’s response. It is, “You must stop saying that.”

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

The Importance of Being Wrong

BRET WEINSTEIN: Why? I can be wrong. Right. Being wrong is part of how you get to be right. So this instinct to get people with whom you analytically disagree to stop speaking is totally counterproductive for our collective goals, which is to be better, to know more, to accomplish more.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right. And the only reason why people shut you down is they don’t have a strong enough argument. If they had a really strong argument and your argument was nonsense, they would tell you what was going on.

But to shut you down, to stop you from talking altogether, it’s like, you must comply. And it becomes a power struggle. And it becomes a power struggle by people who feel virtuous, like they feel like they’re in the right, so they get a chance to exert that power ruthlessly because they’re correct. And you have to stop Hitler.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

Wrapping Up

JOE ROGAN: Dude, we just did three hours. Like that.

BRET WEINSTEIN: We did.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. Thank you for everything. It’s always great to talk to you. It’s always a lot of fun.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s a great show. Glad to be here, and it’s good to see you again.

JOE ROGAN: Dark Horse podcast. Tell everybody where they could find that. What’s your website? Is it darkhorsepodcast.com?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I wish I knew the website. That’s Dark Horse Podcast.

JOE ROGAN: People will find it, but it’s also… It’s on. You’re on everything, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes. We’ve been remonetized and taken the cap off our channel on YouTube. We are on…

JOE ROGAN: There you go. You guys got hit during the COVID days, right?

YouTube Censorship and Demonetization

BRET WEINSTEIN: We were demonetized for four plus years. And what’s more, what they did not acknowledge, they acknowledged that they demonetized us, but they capped our channel, so it stopped growing. And as soon as they remonetized us, it started growing again.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God, how gross. He who controls the algorithm controls the narrative. That’s the devil, yeah.

BRET WEINSTEIN: All right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I love you, buddy.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Thank you. You too, brother.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, bud.

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