The Professor Banned From Speaking Out: "We Need To Start Preparing! The Terrifying Lessons Of Covid We’re Ignoring!" - Bret Weinstein

31:58But that doesn't get you out of the woods because you have to put energy in in order to keep the cooling water flowing and that cooling water is not just about keeping the reactors cool. It's also about keeping the fuel pools cool. So the fuel pools are where fuel is taken after it's removed from the reactor. Now for something like five years, a set of rods taken out of a reactor is releasing what's called decay heat. That decay heat is sufficient to boil the water out of these fuel pools if you're not constantly circulating new cold water in there. So these fuel pools look like they're unimportant.

32:40But if you cut the power, you've started the stopwatch. Right. That water is going to boil off. And when that water boils off, they're going to catch fire. The cladding on the rods will literally catch fire from the heat. Now the reactors for reasons that are almost too boring to recount contain not only the fuel rods from the most recent five years of refuelings, but they also contain decades of rods that we never found any other solution for stuff. What are these rods? These are nuclear rods. Yeah, these are nuclear. Basically they are physical rods clad in something called zirconium that contain fuel pellets.

33:28This is uranium that has been packed in a particular way. These rods get loaded into the reactor. And then there's another set of rods that are used to modulate how much the rods interact with each other. Pull the modulator out and you get a chain reaction. You put the rods, the control rods back in and it tamps down the reaction. So in an earthquake, you tamp down the reaction. And then you're not putting out a power, but you do need to put power in to keep it cool. If the power goes and the water boils off, the thing will explode. As we saw in Fukushima, you had a situation in which the cooling water literally got torn apart into hydrogen and oxygen.

34:19So it goes from a coolant to an explosive. And we had multiple explosions where the hydrogen, oxygen mixture just blew the buildings apart. But the rods that have been stored for decades in these pools and the pools literally sit there right next to the reactor. So if you lose control of one of these reactors, it threatens to take out the pool. And the pool can go dry. If you can't circulate water through it, the pool can crack and all the water can drain out. And then there's not even a way that you could put water in and stop it. And my point is that when that happens, it's going to create a fire.

34:57That fire is going to start spewing highly radioactive material into the atmosphere right around the plant. That's going to make it impossible for human beings to do even the heroic stuff that we've seen in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. And you're going to lose control of the site. Now, combine what I just told you with the fact that we have a grid that is vulnerable to going down and not coming back up for months. And the question is, well, do we start losing nuclear reactors? Things that if we could keep power flowing to them could remain cool and not blow up. But as soon as we lose control of them, boom.

35:36There are 400 nuclear reactors on Earth today, civilian nuclear reactors. The world will look like a very different place if they all lose not only the containment of the reactor itself, but all of the built up material that exists in those fuel pools. Some of the isotopes in those fuel pools have have lives of 200 ,000 years. So you don't want to live in a world in which these things have gotten away from us. And all of that radioactive material has been liberated into the atmosphere by fires. So second thing on my list right after hardening the grid by improving these transformers is that you take all of the fuel in the spent fuel pools.

36:21That is cool enough to remove. And you put it into what's called dry cask storage. Dry cask storage are these sort of fancy containers that don't require you to circulate water through them. They just sit there in dirt. You could leave them for a thousand years. So the risks of humanity would be hugely decreased if we took all of the fuel that doesn't have to be in the pools and we got it out of there. And we put it in a place that we don't have to pay attention to it in order for it to remain contained. Why don't people do that? It costs money. It's too expensive. No, it's not too expensive. I don't...

37:01both of these measures are so cheap compared to the risk that we're running that I think you would have to be positively mad not to spend the money. It's just more expensive. Yeah, it's more expensive, you know. Okay, so is the incentives to do that on clear? Well, not only are the incentives not clear, but this is why you need good governance. For those who think that markets just simply solve every problem, if competitors are making the decision whether or not to take their spent fuel and put it in dry casks, well, the competitor that decides not to out -compete the competitor that decides to do it because their bottom line is better.

37:41But what you need is good governance to say actually, you all have to put everything that can go into dry casks storage as soon as it can go for humanity's safety. Is that anything we can do on an individual level to prepare or to avoid this crisis? Yes, here's what I suggest. Let's talk about it on podcasts and hope that somebody with power realizes how dangerous this stuff is and starts the correct initiative within some governmental structure that remembers how to do its job. Is there anything else that... people often think about prepping and preparing for these kinds of things, digging a bunker under their house and hiding in there or having supplies?

38:24Well, so look, I think preparing at all scales is a good idea. We've faced many different scenarios. Some of them aren't survivable. Okay, well, if you've prepared and you hit an unsurvivable scenario, I guess you could make an argument that you didn't make as much of the time you had, but I don't find that very compelling. It seems to me that the low -hanging fruit phenomenon is... it's the consequence of something that is essentially universal, which is a pattern of diminishing returns. Right? diminishing returns means that over time, if you keep putting the same solution to a problem, you get less and less benefit.

39:21But it has a positive side too. The diminishing returns curve has this very steep face on it. Right? That face is the bargain face. That's the face where you get a ton of benefit for a small amount of investment. You should certainly do all the stuff up until you get to that point where it goes from a steep face to a plateau. Yeah. So, let's just do that. Right? Who knows? Maybe the calculations about the galactic current sheet are off because there aren't enough people studying and we just don't get it yet. Okay? Maybe there's 500 more years than we think. Right? Maybe there's some factor we haven't found yet that has some impact on the system we don't know.

40:08So you should always be doing the stuff that makes you more capable of surviving the disaster, even if you think it's not enough. And then hopefully you discover things are better than you think. So we should be doing that at every scale. And yes, people should they be preparing? Absolutely. Should they spend everything on it? No. Do you prepare it anyway? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, I have little rules for myself. One, I realized, okay, if we were to take a, we were to map out all of the things that I'm worried are a threat. And then you say, well, which are the ones that you're going to have an extremely difficult time affecting your likelihood of surviving?

40:57Okay. I'm going to ignore those. Yeah. Right? Why would I spend everything on a solution that's almost certain to fail anyway? Right? I mean, none of us are getting out of here alive. So at some level, you can just say, look, there are things that aren't worth preparing for either because they're too unlikely or because they're too catastrophic and you're not getting out of it. And maybe you wouldn't want to live in such a well anyway. Bingo, that's the next thing is, you know, I'm not sure how thrilled I am about a world in which 400 civilian nuclear reactors have spilled the entire history of their, their functioning into the environment.

41:37I, I much more animated about getting us to reduce that hazard on the front end than surviving it if it occurs. So I think, I think people should look at their life and they should probably go through a little period of alarm. If you, if you look at the way your life works, and then we flip the electricity off, right? Suppose your continent loses electricity for a year. How well prepared aren't you for that? Me totally unprepared totally unprepared. My Tesla outside has like 50 miles left on it, so I wouldn't even be able to get far from here. Right. So that's not a good plan. But there are things you can do, right?

42:26You can. And let's put it this way. The power going out for a year, that's a pretty far down the list scenario. That's pretty catastrophic. In fact, I wrote an article for unheard in which I painted a scenario in which the sun did trigger the collapse of just a part of the North American grid. And I described how that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take was surprising how easy it was to write it actually.

43:09But could the power go out for two weeks? Yeah. How, you know, how hard is it for you to prepare yourself and your family so that in a two week grid down scenario, you'd be able to get through it. Well, depends if it's summer or winter, right? If it's summer, it looks like one thing. You really need food and water. If it's winter, depending upon where you live, you might need to figure out how you're going to generate heat enough to keep you. I would say you want to go beyond alive. You want to get to where your family feels comfortable. But, you know, could you edit down to one room? Could you keep that room warm?

43:59How would you do it? You don't want to have to, you don't want to have to run through that in the circumstance because that two week scenario. I mean, that just simply happens. So anyway, yeah, I think prepping is a great idea for many reasons. For one thing, it's mentally clarified, right? Just even understanding how dependent we all are on the systems around us makes us better citizens. So let's say we managed to avoid the soda flair. What else is sort of front to mind for you in terms of concerns at the moment? I'm very worried about the absolute collapse of our institutions. I cannot think of a single sizable institution that still functions in any meaningful way.

44:48Many of our institutions actually function to the inverse of the purpose for which they were created. When you say collapse of institutions, which institutions are you referring to? I believe I mean all of them. And I will just give you some examples. In the world I grew up in, there was something called a newspaper. The newspaper was far from perfect. It reported a lot of garbage. There was a lot of propaganda in it. And there was a lot of wrong -headed stuff that got reported as if it was true. So I'm not pretending that it was a source of fact that one could just simply go to to look them up.

45:34However, I now live in a world in which the newspapers look like the newspapers I grew up with. But they seem to bend over backwards not to report the news. And then they finally do report the news only when it becomes so embarrassing for it not to show up there that it would reveal how broken they are if it didn't get said. And that's not normal. We should be trying to make sense of the world. And you can tell this isn't normal because if there was a newspaper that just simply did what the newspapers of old did that had a newsroom, it had a budget, it sent people to places where important things were happening.

46:27It assigned them the job of talking to people and seeking the facts and soliciting documents and taking pictures and all of that stuff. And it did its best to give you a view of the world as that flawed newsroom the best it could best sense it could make. Would you subscribe? Yes. You and everybody else. Well, I think I would have to check myself there because what I think I would do is probably different to what my innate biases might lead me to do and to click on.

47:02Well, I will tell you that in a world where we are all quite unsure about what's actually taking place, even just the basic facts that if there was such an object, I think it's a slam dunk you'd sign up even if you don't spot it because the disadvantage when other people have access to the facts, just not knowing what it is that they're even talking about would be. It would be like everybody in the room knows a secret and you don't. But do we want the news or do we want confirmation of what our existing beliefs? Well, I think people differ and I think it is very easy to get addicted to confirmation bias.

47:39But I also think that that's downstream of the failure of another institution, our academic institutions, our schools do not teach people how thinking works. And if you know how thinking works, then you understand that actually confirmation bias will get you killed. You don't want to be told something comforting. You want to be told something true because the comfort actually comes from utilizing that information to make yourself less vulnerable. So having a newspaper would be a fantastic thing. The fact that there are none. Let's say that 30 % of thinking people would subscribe to a newspaper that just simply tried to do the job and was undonted by competing incentives.

