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June 23, 2022 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
02:03:57
Staving Off Extinction: Bret Speaks with Konstantin Kisin

Bret speaks with Konstantin Kisin in London about fatherhood, thinking in public, and human extinction.Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-British comedian, social commentator, and co-host of the Triggernometry podcast.https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisinhttps://www.youtube.com/c/Triggerpod*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/bretweinsteinPlease subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @D...

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I liked when Joe Rogan came out and he said, look, I'm going to stop talking to politicians because I don't want to be a player in this field.
And when it comes to this stuff that we're talking about, I don't want to be a player in that.
So if the government is coming and taking your rights away and saying, if you don't take the vaccine, we're going to fire you from the job.
I'm going to stand up and say that's wrong.
Right.
If the government is forcing you to wear a nappy on your face, it doesn't work.
Right.
Yeah, you're gonna stand up.
I'm gonna stand up and say that's wrong.
If the government is forcing you to live in a quarantine facility when you have a disease that is akin to flu, I'm gonna stand up and say that's wrong.
But all of this other stuff, it becomes a little bit above my pay grade is my point.
And that's why I think, you know, you talked earlier about sort of like, well, this is a problem you don't feel capable of solving, so you solve the ones that you can.
Actually, I do think that's a recipe for a sane person, in my opinion.
There are many, many things I could worry about in the world on which I have absolutely no impact and on which my interference will probably make things worse rather than better.
And rather than focusing my energy on that, my energy is limited.
I'm going to focus on fighting for the things that I do understand, that I do think are important, and that I can make a difference on, and that's what I've been doing.
So, this is not me rejecting what you're saying, this is not me taking a position either way on ivermectin or vaccines or anything like that.
All I'm saying is, I think the time for people like me interfering in things like public health policy is at an end.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I have the great pleasure today of sitting in person with Konstantin Kissin.
I am sitting, of course, on his set, the set of Trigonometry, also known affectionately as TriggerPod.
Welcome, Konstantin.
Thanks very much.
It's great to have you here in London and for us to sit down in person.
It is great to sit down in person.
Last time I saw you was pre-COVID.
Yes, it was.
Yeah.
So it's been some time and the world is a new place since last we spoke in person.
Thank you for the loan of this set.
I will say I'm concerned about one thing, which is that because all of the visuals here are your visuals, I'm triggered to just let you ask questions and that's not going to work, is it?
Well, it's a pity because we would have loved to have you back on the show and in person.
But Frances, so as people may know, I've been on paternity leave and Frances has been on holiday or very much needed one for the last couple of weeks while I've been dealing with a new baby.
So that's why we're not able to interview because she's still abroad.
But I'm really pleased that we get a chance to chat anyway.
Yeah, me too.
I don't know how much it will be a focus of our discussion but the new baby is certainly the most important fact in the room here at the moment and congratulations.
Thanks man.
I'm really enjoying it actually and you and I were talking earlier before we started and I was kind of You know, not complaining, but sort of saying like the baby's at the stage where he's, you know, just he does a lot of poops and he does a lot of sucking on my wife's breasts and that's about it really at this point.
So, but I'm really enjoying it anyway, but it's not quite at the stage where they have a personality yet.
So, I'm really looking forward to getting to that point where you actually get to meet the person.
So, at the point that you have stopped producing new children, you kind of forget some of what goes on.
Am I right that your child is still in the stage where they remain where you leave them?
Yes, oh yeah, he's only about 12 days old.
Oh, so you can't even roll over?
No, no.
Roll over maybe is a bad joke?
No, no, no.
Still not, still not, yeah.
Pooing, eating, screaming, if those two things are in the wrong setting and that's about it.
You know, if you're going to count on your fingers the things that the child does, you're going to find a phase coming where you're going to run out of digits and you're going to have to count some other way.
But anyway, it is...
I would just say it is transformative when you have a child because it rearranges the whole logic of life.
I can't even figure out exactly what words to say except that this is the way in which the human purpose unfolds and we many people don't have children and they have found new purposes and all of that's marvelous but at the point that you return to this Sacred role of passing on what you are to this new human in this very special way that humans do it.
It can't help really, but transform really everything about life.
And I do hear what you're saying.
I went through the same thing where At first, you know, babies are, you know, a really important fact and you feel the emotional bond that you feel, but it's like, well, you know, I, I can't really father the child very well at this point because, you know, uh, they're, they're just not capable of taking on the kinds of lessons that I'm equipped to teach.
Um, but you'll be there so soon.
Oh man, I'm loving the whole process as it is.
I was just observing that there's a kind of transitional phase.
But in terms of the point that you make about it changing who you are and how you view the world and how you behave, I noticed it literally the day that I found out my wife was pregnant.
I was driving into London here to the studio and a guy cut me up and sort of blocked me off on the road.
And he was completely in the wrong by the rules of the road.
And normally in that situation, I'm not going to lie, I am...
If people are going to behave like a dick, I am going to make it uncomfortable for them to continue to behave that way, usually.
So, I would normally take extra time to, you know, I wouldn't be screaming and shouting.
I'd take extra time to get out of his way, make sure I was extra slow, give him an extra smile.
You would make sure there was no profit in his behavior, so that the behavior would shut itself in.
Yeah, exactly.
Thank you for giving an evolutionary spin to me being a dick.
So basically, that's what I would normally do.
And that day, I just found out my wife was pregnant.
I had absolutely no... It's not that I decided to be a different person.
I just noticed that I had absolutely no emotional reaction.
And I just let this guy get on with it as quickly as he could.
Didn't make it any more difficult.
And I just think...
There is something that definitely happened with me, which, in terms of how I conceive of myself in the society that I exist in, in terms of my status and relation to other people and what I'm trying to achieve in the world, instantly changed.
About that time when I realized there's a person who's now counting on me in a way that even my wife wasn't counting.
My wife will be fine without me, I would hope, but a little baby won't.
I think that switch of being responsible for another human being who's helpless without you, it changed the way I think and behave about myself.
I'm sure there's quite a lot that you could probably talk to me about in terms of the evolutionary function Of preserving yourself versus being a young male and risk-taking and all of that?
Well, I remember a similar shocking transition.
It wasn't on Discovering that Heather was pregnant.
It was, I believe, the night before she gave birth to my first child, Zach.
And I remember, I think this must have been triggered by a dream which I don't remember, but I remember feeling my brain rewire around the concept that the right thing to do would involve You know, running into the burning building to save this person were necessary, right?
I remember that transition.
And it was like, and it happened close enough to consciousness that I would, you know, I wouldn't be of two minds about it.
Right.
Now, here's the really uncomfortable part, though.
The logic changes at the point that you have a second child, right?
Because One does not want to take the tiniest chance, right, of saving a jeopardized child if it is going to strand another child.
So, there's an equation that has to be built.
And I remember that transition from, this is now a very simple thing, even a very small chance of saving this person is worth trading your life over.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
well, you have to figure out the costs and benefits, which, frankly, I wish I didn't have that piece of information.