48:41Well, then that's a slam dunk of a business model, wouldn't you say? Do you know what's interesting? Because I sometimes think that the reason why things I idolize or I would like to don't exist is because there's actually not a market there for it. And like simple sort of supply and demand economics mean that someone's probably tried it and they start at probably went bust. Well, it did, but I don't think that's organic. I think it is a slam dunk and that the problem is that there is a competing force. Okay. And one thing that is true of the way our world is structured is that the go to mechanism for making a fortune is inside information.

49:32Now innovation also works, but it's difficult. Knowing a sector of the market so well that you can beat your competitors because you understand what the future is going to look like is also possible. But again, difficult and the incentive, the financial incentive to know everything you know and outcompete you in the market is so great that you will have a great many competitors struggling to make better sense with the very same data. And I think that's the way I said that you've gotten inside information doesn't work like that. If you can get inside information, you can print money. So if anyone that doesn't know inside information means in like the context of business or investing.

50:14Well, in the context, so this is one of these things that has a definition has a formal legal definition from the initial context in which it was identified as an issue. But if you are inside of a company and you're there for privy to something that is about to be done, then you can utilize that information, which is not available to the public to make money by increasing your holdings, decreasing them, buying stock options. And that's illegal. Right. Because obviously this people would use this to make money by creating events and betting on them in advance when nobody else knew. The problem is that same logic applies in places where the law can't reach it.

51:04So let me take one example. They're in the community of people who ended up sleuthing about the events of COVID. There's the moment at which COVID became a feature of the public discussion at the beginning of 2020. And then there's the moment that it appears to have existed in circulation in the world, which is much earlier, the Wuhan Games in October or September of 2019. If you were privy to the fact that there was a pathogen that was going to circulate, that it was going to result in a major upheaval in people's ability to travel across borders, that people were going to be fearful and locked in their homes, that they were going to be seeking pharmaceutical remedies, whatever.

51:59If you had some sense of what was coming, then you could position yourself in the market so that when it did come, you'd make a mint. So the question is, when powerful people did hear in September of 2019, that there was a pathogen that was on the loose in China, that would spread worldwide, was there first instinct to tell the public? No, there's a perverse incentive against them. So now imagine that you're ruthless and you recognize that that scenario that I just painted isn't at all unique. Any place where you can get the jump on the public with respect to knowing what's coming is an opportunity to make millions into billions.

52:55So maybe you don't want the public to have truth -seeking institutions that work. So this, I think, is liable to be the reason that there's not a single university in the US that still functions. Really, you think that? You think that's why? Yeah, I think if you had one university that functioned, then certainly that would be the place everybody wanted to send their kids. I mean, I have two college -aged kids. If there was a university that still made sense, it's the obvious place for them to go. Why don't they make sense? Any more in your view? They don't make sense because, well, there's multiple layers.

53:39You've got a scientific apparatus that is very powerful when it comes to finding the truth and very fragile when it comes to resisting perverse incentives. As in, like, wokism. Wokism and pressures to be politically correct. Exactly. So where is the American university that stood up and said, I'm sorry, but men can't become women. Right? They can live as women. They can dress as women. There are surgeries. There are pharmaceuticals. There's nothing you can do that takes your births sex and changes it to the opposite one. Not a single university said that anywhere. This is quite personal to you because I was reading actually earlier today about what happened to you at university at Evergreen State University.

54:27And it's funny because I watched the videos of that event. I don't know whether it's because we now have some distance between those events now. I don't know, but I just want to say I think what you did was the right thing. And I think history has made you look more and more correct as time has gone on because I watched it and it just seemed to be a bunch of people living in some kind of collective delusion. These like people shouting at you in this hallway. For people that aren't aware, as I wasn't aware before, before I knew you're on your way here, can you explain what happened there? Because I think it's kind of evidence of this sort of collective delusion that you're talking about.

55:03Sure. There's a little difficulty because there's the public story of what happened. Right? The public narrative settled on a set of facts that isn't exactly right. It's not so far off that it doesn't make the point. But the basic thing that happened is that my wife and I were very popular professors at a very liberal school that had a very unusual teaching model. So the school was called the Evergreen State College. It still exists. The Evergreen State College was founded by radicals who threw out every single structure that would exist in a normal college or university. There were no departments.

55:51There were no grades. The administrators did not have the ability to tell you what you had to teach. There were no requirements about how you taught. And if you were the kind of person that was interested in figuring out what knew might be done in the teaching environment. If you wanted to figure out a new way to teach, it was the perfect place. That said, many people took the freedom that the college offered and they squandered it. They weren't really interested in doing anything other than reducing their workload. So the college was kind of divided between the professors who thought that this freedom was this gift and we used it.

56:33We ended up being popular. And then there were other professors who didn't and they were much less popular. But in any case, Heather was literally the college's most popular professor. She's your wife. Yes. She's my wife and the co -author of that book you have in front of you. She was the most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind. We both had the equivalent of tenure, although the place didn't formally have tenure. It had something like it. And so we were not vulnerable. We were liberated to say what needed to be said. And what happened is the college hired a new president, a guy named George Bridges.

57:13For whatever reason, George Bridges wanted to completely reimagine the college as a much more standard, much less interesting place. And in order to do that, he didn't really have the power because the founders of the college had created a place where the faculty were in a position to just simply say no. And we would have. So what he did in order to overcome the faculty was he empaneled a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee hand selected. And he incited a at first cold and increasingly hot battle over race. It was my job to explain to my colleagues and to anyone involved in the decision making process why the plan that they were proposing would be a disaster for the college.

58:11And although I did have trepidations about standing up because the environment was quite charged. Like I said, I was a popular professor. I had the equivalent of tenure. And you know, the worst that could happen is people are going to call me names. So I did stand up. I stood up at a faculty meeting and the faculty was in the process of voting for a resolution to force every member of the faculty to explain what progress that they had made in the previous year against their own racism. Right. Now worse, not only were we voting to mandate ourselves to reflect on our own progress against racism that was simply assumed to exist.

59:05But these documents in which we reflected would become official documents that would then be utilized in promotion decisions, firing decisions, these sorts of things. So the point was that's a mecca. That's a takeover because you're right. You know, in my reflection annually, I would say, well, actually, I'm not a racist. I've made very little progress because there wasn't an issue to begin with. And the answer is, well, oh my god, he's worse than we thought. Right. He doesn't even recognize his internal racism. Right. So it was going to be that conversation. Again, it didn't threaten me because I already had tenure.

59:42But nonetheless, I had to say to my colleagues, look, this is a terrible mistake. I stood up at the faculty meeting and I said this. And it of course caused a stir. Several people came up to me after the vote. And they said, we agree with you. But only one other person voted with me across the entire faculty meeting. 70 votes that went the other direction. And one year later to the day, I didn't realize that it was the one year anniversary of that event until months later. But one year later to the day, 50 students that I had never met. I had never met a single one of them streamed through my classroom door, accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired.

1:00:31Now, I later came to understand that these 50 students that I had never met had been sent by my faculty colleague who had become my nemesis. They had been sent to create the impression of white professor being accused of racism by students, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine in 2017 what that would have looked like. Except that it didn't go as they planned because, as I mentioned before, I had a teaching environment in which I knew my students extremely well. Not only did I know their names, but I knew their backgrounds, I knew their histories, I knew their styles of thought, their disabilities.

1:01:26I knew them really well and they knew me really well because we went to class every day and we simply talked about biology which brought up issues about their perspectives. So I think what was expected was that when these protesters streamed through my classroom door. In 2017, if you've got a bunch of students accusing a professor of racism that that professor's students are going to jump right on it, they're all going to have gripes about some grade that they thought wasn't fair. And so they expected me to end up being faced with a mob of students swearing that I was racist. Now not a single one of my students turned on me.

1:02:13In fact, many of them spoke courageously on my behalf, including students of color, which then created a kind of rift in the universe because when people from the outside world saw video, video that was uploaded by the protesters themselves who were proud of what they were doing. The world, I didn't sound like a racist to them. And what's more, there were all of these students saying it was nonsense. So it was, I think the case that broke the woke narrative because it just didn't add up. And in any case, that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing is that the world actually recognized that there was something, as you say, that there was a delusion going on.

1:03:02And that was apparent enough in my lack of fear over the accusation in my students willingness to actually stand up and say that it was a bum rap. I will also just point out my students of color who spoke up on my behalf. They actually faced the worst retribution because in order for the woke revolution to function, you can't very well have people of color standing by a white professor. It just breaks the whole thing. So anyway, they needed to be punished from the point of view of this protest so that it wouldn't happen again. And my wife and I ended up resigning. Oh, there's another aspect of the story that I should probably mention.

1:03:52When this protest happened, there was a lot of drama. The protest spread from those 50 students who confronted me at my classroom to a campus -wide riot that went on for days. The president of the college who was indirectly responsible for all of this ordered the police who were a campus police department. They were real police, but they were under his direction. He ordered them to stand down. So they locked themselves inside their police station and were literally forbidden to intervene. Students started patrolling the campus as if they were the police patrolling the campus with weapons. They started stopping traffic on a public road passing through campus looking for me.

1:04:42The police called me up to warn me about this and they told me they couldn't protect me. And it was on fast forward a test of the claims of these revolutionaries. They have this sort of anarchist vibe to them that if we can just simply get rid of the cops that we will govern ourselves and it will be beautiful. And instead it became a dangerous violent riot on the scale of days. And in 2017, the same year that this happened, you resigned from the college and you got to pay out essentially. Yep. I asked this question because we were talking about newspapers and then we moved to the education system and you said that there's not a university in the land that's still doing what it's supposed to do.

1:05:37So it felt somewhat correlated at a link to what you were saying because it kind of sets the backdrop of, hey, maybe while you have clear personal experience here, but also what you saw there was kind of a symptom, I think, of some of the pressures that are being applied to the scientific education institution that are stopping it being able to do what it should be doing. 100 % it's doing the inverse of what it should do. It's indoctrinating people. And you know, the tragedy of it is that the people who are indoctrinated end up hurting themselves. Yeah. Right. They have an opportunity and they will squander it on a fiction and in the end it will not result in them being hireable.

1:06:22Right. They've learned they've learned how to demand things of the system rather than to contribute something to it and that's not their fault. I mean, at some point it becomes their fault, but that's the that's the failure of those who were charged with delivering them an education to do so. It's educational malpractice. You cited this as one of your big concerns. You started talking about basically the loss of the media. What is the what is the downstream implications of that because that is just I just feel like I'm I'll get my media in other places. I'll just go on X. I'll you know, that's not going to cause any issues with society.

1:07:00Well, I believe the consequence of it is something that I call the Cartesian crisis. Cartesian Cartesian reference to Renee Descartes. And the reason I reference him is that he had a kind of philosophical freak out where he realized that almost everything that he took to be a fact. He had not tested himself and therefore all of those facts that felt objective were really downstream of somebody's authority and he realized that dangerous that was. And in fact, it results in one of his most famous contributions to humanity, which is the what masquerades as a proof of his existence. I think therefore I am.

1:07:51I don't think it is a very good proof. Right. Maybe it works for him. He can prove to himself that he exists, but why we should take his word for the fact that he exists. You know, if a computer said, I think therefore I am, it doesn't make it true. So in any case, we can remember that Descartes was troubled by the fact that he couldn't establish any facts in any way other than to take somebody's word for the fact that that's what they were. We are increasingly living in a world where the chain of logic, of evidence of reason that might allow us to have some confidence in a fact is breaking down.

1:08:32And this problem is going to get worse and worse. Not only is every single truth seeking institution captured or broken, but AI is going to change the very nature of what it means for something to be a fact. Right. If you can have a compelling video of you saying something that you never once said. Right. Well, you know, if I show you a video of you saying something last week that you didn't say, you're going to be pretty darn sure you didn't say it. But if I show you something that you said 15 years ago, you may not be so certain. Other people won't be so certain. So what I think this is going to do is is going to produce an allergic reaction to belief.

1:09:19And it is going to cause a cynicism about factual material that is going to make it impossible for us to interact with each other to govern ourselves. It's just there's no future in a world in which we can't figure out. Here is what I believe and here is why I believe that is an essential future. Doesn't the internet just become a bit of a wasteland in such a case? And we're thinking of sort of political commentators. Is it likely that they might just become a channel which we switched to, which is a verified channel to watch, you know, Donald Trump or Rishi Sunak or the prime minister's talking and to get our news source.

1:10:03Well, we know that particular channel is truth and then we assume that the internet is just a wasteland of disinformation. Well, the problem is if you had such a channel, boy, would that be a prize if you controlled it? Oh, yeah. If you've got the fact channel, then the world's your oyster. You're now emperor. So were there going to be a fact channel, it would get captured. And that's the world we're living in. Now, I will say the idea that there are no institutions that work is the flip side of another idea, which I, it goes by the phrase zero is a special number. And what I mean by zero is a special number is that when you have zero universities that work zero newspapers that report the news zero social media platforms in which you are allowed to speak freely.

1:10:55One world unfolds, but a single exception in any of those spaces changes the overall dynamic. And the reason for that is because if you had one social media platform in which people were truly free to seek the truth to discuss anything and everything and nothing bad happened to them and they weren't. And they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not. And then that's obviously where all of the people who want an adult conversation are going to go, right? You don't want to be treated like a child. You want to have a conversation in which you can actually entertain all possibilities, reject those for which there's no evidence, etc.

1:11:30So if you get one platform, then people are going to go to it and if people go to that one platform, it's going to force the other platforms to deliver something similar. So the competitive environment means that a single exception can actually change the whole landscape. And we are in a battle. I don't think X has achieved that status of being completely free, but it's certainly freer than the other platforms. And it is having an effect. It is changing the dynamic and it is in part why the COVID narrative broke wide open, why the political narrative in the US is becoming radically different than it was even a few years ago.

1:12:15So the question is, are we going to see an exceptional university break the trend and become the next Harvard because you'd be crazy to send you get anywhere else? Are we going to see somebody put together a newspaper in which they get all of the subscribers because you'd be crazy to get your news from a propaganda source when there was a real source. So hopefully courageous people will recognize it's not as hopeless as we are led to believe a single exception can change the whole dynamic. I'm actually quite shocked at the impact that Elon buying Twitter and now called X has had on so many things.

1:12:56And even quite frankly, the impact I'm starting to see it have on someone like Mark Zuckerberg at a matter, I watched an interview yesterday with Mark who I think the method previously banned Trump from being able to talk on the platform, basically saying that he's pretty badass. And I do not believe he would have been able to say that had X and Twitter not changed. I agree with you and I think that actually if you start looking for other examples of that pattern, you will see them everywhere. There are certain things that once had magical power that no longer do. The claim that somebody is a conspiracy theorist does not cause them to be shunned from society.

1:13:41In fact, my feeling is when I hear somebody is a conspiracy theorist, my question is, oh, are they any good at it? But the same thing is true for the idea of an anti -vaxxer. Well, you know, somebody's an anti -vaxxer. Is that because they reflexively believe that no such thing could work or is somebody with an injured kid who has legitimate questions? We've just seen the leading proponent of vaccines publish a paper in which he acknowledges that the testing to establish that they were safe was never done. So we're living in a whole different world and I think it's a symptom of musk primarily having broken the dynamic by, as he said, paying $44 billion.

1:14:38Because that was the price of free speech. You mentioned AI there in your sort of list of concerns, pressing concerns, where does AI feel? It feels like it's coming on a nowhere, you know, because if we go back a year, about a year, it wasn't really front of mind for anybody. And for the vast population, for the general population, but now it appears to be front of everybody's mind and everyone thinking's mind. I think that's the right way to view it. I think it should be top of mind and not because it is independently everything that its worst critics imagine. In fact, I have my doubts about the safetyest crowd and their demands for regulation, but there's plenty to worry about in the space.

1:15:31So I have five different existential threats that AI poses. Let's see off the top of my head, let's start with the most fanciful first. AI could decide that we are its competitors and it could leverage its skills and decide to eliminate us. I find that unlikely, but I don't think we can discount it entirely. Second is the so -called paperclip problem that an AI that was very powerful could have trouble operationalizing a command and it could result in human extinction. The example that people think this way uses is if you were to tell an AI, you wanted it to make as many paperclips as possible that it could interpret that as license to go liquidate the universe and turn it all into paperclips.

1:16:33Not what I meant, but there you have it. And actually I will give a different example that I think maybe functions better. There are people in our intellectual space who make claims like it would be great if we were to end all suffering. Personally, I think that's about the most insane idea I've ever heard. It's a terrible one. You wouldn't want to live in that world. But you can understand why people think that it might be a moral obligation. Now imagine that you tell an AI, hey, let's end all suffering. That's actually possible. You just drive everything that can suffer extinct. So the idea that we have a non -trivial problem figuring out how to give a powerful AI an instruction that can't be misunderstood, it's worth worrying about.

1:17:30Again, I think that one's fanciful too, but it should be on our list. But then we get to the three that I don't think are easily dismissed. One is that AI is going to enable people with malign intent to... It's going to enable them more than it is going to enable those with benevolent intent. And this is an unfortunate asymmetry that just exists in the world. That an amoral actor, somebody who has no moral compass, they have total flexibility. They can do whatever a moral person can do, and then they've got a whole list of other things that they can also do. Whereas a moral person is constrained.

1:18:19They just have the limited set of things that are available to them. So the question is does AI liberate us all, or does it liberate those who are monstrous more than it liberates those of us who behave like decent humans? I'm concerned about that. I think we are in some danger of it being leveraged against us in a way that transforms this. I remember hearing a hacker say that the malicious hackers, the people with malicious intent, are always ahead of those, this sort of ethical hackers that have benevolent intent that are good. And he was talking about how like the encryption systems and password systems, he goes, the hacker's always ahead.

1:19:04And the defense systems that companies are trying to put in place are always behind because the hackers intent is obviously always to find new ways of breaking the current system. Whereas the people that defend security systems are just trying to defend against the known forms of attack. So someone in, I don't know, some kid in Russia right now could be at his computer figuring out new ways to use a large language model to attack systems in new ways. Whereas the people who are working to defend that are currently just trying to figure out how to mitigate the risks of current weapons. So it's, you know what I mean?

1:19:38Like the attackers are always thinking forward. Really. Yep. Do you think the general public and also just institutions and governments are currently underestimating the profundity and the impact that AI is going to have on the planet? Yes. And in fact, I think we are crossing over what would be described as an event horizon. So an event horizon, I think the term initially comes from an understanding of what happens at a black hole that there's a point at which light is pulled back in. And so you can't see beyond it. Right. There's literally no mechanism to see beyond it. We are crossing a threshold that none of us can see beyond.

1:20:19And that is inherently frightening. Are people underestimating? They are simultaneously underestimating and overestimating. Right. The fear of being turned into a paper clip is overblown in my opinion. The fear of, well, I've just gotten to the third one on the list, the fourth one on the list is a total collapse in our understanding of the world around us and each other. The way in which an artificial intelligence interfaces with our human API with our interface is profound already. And we're not very far in. Right. I'm already looking at little movies that this thing makes. And I'm not just talking about the clip of the cat walking through the garden, right little vignettes.

1:21:20I'm talking about actual movies in which characters of a made up species are having a conversation about humans. Right. Okay. That's the hell of a moment. Where will we be in five years? It's unimaginable how much change that is going to create because we have no evolutionary preparedness at all for living in a world where the product of a computer can out -compete the product of a human. And that's a very important question in narrative space. That's a dangerous world to live in because narratives are so profoundly important to who we are. Stories. Stories are what we're all about. Even profound ideas are unfathomable until somebody has written them into a story that people can can grow.

1:22:25But also language just generally is I don't think I was listening to something the other day, which was just making the case for how our entire society is pretty much held together with language. And it's so interesting that large language models were really the thing that blew open this conversation about AI because we don't realize that like every relationship I have is held together with language. In fact, all my passwords are language. The way that I think the way that I understand the world is through language. So if there's a super intelligent species that has a better grasp of language and a certain level of autonomy, it's hard to think, you know, it's interesting because what made us dominate the world was I think was our intelligence and our and then our ability to collaborate through through language and communication.