It's uncomfortable to know that that calculation is taking place.
But I did feel it.
And yeah, it sure does line up with the evolutionary logic.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
Well, I think it sounds so cheesy, and in modern society you're not supposed to say it, but it is a revolutionary experience.
It changes your view of things entirely.
It does.
Now, I will give you some advice that you definitely didn't ask for.
Please.
There is, I believe, no way To properly raise a child in this era.
That ship has sailed.
The era is so screwed up and the hazards are so many and they're growing at such a rate that if I were you, I would just, you know.
The cheery message every father needs to hear.
Well, but here's the thing you need to know it because until you I mean, maybe this is different for you.
Maybe you've seen enough parenting.
But in our case, Heather and I hadn't seen any real parenting either.
We had seen the parenting that was done for us.
But we hadn't been around a lot of parents at the point we had kids.
And so we learned a lot of lessons, just by trial and error and talking it out.
But One has the sense right we know that bad parenting messes kids up right and so there's a you know if you're if you're good at the job of parenting you'll be very concerned that you don't want to do that right but what what is harder to understand is how resilient the child is to bad parenting so the point is you'll make plenty of errors and the child is Seeking signal in noise.
So, if your parenting is basically good, then the child will get the result of good parenting as a result of, you know, they'll throw out the outlying bad parenting stuff that you do and they'll get the good message.
The problem is that things are changing so rapidly and so many of the things that you're interfacing with, it's hard to know whether the novelty of them is a hazard or not.
I don't think it's really possible to deliver your kid a program that will make them, you know, a happy, healthy, well-adjusted adult.
Because well-adjusted to what exactly?
To a world in chaos?
Yeah, sure.
I think that's probably always has been true to a large extent.
I mean, there would have been periods of time when it would have been easier to prepare a child for the future because the future was unlikely to change as much as it's changing now.
But there have been other periods in human history.
I think where technological change has caused the sort of rapid transformation of society that we're seeing now.
And I also, you know, I'm not determined that I am the perfect parent.
I know that's not possible.
I am quite keen to be a better parent than my parents were to me or than my wife's parents were to her.
And I sort of think like that's a likely outcome.
To be honest, you know, I love my parents and they did their best.
But when I was born, my mom was, she'd been 18 for four days.
My dad was 20 and they didn't know what the hell they were doing.
So if I can, and I've turned out in my head, all right.
So if I can be better than that, I think my kids will be okay.
And also, I just think You know, I maybe quibble with the idea that it was ever possible to prepare your children for the future and maybe this is part of my background.
You know, I grew up in late Soviet Union as a kid and then I saw that world collapse and almost everybody in that society, 99% of the people in that society were completely maladapted.
So, to me, the idea that it's actually possible to genuinely prepare your kids fully for the future, I think it's probably more about instilling a set of values and a set of principles.
And then they're going to have to use their talents and their ingenuity to fend for themselves in a way.
So, I think it's more about, you know, there's a certain set of red lines that we don't cross and there's a certain set of things that we do do in every circumstance, which is, you know, we speak the truth when we can, etc, etc, right?
All of those things.
And then you just leave them to it, I think.
I don't know that you're going to get them to be well-adjusted to any world because the world is constantly changing.
Well, but the problem is that's actually new, right?
And I take your point about... What about the printing press?
I mean, that transformed society.
I'm still uncertain about it.
But look, first of all... Centuries of violent revolutions around the world?
Well, but here's the thing that I think is missing from this.
Recent human history has had many of these violent upheavals.
And I agree, every single one of those takes people who were adapted to something and throws them into some world they don't know.
Okay?
Humans are adapted to that.
And in fact, I would argue that what we understand about PTSD tells us that human beings are adapted to make exactly one violent transition in a lifetime.
Right.
And that, you know, when a soldier comes back from war is when they have their problem, right?
You can go from walking around a normal, stable civilization to being in a jungle and not knowing whether you're going to step into a booby trap or somebody, a sniper is going to pick you off.
You can adapt to that reality.
But it's very hard To turn off the part of your mind that learned that you could be in such a circumstance, right?
And so then from then on every supermarket is like, where are the booby traps and who might, you know, who's going to shoot at me?
So I do think we're built for violent transitions, but one of them, what we are not built for, is a treadmill, where we are constantly facing, they're not quite as violent, but we are caught I mean, if you think about the difference between this world and the world pre COVID in the world pre Facebook, right, we keep going through these violent transitions.
And what's more, it's like, A treadmill on which some diabolical force is turning up the speed of it, right?
The rate at which these violent transitions are coming at us is going up.
And so I don't think there's any way to be Well, we can be well-adjusted to change.
We can't be well-adjusted to accelerating change with this much at stake.
But your basic point, I think, is true, which is if your child is going to face that world and you know that your child will, then you fall back to something else.
And I actually We don't know each other all that well but I've certainly watched a lot of your podcast.
I have a pretty good sense of who you are and I'm very confident in your capacity to do this because you are highly conscious and very decent, right?
Your values are good but it's the highly conscious thing.
Consciousness is the tool that we have for dealing with novelty and you've got it in spades.
You know, yeah, your kid's gonna face some stuff.
But having a parent who is modeled that way of approaching it is about the best thing that they could have.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
You know, I am troubled by some of the, as you well know, I mean, this wouldn't exist if I wasn't troubled by many of the things that are happening in the modern world.
But I also, I think, I've written a book called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.
And I talk about this stuff a lot in the book.
I go to Russia, I go to Ukraine, I speak to my grandmother in Ukraine, she's alive today, 96, I'm pushing 97 years old now.
You go talk to her, you know, she's perfectly compassionate.
And she lived through the Holodomor.
The gulags, exile, Nazi occupation, and on and on.
The late Soviet Union, the transition from Soviet communism to modern society the way it is now.
The rapid advancement of technology.
This is in one lifetime.
And Is my kid gonna face as many problems as that?
I hope not.
And I don't know that they will, frankly, you know, living through the several, like several events that have killed millions of people in your country, a foreign invasion with genocidal maniac who's doing that.
Those are things that may happen again.
But they may not.
So, I think we get a little... I know the pace of change feels very, very difficult at the moment.
And I think the direction of travel has not been good.
But I also think that we ought not to get carried away because I look at look at comedy, for example, I don't do stand up comedy anymore.
But this was how I came into this world of the conversations we're having.
And it's the pendulum swinging back now in the comedy world.
It went from, you know, my heroes growing up with people like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, and they were pushing back lefties pushing back against the religion of their day, which was religion, right?
And that's why they made fun of Christians and all of that.
We have a new religion now, and a few of us early on started to push back against that religion, and we got the same lumps.
We had to take the same lumps that comedians before us had.
And now I start to see the mainstream of the comedy world very slowly, but pivoting back towards realizing that if you want to be on the edge, if you want to be exciting, Then you actually are going to have to start addressing this new cultishness that we've developed.