1:23:10And this is the very thing that AI has entered the scene with. Well, I will tell you I wrote a piece and I keep meaning to really suggest so people can see I didn't get it exactly right but many years ago I wrote a piece in which I said that I believed that artificial intelligence was going to emerge from the project to get a computer to translate seamlessly between two languages and I explained why that would be the thing that cracked the the nut and that is what happened for a reason the reasons because the relationship between human language and consciousness is profound and largely unknown.

1:24:02So Heather and I described this model in our book, Hannah Gathers Guide of 21st century human beings are a unique species. The primary way in which we are unique is that if you think about the question about well, what do human beings do? If I say, you know, what does a tiger do? We could describe the things that a tiger does to meet its caloric needs to get the materials necessary to maintain its body to produce offspring. We could describe the niche of the tiger. Can't really do that with people. What do we do? Sometimes we form the oceans, sometimes we hunt big game on land, sometimes we terraform a piece of territory and we plant crops.

1:24:56We do a lot of different things and if you think about all the things that human beings have done for our entire history as a species, it's immense the collection. So we are unlike any other species because our niche is the movement between niches both over time and across space. So how does that work? Well, we have a tool that no other species has. When you think about the question of what makes human beings special, the answer really is language. And the reason that it's language is that language allows the breaching of the boundary between one mind and another. So that ability allows human beings to pool their cognitive capacity.

1:25:45And what Heather and I argue in our book is that the way human beings get through time is they oscillate between two modes. When the ancestors, when your ancestors know how to exploit the habitat that you live in, then you take their wisdom and all of the stories that it's encoded in and you apply it. And maybe you build it out a little bit, you figure out how to do something the ancestors didn't quite know how to do. But mostly what you're doing is just applying the toolkit that you've been handed to the problems that it works on. But what happens when you get on a canoe and you cross some body of water in the place you've landed doesn't have the same plants and animals that your ancestors knew.

1:26:31Well, it's not like they they got dumber, but their stuff is less applicable. So what you do is you pool your cognitive capacity, you and all the people in your tribe, and you talk about well, what are the opportunities here and what might you do about them? You know, I saw an animal this morning and it looked like it might be pretty good eating, but I don't know how you're going to catch one. Well, what if we were to drive it into that canyon, right? That's sort of thing. So by pooling our cognitive resources by reaching a collective consciousness, which is the inverse of that cultural mode of the ancestors.

1:27:09The conscious mode when we face novelty allows us to come up with new solutions and then to refine them. And when we've got it nailed. Well, then we're the ancestors who knew what to do and our stories get driven into that cultural layer and they get handed on generation after generation. And then eventually they run out of usefulness and we have to return to consciousness and come up with a new way. So that's what human beings do, both spreading across space and moving through time. They are slave between that cultural mode of the ancestors and the conscious mode of what the hell do we do now?

1:27:45So I make sure I fully understand this as if a 10 year old will understand it is we have kind of two modes. We have what we had passed to us. And because of consciousness and language and our ability to communicate, we have what we're discovering now about the nature of the world. And I think the very president, the very presence of a skyscraper is quite an interesting thing because it's built on the knowledge passed to us from people that no longer live with also, you know, if the skyscraper has something on top of it like a solar powered or something. Much of that understanding has come from our current thinking of the people that live right now.

1:28:23So you have the combination of relatives from the past that are no longer here, all of their collective knowledge and you have the collective knowledge that we're discussing and thinking through now together. That's what makes humans so special and really what ties that all together is language and the ability to communicate right. It is that ability to communicate whether you're in the cultural mode where you're picking up the stories of your ancestors so that you know what to do or you're in that conscious mode where you're parallel processing the problems of the moment and figuring out what new solution you might come up with.

1:28:54I mean, you're running a time can't do that. No other creature comes anywhere close. It's so many orders of magnitude different from the next near and I'm not arguing that other animals aren't smart. There are plenty of smart animals. This is a whole different kind of smart. This is a smart where it's impossible to actually draw the boundary between my smart and your smart right there's a collective smart. It's very real. You can't locate it right. It has to do with some ancient mechanism for pooling understanding and pooling understanding isn't even like everybody bring your understanding. It's like, you know what?

1:29:35I don't trust that guy's understanding because I've seen him screw up and not fix it. That guy, he sounds crazy, but he's got a track record. Actually, I take what he says very seriously. So it's like, oh, there's a waiting of whose whose input plays what roles somebody might have inside in one realm and be unreliable in another that ability to figure out how to take the some total of all of the different skill sets. That people bring to the table and come out of it with something like a proposal for what we do next, right? That is a profound adaptive process that we don't even have a name for.

1:30:18AI changes this. Well, AI scrambles it because on the one hand, I can make the argument that AI is like a flint -napped blade. It's just another tool and it is just another tool at one level. On the other hand, because you know, the blade, you're in pretty big trouble when a blade starts talking to you. You know what I'm saying? That's a bad moment. That's you need to lay off the mushrooms at that point, right? In this case, the blade, the tool that we've created, it is talking to us. In fact, it's sensitive to what we think about what it says to us, which means it is it is certain that you will have an evolutionary process in which the AI gets exquisitely good at telling us what you want to hear.

1:31:18There's nothing more dangerous than that. You want an AI that tells you what you need to know whether or not you want to hear it, right? That would be a useful tool. An AI that responds to the fact that you think that what it said is good. Oh my god, we are, we are going to end up in a, I'm struggling for a better metaphor than an infinite hall of mirrors, but that's what it's going to be. It's going to be a big fractal hall of mirrors in which you can't be certain of stuff. And I will say because I know that there's a lot of concern. You've got a kind of safety ast crowd that wants to regulate AI because the dangers are profound.

1:32:02And you've got a bunch of other people who think regulating AI is dangerous. And when I've realized is that failing to regulate AI is dangerous regulating it is worse. Regulating AI is worse. Oh yeah. Why? Well, for one thing, you create an asymmetry between those who abide by the regulation and those that don't. So say China won't have a regulation, but America do have one. Right. Do you want to be ruled by whoever violates your regulation? I don't, but that's what we effectively guarantee if we create that dynamic. So I don't like the idea of heading across the event horizon created by AI without a plan.

1:32:44I really don't like that idea. That's not safe. On the other hand, the alternative is only going to make that problem worse. So somehow we have to face this with our eyes wide open. I mean, how does one face it with their eyes wide open? I mean, well, I'm hearing is you can do nothing about it. Well, I don't know that you can do nothing about it. Here's what I want to know. Why are we not obsessed with tracking the thought process of the AI's? In other words, if there were one thing that I would want, it's AI's to report how they arrived where they did. So that when the catastrophe happens, we can figure out why it happened.

1:33:35We can potentially get through this very perilous moment by coming to understand it and becoming wise about how to leverage this. So I do think there are things to do, but what is not wise is this sort of naive. Oh, I'm just going to get to the point where I realized that regulating AI makes problems worse, and now I'm not going to worry about it. Right. That I think I think not regulating it is the right thing to do and worrying about it tremendously is also the right thing to do. I also think about a world. I think maybe the world that Elon is really trying to create where we are able to interface with AI via brain interface devices like neuralink.

1:34:20It's interesting because I watched Elon's narrative emerge around neuralink at the very start, and he was very focused on being able to interface with AI. That was all the interviews he was doing at the time where it centered on the reason why I'm doing neuralink is because we need to be able to interface with this technology or else we're going to get left behind. And then more recently it's become about allowing people that can't use their arms and legs to use them again, which I think is maybe a marketing spin, but at the heart of his narrative and other people's narratives is that we are probably all going to have these brain interface devices put into.

1:34:49Our brains will maybe outside of our bodies if you look at some of the other companies so that we can interface with AI and. I mean that fundamentally changes what humans are. We become side side books or something yes it's not the first time we will have fundamentally changed what humans are though. And I think this is an important thing to realize is that we do we do this regularly. The printing press did this television did this the internet did this and you know the the gloom and doom crowd each time I said oh my god she print books it's going to cause our minds to become feeble because you won't need to remember.

1:35:33And the funny thing is I think in each case the gloom and doomers were right there's definitely an element that they correctly spotted what's difficult to do is. It's correct impossible is to look over the event horizon and say what does it mean. And in this case. What does it mean right are we going to get through this incredibly perilous period and look back on this you know the way we look back at the cell phone right cell phone oh no it's going to destroy human society it's going to you know it's going to do that well it did. It drove us crazy absolutely insane so yeah I was going to be that and worse and that the only thing to do is to try to understand that change so we can mitigate the harm and hopefully rain in the overarching pattern of hyper novelty that we are creating for ourselves.

1:36:34Do you think this technology is comparable to any of those. It's like those but 50 times worse. I mean the phone was really a tragic innovation in many ways and it's not the phone itself I actually I sometimes say it's not the box it's the business model right a phone is a terrifically enabling device and. It has made us more powerful it has made us more fragile right I was talking to to Heather about the problem if we face a major disruption right if the solar flare takes out the grid. You have to get home well do you have a map. Because not so long ago you could have bought a map on paper now the fact that we have these maps in our phones means that the ability to buy the map doesn't even exist anymore where would you not even sure where I would go to find a map so we are less secure than we were because we are so hyper enabled in the present and.

1:37:51Yeah we're we're in for some really interesting times. I will just say to complete it I've gotten through four of the five existential threats that conceivably come from the AI at least as far as I can spot it the last one is the most mundane and that's just the massive economic disruption that's coming from a technology that will take what most people do for a living and make it useless. There's a lot of people at the moment kind of denying this fact that think they'll be fine. Yep is there anyone that will be fine and who are those people and who won't be fine and what's the important part as well when we think about this disruption is the speed of disruption because that that gives us a clear as to how long will have to adjust as a society find new jobs up skill people learn training maybe go to find something else to do.

1:38:45Most people are not going to be able to retrain for something that will be relevant. I think and in fact the advice I've given my kids is invest in tools invest in a toolkit a cognitive toolkit that works for a future that you can automatically. If you five years ago people were saying learn to code that was bad advice. That's something that AI's can do. If however you invest in things that cause an upgrade to the quality of your thinking if you invest in the kinds of skills that can be mapped onto new realms then I can't promise you. You'll be alright but you'll be a lot better often people whose skill set is so narrowly focused on some task that made sense in 2024 that in 2027 they're adrift.

1:39:52Be a generalist invest in clear thinking figure out who you can trust develop your interpersonal relationships maybe that should even have been the head of the list. People who you can depend on who have the insight the values that makes them worthy of your investment in them and know them in person so that no matter what happens if the forces that wish to confuse us leverage AI to get in between us which would not be a terrible description of what happened during COVID except the AI was presumably not. It's not a big player but if people try to get in between us they're going to have a lot easier time doing it if your relationship with somebody is intermediated by a screen.

1:40:45You want to know people in person so that you can turn off the screen and you can say do you know what the hell is going on what do you think what did you see what did you hear what what do you think is occurring right you want to be able to have that conversation with somebody who's a real flesh and blood human who. You know who you're willing to to go all in with are there any careers that so if your children tend to you and said you know dad what what career should I do in a world where AI is getting smarter by the week.

1:41:24The funny thing is that almost strikes me I know you don't intend it this way but it's almost a trick question at this moment right anybody who thinks they know how to answer it is probably at least getting themselves is it is that you know it's like if we were let's say we found ourselves you know a drift. But on an outrigger in the middle of you know the South Pacific we don't know if we're going to survive and you want to know hey well if we do if we find some land what do we do then and it's like well I don't know but let's find the land and then let's think very carefully about what to do when we get there.

1:42:14So if your kid literally came up to you would you say that to your kid yeah so they say well dad I'm like do I go to school University what would I do I think the question that you're really asking is what would you do in their shoes which is not really a career question. What I would do in their shoes is I would if I was going to go to college I would make damn sure that I left college with a tangible project that I had accomplished that I could establish was my own that proved I was competent. Right if you develop something I don't care if it does something useful or not right could be you ever seen a most useless machine in there a most useless machine is kind of an interesting thing the classic version of it is it's a little box with a switch on the top and if you flip the switch a hand comes out and flips it back the other way and it goes back in the box right totally useless but the point is look anybody who can make a mostly useless machine.

1:43:26Well I know something about their skill set so what I'm saying is I don't want to see anybody's transcript. I don't know why your transcript says what it does I don't know that your professors knew what they were talking right it's not useful but if you show me a most useless machine and the answer is okay. If you really made that then I know a you know something about prototyping be you know how to manage a project see I know that your motivational structure allows you to go from the concept to finish project that actually works et cetera so I know a bunch of things that your transcript can't tell me.

1:44:08Now a recommendation from the right person might mean something you know who's really the right person but a recommendation from a random person I don't know that just says your marvelous I don't know what that means but so one thing is make damn sure you graduate with something that you can show other people that is unfakable the other thing that I have told them is if you invest in a skill one of my sons asked me about electrical engineering what do I think about electrical engineering I said I think electrical engineering is great but it's not enough. If you go into electrical engineering you are going to face a huge number of people who also went into electrical engineering who are very good at what they do and maybe you're just awesome what you do but distinguishing yourself in a world where you find yourself.

1:45:07You've got a bunch of competitors many of them maybe they're not as likable and so they have more time to just dedicate to pure electrical engineering you don't want to compete it's not a it's not a winning bet however if you you know if you invest in electrical engineering and one or two other things that have some relation to it well maybe you're the only person on earth who has the skill set to combine these things so that you come up with something that's unique. And then it doesn't have to be perfect and you don't want to have to make perfect things perfect things are almost impossible to make the expense of making something perfect is through the roof for exactly that reason of diminishing returns you'd much rather bring something to the world that's novel and useful and then let other people perfect it that's where you want to be.

1:45:58So combining things that are not usually combined is one way to distinguish yourself and tangible product that actually establishes that you have those characteristics and then the hidden punch line there is if you say okay my dad told me I need to make a project that makes it clear what skill set I have and you set out to do it you know what you're going to find out what skills you don't have. If your motivational structure is broken you're going to learn that and then you can fix it right if you think well I'm going to learn the skills I'm in college I better you know buckle down and get all the skills in the textbook and then when I get out I'll start making stuff if you do that then the point is well when you get out it's too late to discover that your motivational structure doesn't allow you to complete a project or that you you so dislike failure that when you make a prototype you don't even realize what the meaning is all you see.

1:46:54Yes, it doesn't work very well. Right. On that fifth point of your AI concerns this idea sort of economic turmoil for whatever reason. Sam Altman's other business called world coin. Intense to I think it intends to distribute basically value let's just to simplify it distribute money to people in a world where there's been so much economic disruption that we've kind of lost our jobs that's kind of how I understood it. So people are going around the world scanning their retinas on these machines that have been placed all over the world and that's going to become the mechanism to identify you as a unique individual as a as a as a human so that they can send you free money universal basic income in a world where people are going to struggle to have jobs.

1:47:40Now I think I've I don't think I've put you that too much but do you believe that world is going to happen where there's going to be so much disruption in the labor force that so many people are going to be unemployed that we're going to need to just basically give out money to people. I think that's going to be a short ride you think it's going to be a short ride yeah I do what you mean by that unfortunately. The story of human evolution and competition is it's one of great triumph and overcoming adversity in some chapters and it's one of tragedy and atrocity in others. I am very concerned that the idea of useless eaters is about to make a huge comeback and that you be I has two impacts you be I mean universal basic income universal basic income and everything that functions like it you know so some distribution of value.

1:48:42One it's going to make the people who are creating the value where people who think they're creating the value resent those who are absorbing the value just to live. And it is therefore going to trigger a quest to reduce that line item on the balance sheet and there will be all kinds of excuse making but it's pretty it it's pretty ugly. I mean we see that in society already people that are working hard and that I'm paying a lot of tax get resentful towards the people at the very bottom of the income spectrum who are maybe not working at all and are getting paid. Yeah and interestingly another factor in here is people that earn more money seem to have less kids and that becomes a point of contention in society.

1:49:36Yep so I think you're seeing the picture and you're you're exactly you're exactly understanding why this will turn into the usual demonization of some sort of people as a pretext for getting rid of them so that's bad the other bad effect that will come from you be I is learned helplessness. And I think we've actually seen this in fact the woke revolution. I think it's a tragic story because on the one hand while you know I was chased out of a job that I loved by a bunch of people who accused me of things that I wasn't guilty of in a kind of madness. On the other hand how did they end up there they ended up there because they were betrayed.

1:50:33They were betrayed by a system that was supposed to deliver them a life that worked it was you know if you did what you were asked to do if you went to school if you did the homework you were supposed to come out of it with a skill set that would allow you to live a decent life. And instead they were given many of them were given. Drugs that we biologically had no understanding of you know because somebody was profiting off their dependency. And we sent them to schools and we provided them with majors that they could dedicate themselves to that weren't real that didn't create skills or insight in many cases created exactly the inverse it created confusion.

1:51:26And at some point they realized you know what I don't have a plan. And in such a case those people who don't have skills that are going to allow them to live a decent life are going to look for someone to blame. And they're probably going to land on the wrong person right and especially if somebody is cynically willing to sell them the story that you know who you should blame it's straight white guys or something like that they'll listen. And I will say I've done a lot of thinking about the game theory of human competition and one thing has struck me in recent years which is that there's a reason that communism continues to reemerge.

1:52:19It doesn't work so why would people keep landing there. And I think it is unfortunately the natural consequence of a a meritocracy that does not take care of those who lose. If you have a meritocracy where the way to have a decent life is to figure out how to provide something that people want. But you don't have a plan for the people who try that and it doesn't work for whatever reason. Then what you will end up with is a large number of people who will correctly understand that they are on the losing end of a bargain. Those people don't have an investment in keeping that system running. They want to overturn it.

1:53:10In fact, with some cause they will look at all of the fortunes that have been created in that meritocracy and they will say you realize how much of that is illegitimate. You realize how much of that was parasitic. We want it back. And so I think communism is game theoretically it can't be made to work. It has a fundamental flaw at its heart which is that it punishes those who contribute and it rewards those who don't. Such a system will inherently be unproductive. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places.

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1:54:28So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. Is there anything else that exists on your list of concerns? That we haven't crossed. We've covered AI, the solar flight issue. Yeah, there is a big concern that I have. So I, Heather and I on our podcast, spend a lot of time sorting out the landscape of the COVID debacle.

1:55:07And what we saw was quite dark. Virtually everything that we were told was upside down and backwards. If you wanted to know medically what you should do about COVID, you literally couldn't do better than looking at what the CDC told you and doing the inverse of all of it. Right, they got every single thing wrong, which is improbable. What's the CDC for you when it doesn't center for disease control? Should probably be renamed the center for disease because they resulted in it spreading farther and having worse impacts. But nonetheless, I sometimes say certain stories diagnose the system. Right, you can see what's wrong with your system.

1:55:50By the way, a particular story flows through it. You can see the complete collapse of journalism through the COVID story. You can see the utter dereliction of duty of our universities from that story. You can see the brokenness of our political institutions, our courts, all of this. They all failed and you can see where we live based on that story alone. But unfortunately in the US, the two major parties both have their fingerprints all over the failure and neither of them want to talk about it. So aside from a few exceptions, people who shined during this period, mostly there's a tacit agreement to move on.

1:56:38And I think it's a terrible error. What was the failing? Well, I would point to three and a half separate failures. One, the COVID crisis and mind you, all of the words here need caveats. I do believe that there was a pathogen, SARS -CoV -2. I do not believe that we had anything that would, by the prior definition, be called a pandemic. I do not believe it was inherently an emergency. But nonetheless, these are the terms we use. The COVID pandemic was some kind of emergency. We were delivered something wrongly called vaccines. We were propagandized into avoiding off patent drugs that really did work.

1:57:35And so, you know, we made our situation vastly worse. We locked down, which injured people. We put masks on children, which literally disrupted their normal developmental processes. We kept vaccinating and re -vaccinating, which has created an entire landscape of adverse events and early deaths, which we are still not being honest about. So, the three and a half realms are the origin of the virus, which is all but certain to have been laboratory, and very probably the Wuhan Institute. But the Wuhan Institute isn't the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's also connected to the NIH, Anthony Fauci, this enhancement, this gain of function research that was embarked upon was downstream of a weapons program.