So the pendulum will always swing.
I am troubled by the direction that it's been going.
I'm also very optimistic.
And maybe this is just fatherhood speaking through me and I have to be optimistic for the future.
Now I don't know.
But I am less concerned than I've been in the last five or six years now than I have been ever, personally.
Well, I'm thrilled to hear that, because although I vehemently disagree with you, I think it's a very important data point.
In other words, if I'm trying to calibrate my own model, how confident am I in what I'm seeing?
I know that you see things from a different perspective.
I know you have a toolkit that was built under very different circumstances, and it's great to hear that you're optimistic.
I hope you're right.
And I will say, I had a lovely conversation with Neil Oliver a couple days ago, and he said something that upgraded my model quite a bit, right?
I was talking to him about the trajectory that I see, which is frankly quite alarming and dark.
And he told me that he thought that it had been so long since the major tragedies of history, the events you refer to, in which millions died in particular places.
And he said that he thought that because the current generation of tyrants is too far removed from that to have experienced it directly, that they've lost the ability to engage in that level of wet work.
And I must say, I found something compelling about his formulation.
Now, I don't, it doesn't bring me all the way to a hopeful state because I think, you know, I know it's not going to goose step, right?
If you think that it's going to goose step into the room, you're going to miss it when it does arrive because it's learned the lesson that it mustn't.
But I also think that we are, we are in an existential battle.
That existential battle looks nothing like the battles of the past.
Many of the tools are strangely reminiscent of the tools of the past.
Right?
The degree to which Orwell is on target is almost ridiculous.
Right?
You know, ministries of truth and, you know, malinformation, these couldn't be more Orwellian if they tried.
But nonetheless, I don't think it's going to look like those past tragedies.
But it also, well, let's take it, let's take one example, just to put some flesh on the bones.
There is a battle to prevent change, right?
Those who have a disproportionate amount, some of which will have been earned through innovation, most of which will have been earned through rent seeking or worse.
Those people always have an interest in thwarting change that they do not control, right?
Because change can only reduce their position and their power.
So they oppose change, right?
What does one need to do to successfully oppose change?
Well, in the past, you might need to go after huge numbers of people, right?
The Stasi had to keep track of an incredibly large number of people.
And so it needed basically to, you know, to conscript your neighbors into spying on you.
This thing has tools that the Stasi didn't have, right?
So, for example, the ability to gather everything that we exchange electronically and bank it in Utah, right?
What that allows them to do is it allows them not to pay attention to what you're saying.
And then at the point that you become annoying, they can say, well, let's look at everything you said in the last 10 years.
What's the most troubling thing the person has said?
I call this retroactive surveillance, right?
And so what it means, Is that the thing can leave most people alone, and it only has to exert pressure on the tiny number of people who are the sort of people who do create change, right?
That's enough.
It can be surgical.
And so I don't want to go up against an enemy that can be so surgical that most people can be smug about pretending it doesn't exist because it's not going to come after them, right?
That's a very dangerous world.
And we're there already.
So I sincerely hope that your optimism is well placed.
And I hope you can ridicule me later for having seen things.
Oh, no, I'm not unconcerned about those possibilities.
But what I also see is, look, All of us who've spoken out against the dogma of the day on one issue or another, and we may disagree about certain dogmas or whatever, but we've all been quote-unquote punished.
Your and Heather's experience, for example, way worse than mine, deeply unpleasant.
I'm sure, you know, cathartic in some ways, but traumatic in others.
You're talking about Evergreen?
Yeah, I'm talking about Evergreen.
Yeah, I'm talking about Evergreen initially, right?
So that Bad, bad, right?
Me, you know, I refuse to sign a contract to not make offensive jokes at a comedy show.
I get kicked out of the comedy industry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Again, unpleasant, not really kicked out, sort of just sort of like, very different, very, very different to what happened to my grandparents.
Even more different to what happened to their grandparents.
In positive ways, right?
Not burnt at the stake, not put in a gulag, not executed, right?
Look, I live this all the time.
People come up to me specifically about the Evergreen stuff, right?
And they say the darndest things to me about my courage and you're a hero and this and that.
And my feeling is, You know, I'm proud of myself.
But do you realize how safe that was compared to what people have faced?
I think we've become soft, we've become really soft.
And, you know, look, I, I don't really see it going the direction of gas chambers.
But, um, What I'm... You see it going in the direction of digital gas chambers.
I get it.
I understand.
No, worse than that, actually.
Digital prisons, whatever you want to call it.
Right.
No, even worse than that.
What I see coming is extinction.
Extinction.
Extinction.
And my feeling is it is our obligation to head that off.
And the tools with which to head it off are not at our disposal.
So when you say extinction, what's the path that takes us to extinction?
Well, there are a lot of them that could, but my basic point would be what we have is the generating function.
We have tools that are scaling up our disasters.
Our disasters are getting worse and worse.
And we haven't had an existential one yet.
But we have several things on the map that could be that large.
And they're being managed by fools, people who really don't understand what they're doing, don't understand the first thing about complex systems, right?
The hubris of these people who are managing these systems is so great that the systems will take us out when they mismanage them.
And so somehow, and I know, I'm going to take a lot of crap for using this phrase, because it's the kind of it's like, it's like invoking Nazis, right?
As soon as you do, you've lost the argument.
It is a rush the cockpit moment.
That's where we are.
And I don't know how to convince you that because frankly, this is pretty comfortable.
I had a lovely breakfast this morning.
It all feels pretty okay.
You're right.
Comedy is coming back.
We're getting our tools back.
They're having a harder time throwing us off social media.
All that's to the good.
It's not nearly sufficient to protect us from what's coming.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Let me give you an example.
There is a problem where the sun periodically throws off these bursts of energy, right?
Now, the sun is a sphere.
These things are thrown off effectively in random directions.
Gigantic storms get thrown off fairly regularly, and mostly they don't come anywhere near us, and every so often one does come near us, and sometimes they hit us, right?
We are running an incredibly large risk That one of these is going to take out a major section of the power grid across an entire continent.
It is not implausible that we would lose a third of the North American power grid.
And when it goes down, it's not like it comes back on a few days later.
The transformers that hold this system together, that run it, It would take more than a year.
If you ordered one today, it would take more than a year for it to be delivered.
And that's in a system that is not pressured by the need to replace many of them simultaneously.
Right?
Now, if you imagine a third of North America going dark, already you've got a question.
Are the Canadian and American governments sufficiently competent at this moment to keep order under such a circumstance?
Well, I sure don't know that they are.
Second thing, we have numerous nuclear reactors in these zones.
Every single one of them requires a constant input of electrical energy, or the water that is used to keep all the spent fuel that has gone through these reactors from catching fire.
will boil away, right?
So they all have, I think it's two weeks supply of diesel fuel on site in order to keep them cool.
Probably, I think I know that most of them have at least a month, which is more than they are legally required to have, which is great.
But we're talking about doing this over the course of a year.
Any one of these in which the vigilance to keep the diesel fuel flowing to those reactors, any place where that fails, turns that reactor into a nuclear volcano. - Well, no, you can shut them down. - You can't shut them down.
What do you mean?
You can't shut them down.
And this is one of these things where I didn't know this until Fukushima happened, at which point I learned a lot about fission power.
The fact is, when you run this material through the reactor, it's actually fairly safe before it's gone through the reactor.
It becomes much more dangerous in the reactor.
Right?
And then there's a period of something like five years where the only way to keep it from catching fire is to keep it underwater and to keep the water circulating.
It needs constant influx of cold water in order to keep it cool.
Right?
Now the reason that that stuff is still in these reactors or on these reactor sites is that we never made good on our promise to find something to do with it.
When these reactors were first built, we were told, look, we'll figure out where to put it.
Well, it'll be in Yucca Mountain.
We'll find something really stable, a good place it'll go.
That never happened.
So the stuff is all stored on site, which is really the worst place it could be, because if the reactor goes bad, it gets in the way of your ability to manage the spent fuel that came through it.
So for five years after coming out of these reactors, the stuff has to be actively cooled.
It contains literally the worst stuff on earth, right?
Including plutonium with a 200,000 year half-life, right?
Really dangerous stuff and it will all be liberated into the atmosphere if it catches fire and it will make it impossible to manage the rest of the stuff that's there, right?
All the stuff that's been there longer than five years could be taken out of these reactors and it could be put in what's called dry cast storage.
Dry cask storage isn't great.
Still highly radioactive.
Stuff in there has a really long half-life.
But it at least doesn't require vigilance, right?
It just sits there inert.
And as long as nobody breaks open the container, it's okay.
But we're not doing that.
Why not?
Because it costs money.
So what I'm telling you is that Accidentally, we built a doomsday device and we distributed it across North America, across Europe, right?
It's just sitting there, right?
And it's sitting there waiting for a failure that could be flung out of the sun at any minute.
And at the point it gets flung out of the sun, we can calculate roughly the likelihood that the storm will hit us.
We can calculate based on how big the storm is, what the potential is for it to do damage to our grids, but there's nothing we can do about it.
So, here's the weird punchline in that story.
The remedy for this isn't expensive, right?
We're talking something to solve this problem in North America.
We're talking about a sum of money that has been estimated as something like equivalent to a B-2 bomber, right?
Stealth bomber.
That's not a lot of money.
You could Tax the rich, you could tax the middle class and you could come up with that kind of money and nobody would notice it.
It's tiny, right?
And yet we don't do it because the people who are managing our system are insane.
They've left this vulnerability there for no reason.
It doesn't serve anybody's interests.
It's just easy to ignore it because it's kind of abstract and technical and nobody notices it because it's not a political winner, right?
In that world, right?
That's when we that's one that we can say, hey, we know enough about this one to describe it.
But then there's a whole series of other things where something has been done that we only discover after the disaster that some process was underway that we needed to know about ahead of time, right?
Gain-of-function research.
How much did you know about that before COVID?
I wasn't paying attention.
No.
Right.
So, okay, they're doing gain-of-function research.
Well, how much more of that are they doing?
And on what?
And, you know, how good is their security?
And how much of it's in Ukraine?
And what happens if there's a war, right?
You've got that.
You've got the Aliso Canyon disaster in which we are pumping Natural gas into old oil deposits and storing it there and it can spring a leak.
We've got the Deepwater Horizon accident.
We've got the financial collapse of 2008, right, with credit default swaps.
I mean, the point is people are inventing dangerous technologies all around us.
And you know what?
We've gotten through all of them so far.
But at some point, something that is of the appropriate scale to take us out is going to get unleashed.
And my point is, I want to know the name of every technology that has that capacity now, and then I want really smart people who aren't corrupt to discuss how you properly manage it.
And I know that none of that's happening.
Well, congratulations.
I'm slightly less optimistic than I was before we started this conversation.
Well done, Brett.
Sorry.
Well, we're having a conversation completely outside of my area of expertise, so I don't really have that much to come back to you with.
Well, look, it's outside of all of our areas of expertise.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, right?
I don't even know what I would need to be an astrophysicist to know about solar storms at the proper level.
I do know enough to evaluate this gain-of-function stuff, but But really, none of that is the point, right?
You do know enough to say, well, hey, that credit default swap thing sounds like it was a bad idea before it went bad.
And then we found out about it at the point it had gone bad, and it didn't take out the world economy, but it was of a scale that tells us that's possible, right?
So, something out there We've got a Sorcerer's Apprentice problem, right?
There's something out there with the power to unleash things that it cannot keep under control.
And we don't have the wisdom to address it.
And so, anyway, I do feel... See, it's interesting you make you make that point because credit default swaps is something I understand a little bit.
And actually, what's interesting about the 2008 financial crisis is it is the direct consequence of the Clinton administration abandoning rules that were set in place after the Great Depression to prevent that from happening again.
So it's not so much that we don't have the competences.
It's more that we are greedy enough that we think, well, look, if we take the brakes off the car, we can go faster.
Right.
And that's how we so I understand your concern.
But also, I suppose I'm kind of philosophical about extinction.
I, I fear death only as a personal thing.
I fear dying.
If it also if it means that my wife and child and people I love are going to be without me and they need me.
I actually am not that concerned about dying if we all die together.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I've noticed that in myself too.
I don't know what it's about.
It's a little odd.
Yeah.
It's a little odd.
But I don't fear death.
I fear leaving people behind who might like me or love me or need me.
But I, you know, I've lived a great life already.
I have I have exactly the same sense.
Yeah.
You know, I'm very comfortable with who I, you know, who, if I died 10 years ago, I'd be concerned that I hadn't become the human being that I could die and know that I'm proud of that person.
Today, I'm more comfortable in that.
I'm like, you know, this is a person who's stuck by his principles, who's done some things that he thought were important, who's created something, who's employed people, who's made other people's lives better, who's helped his friends, who's, you know, all of that.
And so, I hear you.
The accelerating pace of technological change means that we are left in the hands of people that we wouldn't otherwise choose to trust.
And the catastrophe that could come from that failure is extinction level.
Sure.
Okay.
I'm okay with it, Brett.
All right.
Well, I hate to be this guy because I want to make you less okay with it.
Some of us are going to survive, is the way you're going to say.
No.
First of all, I'm not entirely convinced that that's right, but it could be.
But I guess the point is, I detest the idea that some will survive and we will leave them a greatly diminished planet that will not recover, right?
They might live on it, maybe it will be possible to continue on and the human species will do whatever's next, but it will be on a planet that we wrecked and I can't be okay with that.
Now look, There's a practical issue to all of this, Brett, which is everything you're saying may be completely true.
And I'm sure there are big elements of it that are.
But at the end of the day, I've always made my life about solving the problems that I think I have a role in and that I can solve.
And this ain't one of them.
Well, no, I disagree with you completely.