1:58:41And what's gain of function research? Gain of function research is where various techniques are employed to give a pathogen, in this case, a virus capabilities that it didn't otherwise have. Okay. So, what I think happened in the origin of COVID, we can now tell a pretty good story. You have a vast network of laboratories working to find new pathogens that can be turned into weapons. What story they tell themselves about why we need these weapons, I don't know. But it is clear that if you are working to enhance human health, or you say you are, that you are allowed to enhance the lethality of germs as part of a dual use program.

1:59:34So, the excuse is, oh, we're working to prepare the world from a pandemic. It's not a matter of if it's a matter of when, right? That's what they tell us. It's not true. The likelihood of a pathogen leaping from nature to humans is actually quite remote for reasons that it took me a long time to realize, but I now get it loud and clear. Pathogens don't jump from animals to humans very easily, because it's not an easy jump. They have to do two tricks, and they have to do it in a rapid succession in order for it to work. The first trick is they have to actually infect a human being. The second trick is, before that human being dies or gets better, they have to learn to jump to a second human being.

2:00:19That is not an easy trick. So, what human beings have done is they have started accelerating that process in laboratories that are specifically attempting to create these highly pathogenic creatures that infect people for the purpose of creating lessons. So, what happened in Wuhan, I believe, is there was a case where some Chinese miners who were working in a mine that was full of bats. They were actually literally shoveling bat guano out of this mine. Six of them became sick, and three of them died. None of them made anybody else sick. And they were all compromised because they were breathing this dust in the mine, which made them vulnerable.

2:01:16But the fact that six miners got sick from a virus in this mine told the folks at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were connected directly to some American researchers, told them, aha, there is a virus in a cave in Yunnan province and the virus already knows one of the two tricks. It can infect a human. What we need to do is find that virus and enhance it so that we have a virus that can spread between people. Well, I mean, they want a virus that can spread between people. Because they're part of a cryptic weapons program. Ah, okay. Now, if that sounds preposterous to you, and I can imagine that it would, I can imagine myself five years ago thinking that sounds absolutely ridiculous and paranoid, frankly.

2:02:08I would suggest that people read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s most recent book. It's called The Wuhan Cover Up, in which he explores at Great Length this weapons program. And it's probable link to SARS -CoV -2. It is also worth reading the book he wrote before that, The Real Anthony Fauci. When one comes to understand that the reason that Anthony Fauci was the highest paid federal worker in the US bar none, that's because he was the head of a weapons program disguised as a public health program. Okay. So Anthony Fauci is the guy that I saw on TV telling giving us advice on what to do about this pandemic.

2:02:52He was, he was the guy. And he was like the medical advisor guy. The medical advisor guy, but the funny thing is Anthony Fauci is largely responsible for the gain of function research that created the virus in the first place that made it a human pathogen. How do we know that? Because we now know that there was a ban on gain of function research in the US, and that Anthony Fauci was part of the effort to offshore the work to Ralph Barich, who was an American researcher, still as an American researcher, his partners in the Wuhan Institute of Virality, usually being the primary. So what they did was they evaded a ban that arose in the US, I believe in 2015, as a result of very realistic fears that a virus would escape from gain of function research.

2:03:45They offshoreed it to the Wuhan Institute of Virality so the work could continue. That was Anthony Fauci's work. So somehow he ends up both in a position to fund and fuel the research that creates the virus. And then he's the go -to guy for advice about what we should do about it. That's a very odd coincidence, and it worked out very badly for planet Earth. Why would Anthony Fauci send offshore it to China, who are, I would consider to be one of the US's arch nemesis? Yeah, that is a great question. I don't know the answer to it. You would want China to have that information. It's like developing the new play ball in Russia or something.

2:04:25Well, I actually think that folks like you and me are... we don't get it. We think that China is a nation, and America is a nation, and that these nations are antagonists. We don't understand that actually the United States, while it is a nation, is also a set of factions, and those factions don't agree. One faction decided to forbid gain of function research. Another faction decided, oh no, you don't, and we know how to get it done. And it was partnered with some faction of that Chinese entity, you know, across the water. And if I think about how America looks to outsiders, I can imagine people talking about, oh, the Americans are doing this.

2:05:18But if you're talking about what the Biden administration is doing, you're not talking about me. The Biden administration isn't on my team, I guarantee you that. So the point is, the Biden administration is my antagonist. The Americans are a composite of antagonists, I mean, I guess, in one sense. But I don't know why we off -shored weapons research to China. I don't know that there isn't a partnership between entities that is much more relevant to the unfolding of events that simply doesn't have a name I would recognize. But somehow we know that we did it. We know that the research was forbidden here, and we know, you know, Ralph Barrett trained, usually, in how to do techniques, including what he calls no -seem edits.

2:06:09Those are edits you can't see. Why would a biologist interested in studying pathogens in order to make people healthier care, whether you could see their edits? Could it not be the case that Fauci moved the project to China, the gain of function research to China, or was involved in that, because he wanted to come up, he wanted to understand these pathogens, these viruses better, so that we could do experiments on them to better understand them, to figure out how to defend against them. This is exactly what they tell you. I'm a biologist. Maybe I'm dumb, but that story doesn't make any sense to me.

2:06:45You're going to create a new virus from an ancestor you've pulled out of a cave in unan province that you've enhanced in some way that you decided to enhance it. It doesn't tell you about some virus that's going to leap out of nature of its own accord. It tells you about the virus you just created. It doesn't make sense from the point of view of enhancing human health. For two reasons. One, there's no demonstrated evidence that such research has given us any benefit whatsoever in fighting off pathogens. There's no case in which we've seen that. What we do have are multiple cases of leaks of pathogens from lab studying them.

2:07:27So we've just got a simple comparison. What are the chances if you study some virus you plucked out of some cave that you're going to come up with something useful that's actually going to help us? Certainly didn't happen with COVID. Chances are very low. What are the chances that things are going to leak from your lab and cause a global pandemic? Pretty high, actually. I just imagine scientists in the lab would take a sample of it. They'd put it in the lab. They'd start analyzing it. They might start doing tests on it to see how it responds to certain things. And then, you know, through no thought of their own, maybe it leaked.

2:08:02Okay. But let's see how that played out. We've got some gene jocks pulling a virus out of a unon cave and enhancing it so that it becomes a communicable human pathogen.

2:08:23They should, in theory, in studying it, have come up with information that would tell us what to do if such a pathogen ever got out, which it did because they lost control of it. Well, what did they tell us? They told us, don't use Ivermectin. Don't use hydroxychloroquine. That what you should do is you should wait at home until you're actually your lips are turning blue. Then you should come get medical out. Now, that's wrong in every way. The right thing to do was to allow doctors to look at the patients who were coming into their office and to figure out how to treat those doctors should have said, well, as a person, they appear to be sick with a respiratory pathogen.

2:09:15There's a good chance that it's an RNA virus. They could have quickly actually ascertained that it was an RNA virus. You know what works on all RNA viruses? Ivermectin. Then they could have treated it and they would have seen, oh, Ivermectin works for COVID. If you give it very early, if you give it in sufficient doses, and if you give it with fat. Doctors would have figured that out on their own. Instead, what we got was a message from the very people who had engaged in off -shoring this research ostensibly to figure out how to deal with COVID, who then gave us exactly the inverse of the right advice.

2:09:54Then what did they do? Well, then they told us the route out of this is a vaccine. What they delivered was not a vaccine. It was a gene therapy. That gene therapy, we were told, blocks the contraction and the transmission of COVID. And what happened was they demonized everybody who questioned either the safety or the efficacy or both of these treatments. It turned out that didn't work. So what we have, this is why I say that the COVID story diagnosis the system. If you think, and a person could be well within their rights to think, well, I'm sure we were studying the virus to protect people and that it would tell us something about what should be done if it ever were to leap into humans.

2:10:50Well, we got a perfect test of how well that worked. Every single thing they told us to do was wrong and upside down. If you took what they call the vaccine, you put yourself in jeopardy. If you ignored their advice and you used Ivermectom and hydroxychloroquine and you used it early and you used it in sufficient quantities, it actually was highly effective and actually rendered this illness perfectly manageable for almost every single person. So we've seen how well they did. They failed across the board. Do you think there's malicious intent somewhere? Because when people hear these stories, and because the average dough doesn't know how systems above them work, they tend to think of this like a lumenati group of people coming together, deciding this was going to happen, then executing this plan for some because these, you know, this room of people who are evil, who people are fat, who are like they wanted to do harm and they want to control us.

2:11:45That's the kind of conspiracy narrative. I have no idea what motivates such people. My guess is most of the people who participated in the programs that did so much harm, thought they were doing the right thing. I don't think that's true for all of them though. I don't think that's true for Anthony Fauci. You don't think he thinks he was doing the right thing? I think he knows he's a weapons guy and that when you're a weapons guy, you are inherently comfortable with the destruction of human beings. That's what you do for a living. You're trying to create things that destroy human beings. I don't know what it would be like to have such a job.

2:12:29I've never had one. But my guess is there is a mechanism for rationalizing absolutely ghastly things if what you do for a living is plot the destruction of others. Now you raise this as a concern, as one of your key concerns because I guess you think we haven't learned all lessons from this? No, we haven't. We, and I think things are a little bit inverted in Britain. In the US, there is widespread discussion of the harms that came from the so -called vaccines. But the question of the repurposed drugs has still, that story has not broken. People still think that Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don't work and never worked for COVID.

2:13:23I think this story is in general the inverse, that the vaccine harms are still taboo in Britain and there's more acceptance of repurposed drugs. But really what we need is a no -holds -barred exploration of what happened. Irrespective of what it was, maybe I've got it all wrong and maybe that would emerge in an investigation. But we need to look at the viral origins, how exactly that happened. We need to look at what was done, the coup that public health staged against medicine in which directives about how to treat patients came down from on high, rather than the normal medical process of doctors figuring out how to treat their patients empirically and pooling their insights.

2:14:19And we need to talk about what happened, where these gene therapies came from, what was understood about the danger, and how it is that we treat all of the people who did exactly what they were asked to do, and have had their lives compromised or lost because of injuries that they were not told were possible. Are you at all concerned that if there is a pandemic that breaks out now, people would be so distressing in institutions that we wouldn't be able to communicate any kind of instructions to society at large, we wouldn't be able to tell them what medicine to take, we wouldn't tell them to lock down, we wouldn't be able to tell them pretty much anything.