I'll try it with two points.
Okay.
One, I agree with where you are, right?
I've had a great life.
I feel like as you, I'm in the black.
I have contributed more than I have absorbed, right?
And so, I'm not looking to die.
I will avoid it as long as possible.
I really don't want to strand my family.
But, you know, if I went to the doctor tomorrow and I got a terminal diagnosis, I would think, well, it sucks that it wasn't longer, but I can't complain, right?
On the other hand, We are temporary custodians of something, something that has been in motion for three and a half billion years.
I don't really care about it very much.
You know, I think the planet is full of cool creatures and the creatures that we were before we were human are cool.
And I like all that, but the ability to be a human being, right?
The ability to have the capacity to even Catch a glimpse of where we are and how unlikely that is and what it implies about the universe and to have some idea of how big the universe is and to look at really marvelous things and be provoked and to feel love and all of these great things, right?
That experience is It is the greatest experience that could be, as far as I know.
And I believe that we have an obligation to deliver it to as many people as can possibly experience it.
Now, asterisk, I know that in the end, none of us get out of here alive.
Our species will go extinct, right?
The sun is going to swallow the earth.
I believe before that our galaxy will collide with Andromeda, which ain't going to be pretty, right?
Even if we were to escape these galaxies, ultimately, you know, the universe either goes cold or, you know, hot or whatever the end might be.
But the point is, in the end, philosophically speaking, even whatever we might accomplish as a species and whatever we might escape, it'll get us in the end.
That said, That right there could be an argument for not taking my next breath.
But I'm not listening, right?
I'm taking my next breath.
I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this.
I'm going to do as much good as I can.
And I'm going to do everything in my power to deliver this opportunity.
To people in the future because that's what I'm supposed to be doing, right?
That's what we are and we don't quite get it because evolution built us to perceive and to contemplate only those things in which there would be value in us perceiving and contemplating, which for our ancestors wasn't very far in the future.
They didn't have any power over the future.
We have ultimate power over the future.
So we have to correct our thinking and we have to start seeing our distant descendants as important, which isn't easy because they are completely anonymous and mysterious to us.
But I still feel I have an obligation to them.
And if we blink out tomorrow, I'm not going to feel shortchanged, but I'm going to feel a deep sense of shame that we failed them.
I hear you.
What I'm saying, though, is that It's not so much that I am unaware of the existence of our future descendants.
It's more that I can only solve the problems that I am able to solve based on my skills and the limited talents that I have and the influence that I can exert in the world.
By the way, my biggest concern is that always all of us, you and me included, are acting in ways whose consequences we can't predict.
We can strive to address a particular problem.
What is the other problem?
Look, COVID is a very good example of this, right?
A real disease comes along, and whichever way it came along, and it needs addressing.
And so we as a society go, well, we've got to address this problem.
And we start doing things, some of which personally, I agree with some of it personally, I disagree with.
And I think in many cases, the solution may have been worse than the problem that we were trying to solve on some issues, right?
So, in that desire to make the world a better place, I'm wary of people who are so confident in their own ability to solve these problems consequence-free, that they sort of push us down that line.
I'm and I'm wary of my own kind of inability to try to play a positive role in solving this.
So there's certain things that I can do, and I'm doing them.
Beyond that, I'm not able to solve the problems you're describing in any meaningful way.
Well, I mean, I agree with your formulation.
The problem is people whose hubris causes them to think they can solve problems and to be unimaginative about the unintended consequences.
I'm totally on board with that.
I mean, this is the flaw of progressivism, right?
You don't spot the unintended consequences.
You do the thing that you think needs to be done and then do make things worse.
But what I'm talking about is actually Shutting down a kind of cryptic progressivism, right?
Gain-of-function research.
Do you know why we're doing all this gain-of-function research?
Well, allegedly to stop the next pandemic.
Right.
But here's the thing, we've got an academic system, in which you rise based on your ability to tell a really compelling narrative about why your work is so damn vital, right?
These people told us a really good story about how human beings are in more contact with nature, because as we expand, we're pushing it back.
Well, that's actually bullshit.
We are expanding and pushing it back, but we're in less contact with nature.
Never mind.
They also told us that there were all of these viruses in nature that were ready to leap out and get us.
Well, it's true that they're there, but they didn't really get the evolutionary part right.
They didn't explain to us how difficult it was for a virus to make that jump.
And they didn't explain to us that the thing that they were going to have to do in order to do that work was solve that problem for the viruses.
That they were going to take the viruses into the lab and solve a very difficult evolutionary problem in order to study what would happen if some virus solved a very difficult evolutionary problem.
That was insane.
Right?
They created this.
This is an entirely man-made disaster.
It was born of this kind of runaway progressivism, exactly of the sort you're talking about.
Hey, we'll solve the problem of the next pandemic.
Yes, but the chances that you will cause the next pandemic are a thousand times greater than you will get ahead of the next pandemic.
I mean, look, they studied this exact clade of viruses.
Did they do us any good at all in controlling it?
As far as I can tell, even if their story, which I consider to be obvious bullshit at this point, even if their story that this came either from nature or the wet market was true, they didn't know enough to do anything useful to control the pandemic, right?
They've shown us how much bullshit was in their grant proposals.
And so what I'm saying is, look, We do know enough to control these things because the primary thing we have to do to control them is stop making these stupid errors.
We have to shut down that naive desire to do new cool things.
And this is where your progressive nature comes out of you, Brett, because you think that's possible.
I do.
It's not.
Well then we're done.
We are done.
This is why I'm philosophical about it.
Have you read The Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell?
I haven't.
It's very good.
He talks about, he basically says that there are two visions of the world, one of which he describes as the constrained vision and the other as the unconstrained vision.
The constrained vision is which says human beings are fallible, they're flawed, they're not perfect.
War is inevitable, disease is inevitable, stupidity is inevitable.
These things will happen and we've got to prepare for that and mitigate those things as best we can.
The unconstrained vision is progressivism which says Human beings are ultimately perfectible.
We can be made to not have these flaws.
We can be made not to have these errors.
You're never going to stop people from fucking with the world, man.
It's not going to happen.
That's not what I'm saying.
You're never going to get them away from the levers of power.
You're never going to get them to not invent powerful things that could destroy us.
That's what we do.
Well, here's the thing.
First of all, until I know, you know, even if I believed 98% that what you just said was true, as long as there's a 2% that we might be able to rein in this instinct, I am morally obligated to pursue it.
But we can't.
No, you're saying that with a level of certainty that isn't justified.
Why not?
Has there ever been a period in human history where we haven't done this?
Let me explain something.
Human Human culture and human societies as a special version of human culture is an evolved property, okay?
It is organism-like, not in every way, but in some ways.
If you understand how a hummingbird works, right?
A hummingbird is Utterly imperfect in every regard.
There's not a single system in the thing that's perfect, right?
But it functions as if perfect.
Okay.
It functions beyond what one can conceive of.
The level of functionality is beyond plausible, right?
Now, how does it work?
Well, mostly we don't know, but everything we do know about it involves feedbacks.
feedbacks that detect when some parameter is moving in a direction that's going to make the thing fall out of the sky and it moves it back.
Every single thing is modulated, right?
Now, that's not an easy trick to accomplish.
We don't have it built into civilization yet.
And it hasn't needed to be there because the technologies we were playing with, you might take out your population, but you weren't going to take out the species, right?
Now, we're all so interlinked, there are so many of us, we are burning the resources of the planet at such a rate that actually there's a clock ticking.
And my point is, it is not inconceivable that you could build and you know, I've been pretty specific about this.
I'm not saying we know how to build that system.
We definitely do not know how to build that system.
But what we do know is enough to prototype it.
Right?
To say, here's what the system must not do.
And here's what it must accomplish.
And here are the parameters that ought to be the bounds of these things.
And we know how to prototype it.
And you know what?
Your first prototype is pretty damn crude.
But if it proves you can do it, then you know what to do next.
The purpose of a prototype is to teach you what you don't know.
And so my point is not, hey, we've got to regulate this thing.
Let's do it.
I don't know how to do it.
Nobody else does either, I assure you.
But what we need to do is get some uncorrupted people.
But this is where you lose me.
What?
The uncorrupted people.
Right.
Corruption is a function of existence and of hierarchy.
Corruptibility.
Right.
My point is, you're not going to get a system where people have power where some people aren't corrupt.
It's impossible.
I'm not saying no, people will be corrupt.
What we need is a system that your corruption costs you more than it benefits you, that it moves you away from power rather than towards it.
We have the exact opposite.
But that is in direct contradiction to the interests of corrupt people who always will have the power in the system that of the kind that we have.
I think you're making my point.
No, no, I think I'm making my point.
Well, but then you're never going to get away from that.
Well, you say never going to get away from that.
But I think that assumes this system, right?
Look, like I said, this is your progressive coming out.
Well, but okay, that's a fair challenge, but understand something.
I call myself a reluctant radical, okay?
And what that means is I believe only radical change will save us, and radical change is inherently so dangerous it should terrify you.
So, I am not a progressive by virtue of the fact that I am enthusiastic.
I'm carefully teasing you, you know that, right?
Of course, of course.
But no, look, I think this is important, because I think you do disagree with me, and I think I am trying to make a point that, frankly, You know, I don't love saying this, because I hear a I hear a mechanism at work that actually liberates a friend of mine from a kind of obligation that frankly, probably we can't meet and is really unpleasant.
So I don't necessarily want to inflict it on you.
But I do think that, you know, in terms of being philosophically consistent, We aren't cooked yet.
And you know what?
You may think, well, I don't know anything about nuclear power gain function research, blah, blah, blah.
Therefore, I'm not really in a position to do anything anyway.
So I'm going to go back to not worrying about it.
But the fact is actually, you are in exactly the business where you probably have as much say as anyone else.
I don't think that's true.
But here's the thing.
You're in the business of persuading people of things that they can't see.
No, no, I see this is I think one of the big problems that we're gonna and this is one of the problems we've created by creating the sort of society and culture that we have now is people like me are in a position now where they're supposed to influence things and, you know, have these conversations about important issues like COVID or this or that I actually think
I think it was a mistake to get involved in the conversations around these issues as much as I have done.
And going forward, my aim is to avoid that as much as I can.
I'm not qualified to make these calls or to influence people on these issues.
And the longer I go, the more I realize the thing we've just been talking about, which is unintended consequence of things.
So I was, I think, quite careful to talk about my issues with our response to COVID.
From a position of saying, look, I don't know what the medical side of this is.
I don't know if ivermectin works.
I don't know how good or safe or whatever the vaccine is.
All I know is I'm uncomfortable with forcing people to do things they don't want to do in a free society like the ones that we have.
And that is and remains my position.
I think my view was always, look, As I understand it, and I don't understand it, but as I understand it, the vaccine is relatively safe and the trade-offs are worth it for people who are in a certain age category, who are in a certain health category, etc.
And if I was, not you should, but if I was in your position, I would take it, right?
That was always my view.
And it remains my view, by the way.
It remains my view that based on what I have seen, masks are ineffective at stopping the transmission of COVID-19, right?
So enforcing a vaccine and mask wearing and all of the stuff on people is wrong.
And I disagree with it on a civil society freedom of conscience basis.
But for people like me to be involved in the conversations around the medical stuff, I actually think is a mistake.
And not one I'm going to repeat.
Sure.
But let me ask you this.
Why do you think the vaccines are on balance safe enough and effective enough?
Uh, because that's what I've been told.
By whom?
By the powers that be or whatever.
That's probably better than that, right?
You wouldn't have listened to the powers that be necessarily, but you might have listened to a wide range of people who were better.
And I've listened to people who are very critical of them and people who are very supportive of them.
And I've made up my mind based on what I've seen from those different sources.
But suppose, suppose somebody could take you to a place where you could just simply stand and look at how that consensus came to be, and that the nature of that consensus was that it was entirely coerced.
And suppose that you, from what you do understand, could look and say, well, Had this been allowed to unfold naturally, had doctors been allowed to voice their concerns, there would be no consensus whatsoever.
And in fact, we would know these things, but we don't know them, because the people who said them have been booted off of our social networks, they've been punished, they've been stigmatized, their Wikipedia pages have been vandalized, right?
Suppose you knew that the consensus itself was the product of an intense campaign to create an impression that is false.
If you could take me to that room and I could observe it with my own eyes, sure.
But that's never going to happen.
Well, I don't know that it is or it isn't.
But it's not going to happen.
Well, because you're not going to go.
No, because there is no such room to which I can be transported.
That room is in the past, if it even exists.
Oh, I don't think it is.
The fact is, there are places that you could stand.
I don't know that it would nail it down 100% for you, but there are places that a guy with your intellect and your skill set would look at that consensus and say, now I don't know what to think.
Because if this was a natural consensus, none of this coercion would have been necessary, right?
I mean, for example, I'm not asking you to make a conclusion about ivermectin, but the fact that intense pressure was put on pharmacists not to fill prescriptions for ivermectin tells you that whatever those powers were, were ineffective at convincing doctors not to prescribe it.
Right?
They convinced the public this drug doesn't work.
And then they went after your pharmacist because your doctor couldn't be convinced.
That should tell you something.
Right?
That's a very interesting fact.
And it's not the only one of its kind, right?
I mean, again, we're talking about things in which I have no expertise, but I am unpersuaded that that is the equivalent of taking me to a room in which I observe large scale coordinated coercion.
That is one element of something that happened.
There could be plenty of alternative explanations why it happened.
For example, terrible public policy.
Reaction to a panic, right?
Whatever those things that look, governments do stupid shit all the time, right?
And they do it not because always because there's a conspiracy or because there's something going wrong, but because governments are flawed and they make mistakes, right?
And this has happened time and time again.