2:15:03100%. It would be an absolute nightmare. But what we do have, that we didn't have in 2020, is a sizable, dedicated group of dissidents, many of whom have lost jobs, who did figure out how to treat the disease, what its implications were medically, what the vaccine harms are, how you mitigate them. And we have another group of people who were able to make excellent progress on the question of where did this thing come from, and what was the process that created it. So I guess on the one hand, yes, the distrusting institutions would make an actual pandemic, if such a thing happened, nightmarish.

2:15:55On the other hand, we've got people that are actually worthy of our trust. But I will say one other thing. In 2020, I was somewhere in the mainstream with respect to how much concern I had over zonotic pandemics. Seeing what happened during COVID, I have come to understand the world is not nearly as dangerous on this front as we thought. Even the stories that we think we know, like Spanish flu, turn out not to mean what we thought they meant. Spanish flu was largely a self -inflicted wound. Yes, there was a flu that circulated. Much of what people died from was bacterial pneumonia that followed on from that flu, which we could currently treat with antibiotics.

2:16:51And much of the harm that was done, in fact, what panicked people tremendously, was that young, healthy people were succumbing. Why? Because they were being given huge doses of aspirin that today would be understood to be lethal. So I'm not convinced that the story of Spanish flu is what we thought it was. And the absence of such a story, how often is humanity faced with a terrifying pandemic? The answer is it's very rare and the degree to which humans make it better and not, I mean, make it worse and not better is substantial. So can we afford to wait five years as we sort out the truth of what happened during COVID?

2:17:39Yeah, absolutely. We can afford to wait. The chances of something 1918 happening in the present is very, very low and our ability to deal with it is much better. So, yeah, if it were mine to say, I would say, relax about the zoonotic stuff. You've been sold a bill of goods by a lot of people who actually wanted to study how to make weaponized pathogens and pay attention to the people who have a good track record. And it doesn't mean a perfect track record. It means people who recognize their mistakes and got smarter over time. We've spent a lot of time talking about macro concerns and big things.

2:18:18It's funny because when I sat down with you, I... There's two things I want to talk about, which is the macro stuff, but also to just get a... I guess a bit of a clear understanding of how our biology, our evolutionary biology and the world we're living in are misaligned. So, that on a day -to -day basis, for the next year, as I navigate through my life, the decisions I make with my food, my partners, my relationships, the day -to -day decisions, I can make them better. Now, in that regard, could you give me some advice? Sure. On how I can live a better life, because I'm aware now of the big macro picture, much of it.

2:18:55But on a day -to -day basis, what things can I do to live a happier, healthier life? The primary alteration that you can make, and none of us can do this perfectly. The world doesn't allow it. But we are beautifully designed for a world we no longer live in. You have no idea how good your design is, because your design interfaces kind of poorly with the modern world. And so, it sort of feels like evolution did pretty well, given what it's made of, but you know, it kind of missed the market a lot of ways. Really not the case. If you lived as an ancestor lived in a world for which they were not only exquisitely well -built, but also brilliantly programmed, then you would see that you lived in a kind of flow state.

2:19:49And that flow state was only broken by the occasional interaction with something new. We live in the opposite world. You have a food in your pantry, and the question of whether you should actually put it in your mouth really hinges on a list of ingredients, some of which you may not even be able to understand. That's not normal, right? So, if you want to live a healthier, happier, more fulfilling life, the key is to remove as much of the novelty as you can from as many of the realms that exist in your life as you're able to. What you want to be doing is eating things that look more or less like what your ancestors look like.

2:20:45Is that a carnivore diet? No. But it's not a vegetarian diet either, right? It's a diet that has these things in proper proportion that has them unadulterated by novel stuff like seed oils, right? Seed oils are strangely repurposed lubricants that people figured out you could sell as food and then were packaged as if they were hard healthy. It's the inverse of the truth, right? Olive oil is not a seed oil. Avocado oil is not a seed oil. Those are safe. Why? Because you're eating oil from the flesh of a fruit, not the seed. Plants don't want you eating their seeds. Plants reproduced by keeping their seeds from getting eaten.

2:21:35So, using detergents to extract the toxins from a seed oil is not a safe process. So, in any case, eating things that make sense, unadulterated things that look like the actual foods that your ancestors ate will make you very much healthier. Realizing that in general, a state of health is one in which you are not disrupted. Until very late in life, your body is built to function. It's built to fix itself. And the idea that health is a matter of which pills to take is insane. We've been sold another bill of goods by people who get rich when we buy pills. Pharma is healthy when we are sick. So, don't get the idea that the way to get healthiest to figure out which things you're deficient in and get some corrective medicine.

2:22:36There are some places where you're deficient. You and I are probably both deficient in vitamin D, right? You live in a novel world where the UV light that we would have been interfacing with in our ancestral environment is being blocked by clothing, by buildings, by class. And that is causing us not to synthesize the stuff. So, vitamin D, that's a place where actually you probably are deficient and you should correct for it. But in general, health does not come from pills. There are drugs that are worth taking when something has gone wrong for which this is an appropriate remedy. But in general, the style of thinking in which people are put on statins for because some number on their chart suggested to somebody that they were in danger.

2:23:30This is nonsense. And it doesn't pan out if you look at the evidence we harmed people with statins, right? The number of people who benefited from them was tiny. The number of people who was sold them was large. And then you can extend this logic to other things too. How much are you wired for this world? And how much could you restore a relationship with other people and with the environment that just simply matches what your ancestors would have done? We would all benefit by spending more time outside. We all benefit from having close relationships with friends, with lovers, things that last a lifetime.

2:24:20And the obsession with modernizing everything is self -defeating. Right? In general, there are things that are worth modernizing, but it should be a fairly high bar when we depart from an ancestral pattern. It should be for a very good reason. And it should be with our eyes wide open about the unintended consequences of doing it. So I don't know whether this is striking you as operationalizable, but you want your environment to look as ancestral as it can. You want the developmental environment of a child to be a good match for the environment that they're going to live in as an adult. You want your relationships to be, again, I'm not arguing for perfectly traditional, but you want them to be recognizably traditional.

2:25:19Right? And those things, it's kind of a high bar because frankly, you've got something that your ancestors didn't have. There's two last questions I have for you. That's okay. One of them just kind of raised there, which was, wait, we wasn't absolutely, was not raised there, but it was in between the lines of one of the things you said about relationships. It's pornography. And we live in a world now because of screens and all of these things that we can access these sort of artificial romantic relationships and stimulation using the screens that 11 year olds have in their pocket. My question is, is pornography bad for us?

2:25:57It's an unmitigated disaster, but I will say that with a caveat. I am not arguing against erotica. Humans have a very longstanding relationship with erotic content and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with erotic content. The problem is pornography itself and I know I'm not supposed to be able to define it, but I will anyway. Pregnography is erotic content, the motivation for producing it, having been profit. So what's happening is the people who are making porn are transferring our wealth to them and I don't just mean money. They are destroying the sacred sexual toolkit that is the birthright of every human being.

2:26:55They are destroying it for money. They are distorting it. And that distortion, I would say, comes in two identifiable realms. One is that, well actually maybe it's more than two, but men have two general reproductive strategies that work evolutionarily. Women have one. The two that men have are a so -and -go, love them and leave them, don't invest in women or their offspring mode. And the other is invest in offspring and contribute to protecting them and raising them. When men are in that second mode, they are not exactly like women, but they are symmetrical to women in terms of how choosy they are about mates, about how careful they are in their interactions.

2:27:57When men are in the first mode when they are thinking in terms of not investing in a sexual partner, that is effectively predatory. And the reason that it's predatory is that human babies are so expensive to raise that no woman with a choice would elect to raise one alone if she could instead have a partner join her in that. So women are built to avoid sex that does not come back in it. They've been convinced by modernity that that's not sophisticated, that that's male oppression, whatever it might be. But the truth is we have moved in the direction of women behaving like men at their worst rather than men behaving like women at their best.

2:28:51And it's a mistake. So you don't want relationships, especially really ones about the most powerful stuff there is. A human sexual interaction is about as close as you get. And you don't want that relationship to be about some predatory mode that you have for, I don't know, ancestral circumstances that frankly were often. And ghastly and unforgivable. Right? Yeah. Right. And things like that exactly. So what we should really want is a society that actually causes men to find this other side of themselves, which is an investing, caring, decent side. And that's not an unmasculine side. Right? A man, you know, investing in a woman and defending his family and providing for them, that's all perfectly masculine stuff.

2:29:48Right? It's a lot more mature than the other alternative. But in any case, the pornography is pushing us in the direction of this predatory mindset being synonymous with sexuality. It also inherently leads to a view of sex that is extreme. And the reason for that has to do with market competition. That pornographers are all selling the same thing. Right? They're selling human sex. How do you capture attention in a market where every competitor has the same stuff? Well, you figure out what taboo hasn't been broken yet. And you break it. That will distinguish you from your competitors. You've got an arms race in which pornographers are trying to find more and more extreme stuff to get the attention and therefore the money of consumers.

2:30:42It's not a good idea. You don't want an arms race. This is not sexism. Some new thing, you know, it's not a technology that we're trying to figure out where it goes. This is an ancient thing. And we're wrecking it in an economic arms race that is really bad for the people who consume this stuff. And it's really bad for society. It's causing people not to want to partner because when they do start a sexual relationship, they may find that their partner is violent because, I mean, here's the hidden aspect of this. Human beings figure out what sex is in large measure through observation of other humans.

2:31:26That's natural. And in fact, in hunter -gatherer societies, we know that as weird as this sounds, kids learn what sex is because they're housed with their parents and they may, you know, be half asleep and so they observe something real. So the human is built to learn this through some kind of observation and inference. But if your detectors are saturated with phony sexual interactions designed to get you to pay attention rather than real sexual interactions that actually happen between people, then it corrupts your whole understanding of what you're supposed to be doing. And then we've got AI humanoid robots at the same time.