And they've made mistakes that have killed people and they've lied about stuff that has killed people.
But it's not necessarily evidence of a grand scale, coercive Thing.
I'm unpersuaded of that.
And also, I've listened to a lot of people who are very critical.
I've interviewed, as you know, plenty of people who are critical of everything that's been happening.
I'm unpersuaded by some of those people.
I'm very unpersuaded by some of those people.
I find them to be, in my opinion, based on what I see, quite untrustworthy.
I see a lot of holes in their arguments.
And the main thing for me is I'm not seeing evidence with my own eyes from people who I know, large numbers of people who are vaccinated have had any issue with it.
So again, I'm balancing all this up as a complete non expert.
Yeah.
And on balance, I've arrived at that position that I described to you earlier.
And my point to you is, remember how we started this portion of the conversation, I'm not qualified to be opining on that in public.
Well, either way, no, no, either way, you are qualified to notice a coerced consensus and infer that something isn't right.
I am aware that there's coercion happening.
I am unpersuaded that that coercion is anything other than a government doing a bad job of trying to get people not to be ill.
Well, first of all, it's not a bad job, right?
Again, I'm going to take you back to ivermectin.
And I'm not asking you to pass judgment on this molecule.
But what I'm saying is, either This drug was the key to preventing many of the people who died from COVID from dying of COVID, or it's not, right?
So, to the extent that the government is doing a bad job, people die as a result in large numbers.
Oh sure, but that's not what I mean.
What I mean is the communication around it.
So, let's take the position that ivermectin doesn't work, right?
It therefore would make sense For a government that's imperfect, that is dealing with a pandemic, that is firefighting stuff, that's got a lot of stuff going on, to react in a place where they are allowed to act in an authoritarian way, right?
To go down that path and to make a decision like that, that looks one way, but actually it's an expression of them trying badly to deal with a problem and the PR stuff around it.
For example, in this country, we had vaccine mandates being considered for people who work in the NHS, right?
Do I think that is because there's some plot to whatever?
I don't even know what the allegation is.
I personally don't.
I think the government It's like a big oil tanker.
And their thing was, we've got to solve COVID, we've got a vaccine, we've got to say, and they went down this path.
And it took people like us to stand up and go, hold on, you can't coerce people to take this.
And they relented.
And by the way, COVID itself had got to a point where it was less dangerous.
So they felt less pressure.
And that's how that got eradicated.
I think a lot of a lot of the evil that happens in the world is people trying to do good, as they understand it.
Oh, no doubt.
No doubt.
But My experience with the ivermectin, which strangely I find to be the stickiest wicket, right?
Lab leak, I believe that we effectively made the case successfully that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence pointed to the lab and not to nature.
I'm persuaded by that argument.
Right, and I think most people are, so I wasn't expecting us to win that argument, but I believe that we did.
The vaccine argument, right?
Reasonable people can disagree over the net impact of those vaccines, but the idea that they are simply safe and effective, people are aware that that cannot be the case.
The fact that they are being told that they need booster after booster after booster challenges the idea that they were highly effective, right?
These were weak, narrow vaccines.
The fact that they haven't been updated for the change in variance is conspicuous, and the fact is there are a large number of adverse events now.
Large number of adverse events is not an argument against using a vaccine.
There has to be some sort of net analysis.
So reasonable people can disagree over that.
But nonetheless, people are awake to the fact that they were told an overly simple story about vaccines, which didn't stand up.
And people are aware of the fact that this virus appears to have been modified in a lab.
And when they finally understand what that means, that will be a very important fact.
People still believe Well, the early treatment thing, that was a false start.
This stuff doesn't work.
Ivermectin doesn't work.
But there is a room that I could take you to where I could show you that all of the pieces of evidence that cause people to believe that have a strange fact when you lift up the rock, right?
And I would encourage you to look.
There's a very nice short piece of video which I will link in the description to this one.
Um, in which have you seen, there's a, there's two videos.
There's one raw piece of video in which Tess Lori confronts Andrew Hill, uh, on a zoom call.
Have you seen that?
No.
Okay.
So you know who Andrew Hill is?
Probably don't.
You know who Tess Lori is?
Okay.
Tess Lori is a former She's a medical doctor and an analyst and she has done with the BIRD group the meta-analysis that says ivermectin is a highly effective treatment for COVID treatment and prophylactic.
There is another meta-analysis done by Andrew Hill which says actually it's not effective.
So the question is which of these meta-analyses is correct?
The fact is, Andrew Hill believed that ivermectin was a highly effective prophylactic and treatment, and in early versions of his paper, he said so.
He then reversed that conclusion, and on videotape, he acknowledges to Tess Lorre that the reason he did that is he was pressured by people who are not named as authors of his paper, right?
Unitaid.
Now, it is conspicuous that the world is persuaded that the evidence suggests maybe it doesn't work, and at best it's conflicted.
And then you look at the part that says it doesn't work, and you pick up the rock, and you find the admission that there was external pressure to reverse a conclusion, that the author themselves believed it to be effective, and then changed their conclusion in print, right?
It's not the only time we've seen that.
You've heard of the recent TOGETHER trial.
You've heard of this trial.
They will say it's the largest randomized controlled trial done to date on ivermectin and it says ivermectin doesn't work at all.
Well, that's not what it says.
That's what the paper implies, but it is not what the data inside the paper implies.
And it is also inconsistent with what the lead author on the paper has said in email, emails you can read yourself, where he says, I think the only reason that this showed up as not effective was that we didn't bring enough patients into the trial.
Had we brought more patients into the trial, it would have shown up as highly effective.
The author of the paper says that himself.
Now, we could go for hours on all of the flaws in this trial, but nonetheless, if every time you go to the evidence that might have persuaded a government bureaucrat that the stuff didn't work and therefore gotten them to get in the way and, you know, strong-arm your pharmacist, right?
If all of the things on which such a decision might have been predicated all have this weird underbelly, Right?
Where somebody is exerting pressure, where the data doesn't match the conclusion of the paper, where the conclusion of the paper is announced seven months before we're allowed to see the method section, right?
When that's happening again and again, it's like your bank has made 50 errors, right?
If those errors were random, if half the time they went in your favor, you might say, this is a fucked up bank, right?
If they all go in the bank's favor, it's not a fucked up bank, right?
It's a criminal bank.
Then this is where we come back to the point that I made earlier which is I'm not qualified to have this conversation with you because a person who's qualified to have this conversation with you knows what the other things that have happened along the way are.
They know about how ivermectin has been used in India and they know about how ivermectin has been used in South America and they can give you the data and the trials and they can say well this is what happened here, this is what happened here.
All I'm qualified to do is sit here and nod along as you list things about which you know and I don't.
No, no.
Look, I'm not telling you that you're qualified in this conversation to have an opinion.
For one thing, you don't know that I've represented these things accurately.
But that's my point.
Right.
And it's not that I don't trust you.
I just know that you have a particular view of it.
Of course.