2:32:13So you're going to have, there's going to be in our lifetime there's going to be a new story that breaks and it's going to be describing this very large community of millions and millions of men and maybe women as well who are in a committed relationship with a humanoid robot who is pleasureing them in all the right ways and just having sex with them and giving them no problems and affirming everything they want to hear and helping them around the house. Oh, the worst thing you said is affirming everything they want to hear. Yeah. But you just think about what's stopping them doing that and the only thing stopping you doing that, honestly, if I'm being completely honest, is the stigma.

2:32:45And stigma is we look back through history evaporates in a moment when enough people start doing it. Yeah. And we saw this with porn. Yeah. Oh, of course, yeah. But you still have a stigma. Oh, my God, it had such a stigma and now people just talk about it like it's nothing. Yeah. And you know, you're absolutely right. But I mean, look, maybe I have a wonderful relationship. Really, I know I married the right person, which is odd because I met her when I was 16. Wow. Yeah. That's incredible. It is incredible, but it does tell me something because as much as I know that I'm with the right person, then I can look back on my history and just understand what an important role it played and everything good about my life.

2:33:33It's not simple. You don't want it to be simple. You don't want a beautiful robot to tell you what you want to hear. That will wreck your life. Right. I mean, it's like if it let's take the perfect analogy. If I said to you, hey, how would you like just to feel really awesome all the time? It's tempting. Oh, it's so tempting, but it's kind of what cocaine does. Right. It just triggers the pleasure center without it having to be accompanied by success or anything. Wrecks your life. If you really get into that stuff, you'll betray every value you've got just to keep the high going. So this is the same thing.

2:34:15You don't want a sexy, beautiful robot to make you feel great about yourself because you will become nothing. Struggle matters. Yeah. It does, which is why suffering is not something we should be trying to cure. And that brings me to the last question. I was going to ask you of the two, which was just about what parents are getting wrong. Because I'm going to be a parent at some point. I'm 31. Me and my partner have started trying for kids. And my brother is a year older. He has three kids under the age of six. And I am trying to navigate now. What advice or what, you know, very top level things I should be thinking about as a parent.

2:34:52I'm so glad you asked me. Why? Because I've got some actually useful advice. And, you know, like I made mistakes with my kids. And I know what they were in large measure. Maybe I don't know all of them yet. But I also think Heather and I did really well. And our kids pair that story out.

2:35:13Kids are built to be raised correctly. They are not fragile in the sense that you're going to make plenty of errors. You're going to yell at them when you shouldn't. You're going to do all sorts of stuff you shouldn't do. That does not wreck kids. The signal to noise ratio is what you got to focus on. Right? In general, you want your successes, the things that you do right, to sufficiently outpace the things that you screw up, that they get the idea. Right? They're not... Their purpose is not to gain you. It's not to evade your authority. They're trying to figure out how to be in the world. And your job as a parent is to mirror the world that they will live in.

2:36:03Right? To do so in a way that they can get the message, so that they can become... You don't want a panicky kid who is going to face danger and freak out. That's not useful. I will get you killed. What you want is somebody who, when they are faced with something challenging, brings the right tools to bear. So you'll model it for them, and you'll produce a world in which those kinds of challenges exist. At first in a very crude form, and then they will get more and more sophisticated over time. It's all designed to work. What you want to do is not break it, not fall in love with fads or beliefs like, you know, childhood is a time of innocence.

2:36:44Right? Okay. You're supposed to be playing. Well, you know what play is? Practice. Right? Yes. You should be playing. You should be having a blast, but you should be playing with things that actually have some relevance to what you want to be as an adult. Right? The fun you have should be correlated with the skills that you will want to have picked up. And, um, anyway, I think the key is reduce the novelty in their lives as much as you can. No, Voltape, but what you mean? Um, stuff for which they have no evolutionary preparedness. Screens, screens being very high on the list. Um, I will tell you Heather and I knew very little about raising kids when we had our first.

2:37:30And we literally had a conversation. I said, do you know how to do this? No. Did you have, were you around people who did when you were a kid? Not really, you know, it was true for both of us. And so we just kind of decided to wing it. Um, and one of the things we did was we started talking to our then infant. As if he was a college student, you know, it was kind of funny to do and it didn't seem harmful. And the funny thing is it worked really well. Um, your job is to shoot over their heads. And then they rise to meet it, right? And so don't assume that you should be meeting your child at their level.

2:38:17That's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to shoot above their heads. And then they come to meet it. You're supposed to ignore all the garbage that they used to tell parents about. Oh, you'll ruin your kid if you love them too much. That kind of thing. It's all nonsense, right? Your program to know. You're supposed to love the tiny kid unconditionally. There's supposed to feel very, very secure in that, right? That's what allows them to confront the terrifying world is that they're completely secure at home. And then at the point where it's not so simple. You know, right? You're built for this over there.

2:38:55And that system works. And the thing that makes it break is. Novel influences, especially where you have an antagonist. Right? You're not supposed to have an antagonist. Your ancestors, there were some set of things that a child should eat. There was nobody trying to trick your child into eating something they shouldn't because it's profitable. That's new. Right? So anyway, you're built for it. You're also extremely thoughtful, which is a great tool because you're going to be living in a world with novel stuff. Your book is so incredibly important because it's, you know, until I went through this book, I didn't understand that pretty much everything, as you say, is downstream from my evolutionary biology.

2:39:46And I thought of evolutionary biology as like, why is my finger the shape that it is or what's inside or what, you know, what's the structure of the human body, but actually understanding that everything from the food we and why that's misaligned to the back pain that I get to to the way that I make, the why I have a girlfriend and not five girlfriends and all of society in the way it's constructed and all of my biases link back to my evolutionary biology. It allows me to see a kind of different lens on the world. And I used to think that psychology was the answer to the world. But after reading this essential book, I now know that the answer to the world is actually much of it exists in our evolutionary biology.

2:40:23Our ability to see the future, I meant to understand the past exists in our evolutionary biology. And so I highly recommend everybody gets this book and has a read of it. It's called A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. And by both Brett and his wife, Heather, I'll link it below for everybody to read to New York, that Times bestselling book as well. Brett, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is, OK, I get to know who left it.

2:40:52You never get to know unless they all these questions become conversation cards. So we have a pack for you. So if you turn it over and scan it with your iPhone, you can watch who answered the question on the other side. So your question will become a card and then you can turn it over and scan it. And on the other side will be the person that answered it. If you could travel back to meet one member of your family when they were the age you are now, what would you ask them? I guess I would ask my grandfather who I was very close with, who had a great many, he had great hopes for humanity. And he had tremendous fears about exactly what we're doing wrong, not in detail.

2:41:46But he understood that our power to break the world exceeded our wisdom about how to manage those powers. I guess I would ask him if he could have been certain that he was actually right and at the magnitude of the danger in 2024 would exceed even his substantial concerns. What might he do differently to raise the alarm? Is that what you're trying to do? Yeah. I live by the following premise. If you were on a canoe being pulled towards a waterfall and the chances of your paddling out of the danger was growing vanishingly small. There's no point in which it makes sense to stop paddling. You don't know what you don't know and the chances that you might just barely escape a terrible disaster because you didn't give in to hopelessness means that what you do as things get very dire is you double down and you push as hard as you can.

2:43:30And so what I honestly believe is that it is very, very late. But as far as I know, it is not too late. If we began the process now of waking up to what's actually causing our problem, which is hyper novelty. Hyper novelty for in simple times, meaning meaning of the rate of change is simply too great for our ability to adapt to catch up. If we woke up to that problem and we got serious about addressing it, I believe that we could still do it. Are you hopeful? Let's put it this way. One of the tools that we use in evolutionary biology to think about the process of a creature becoming some other kind of creature is called the adaptive landscape.

2:44:28And it involves thinking about opportunities as peaks. The value of an opportunity is the height of the peak and the obstacles to going from one peak to a higher one are valleys. There's no guarantee that just because you've gone into a valley that you're going to go up a peak on the other side. That involves some luck and some careful navigation. Because if that other peak is far away in the clouds and you're off by four degrees, you could just simply miss it. So the parallel is real. We are entering an adaptive valley. We can feel it. Everybody feels it. There is no guarantee that we get out of it.

2:45:16But the fact that things look very dark does not mean that we are not moving through an adaptive valley to a better peak on the other side. So there is every reason not to give up and to try to play our roles in this chapter as effectively as we can to maximize the chances that we do get to the foothill of that other peak and can deliver our descendants a world as good as the one we inherited or better. And let's put it this way. We all go to the movie and we watch the fellowship of the ring or whatever the collection of weird heroes that we see on the screen. We root for them and we admire them.

2:46:08We know what we are supposed to do at this moment. We are supposed to enter the next chapter of the book and we are supposed to do as well as we can and bring our best characteristics to bear in the hope that it works out. And if it doesn't, we will have tried. And if it does, we will get to look back on this dark phase and say, isn't it great that we kept going? Are you hopeful?

2:46:41You know, the funny thing is, I know the answer to that question and I also know the other answer to that question. Yeah, I'm hopeful. I will see if they're answered to that question.

2:46:57I mean, you really want to know? Yes. Okay. Because it breaks the spell. The problem is, in order to get everybody to do what they need to do in order that we do get out of this, we have to believe that it's more likely to get out of it than it probably is. So I'm comfortable with that. If other people are comfortable with that, then the answer is, yeah, it's a pretty dire moment. We're going to need some luck. But what's the way to approach it? Often the way to approach things is in some conflict with how we understand them. I don't believe in fate. I don't think it's a real thing. But I know that it's very often extremely useful to behave as if you do believe in fate.

2:47:46So I do.

2:47:50Thank you. Thank you for your generosity with your time and thank you for your wisdom, your honesty, and for all the work that you do across your YouTube channel, which I'm a big fan of, your books and everything else that you do. If someone wants to find you as the best place to go, is it your website or is it? They should find the Dark Horse podcast. Dark Horse is one word. They can find me on Twitter at Bret Weinstein. We also have a Twitter account for the podcast. They can pick up the book. I think those are the best places. I'll link all of those below. So everyone has easy access to them on all platforms.

2:48:24So thank you so much, Bret. It's been a real honor and I feel enlightened. I feel like my eyes have been opened in a number of ways. And I feel focused. Well, that's great to hear. It was a very rewarding conversation.

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