But my point is, there's a room you could stand in, or we could say, look, What is the list of evidence that has caused people to imagine that this is not a useful direction and to go in another direction?
And we can say, let us look at each one in turn.
I'm not saying that you're ever going to be qualified to talk about Ivermectin, its mechanism of action, or even make a judgment about its net effect.
But you are qualified to say something isn't right here.
The informational environment is not what would be necessary.
I've said that many times.
Right.
That doesn't prove the Ivermectin works to me, right?
What I would say is absolutely my criticism of the response to COVID has been that we've been given inaccurate, oversimplified messaging.
Coercion has been lent on far more than explanation.
Right.
And I think those are all big problems in a free society, against which I've protested and stood up and stood in Parliament and talked to people who were there, because I genuinely think that was wrong and bad.
And it set a terrible precedent.
None of those things convinced me or unconvinced me or whatever the opposite of convinced me about the medical side of things.
Because like I said, I don't understand it.
And I actually think it's time that, you know, we were talking, we started this conversation about how People in my position have a role to address some of these big problems.
I actually don't think that's true.
And I think in many ways, I liked when Joe Rogan came out and he said, look, I'm going to stop talking to politicians because I don't want to be a player in this field.
And when it comes to this stuff that we're talking about, I don't want to be a player in that.
So if the government is coming and taking your rights away and saying, if you don't take the vaccine, we're going to fire you from your job.
I'm going to stand up and say that's wrong.
If the government is forcing you to wear a nappy on your face that doesn't work, right?
Yeah, you're going to stand up.
I'm going to stand up and say that's wrong.
If the government is forcing you to live in a quarantine facility when you have a disease that is akin to flu, I'm going to stand up and say that's wrong.
But all of this other stuff, it becomes a little bit above my pay grade is my point.
And that's why I think, you know, you talked earlier about sort of like, well, this is a problem you don't feel capable of solving, so you solve the ones that you can.
Actually, I do think that's a recipe for a sane person, in my opinion.
There are many, many things I could worry about in the world on which I have absolutely no impact, and on which my interference will probably make things worse rather than better.
And rather than focusing my energy on that, my energy is limited.
I'm going to focus on fighting for the things that I do understand, that I do think are important, and that I can make a difference on.
And that's what I've been doing.
So, this is not me rejecting what you're saying.
This is not me taking a position either way on ivermectin or vaccines or anything like that.
All I'm saying is, I think the time for people like me interfering in things like public health policy is at an end.
Well, and it should be at an end.
Maybe.
And that's what I'm saying.
I respect that.
And I also hear a lot of us got chewed up in this battle.
I don't think I had any choice about it.
Right?
I'm not saying anything about what you I know, but I'm just saying I hear, you know, This was the worst informational environment I've ever seen on any topic, probably by an order of magnitude.
Agreed.
Okay, this was crazy.
And the level of lunacy, look, we're going to get off this topic in a second, because I don't want to keep pushing you, right?
I respect you.
And I understand what you're saying.
And there is a logic to it.
And if I didn't think that basically this system, this failure, all things COVID revealed the level of degradation, the level of corruption of our system.
If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be so focused on it.
But I do think that this reveals the depth of the problem.
It reveals the fact that, you know, the pilot died, and we don't know it because the autopilot is still on, right?
That that level of problem is where we are.
And this, this story tells it, right?
But even just the simple fact That Anthony Fauci appears to be.
Vital in the chain that circumvented the US ban on gain of function research and offshored it to Wuhan, right?
He's central to that.
And he's central to the vaccine campaign, right?
When somebody has screwed up so badly, as to have been an important player in the causing of the catastrophe, why he's in any position to mandate anything about what remedy I use for myself and my family for a virus that in some sense, he unleashed on the world.
How the hell that makes any sense?
I don't know.
My feeling is, look, maybe ivermectin doesn't work.
Maybe the vaccines are better than I think.
But I'm entitled to make that choice because they have demonstrated they're incompetent.
Well, that is where you and I come into complete agreement.
My issue with all of this is personal liberty, right?
You have the right to take a drug that's going to kill you if that's what you decide to do, because you think it solves this or that problem.
I'm not saying by the way, ivermectin is going to kill you or it doesn't solve.
I'm just saying you have a right as an individual free citizen to make your own decision about your health.
The government can give you advice, the government can give you information, the government can give you even if it wants some kind of Bonus incentive.
If it wants to give you a free hamburger because you've got a vaccine, not that that makes much sense to me, but if that's what it wants to do, that's fine by me.
But when the government starts saying you're going to lose your job, when the government starts saying we're going to punish you, when the government starts saying we're going to put you in some kind of facility, when the government starts taking stuff away like your freedoms, Sure, I'm with you.
I'm with you.
You should be able to take ivermectin if you want.
You should be able to take or not take the vaccine if you want.
And that to me, you know, the you know, we talked earlier about compare everything to Nazis, but in 1945, some pretty smart people came together and when we shouldn't force people to take medical interventions they don't want to do for pretty fucking good reasons.
Oh, and this is this is exactly where we are.
We are now in the process of Reversing Nuremberg.
And to me, that's a big problem.
Huge.
And I'm right with you on that.
What I'm saying to you, however, is when it comes to this other stuff, yes, the experts have discredited themselves.
That does not make me an expert.
True.
And that's the problem I have with all of this conversation, which is fascinating to me and it's interesting talking to you about it.
All I'm saying to you is, I'm not going to continue to be a player in this game in any way because it's not an area in which I understand enough.
Wow.
And reading stuff online and watching experts, excerpts from videos or whatever, isn't going to make me an expert.
Right, but you do understand Nuremberg.
And that's where I stand with you.
You have made a very clear statement about Nuremberg, about personal liberty, and I just want to add one thing to this and explain A, why I'm interested in the couple of steps over here where you're correct, you probably don't have the background to do the analysis.
And maybe I do.
But the problem is, what I saw with the violations of Nuremberg was that there were two.
Right.
Or at least there's two levels.
One, there is the fact that there was no informed consent.
Right?
No informed consent.
That is not acceptable.
Right?
We hung people at Nuremberg over this.
Okay.
Now, the second thing, though, is that The mandates and the fact that people would not accept them caused people to be purged from role after role in society.
Our military was purged of people who wouldn't accept the vaccines.
Government was purged.
Universities were purged.
And that is alarming to me almost beyond anything else I've seen, because what it does is it means that the entire machine is now staffed with people who have been selected for their tendency not to notice a problem with these mandates, right?
That means when immoral orders are handed down, whatever they might be, the chances that somebody stands up and says, not on my watch, has gone way down all of a sudden, right?
Right.
So I believe we are being set up for a tragedy of history.
No, I don't expect it to goose step.
No, I don't expect it to involve gas chambers.
But I do expect it to be catastrophic.
And the chances that we headed off are lower, because the thing went across civilization and used this mechanism to take those who'd had a tendency to stand up and say no and get rid of them all at once.
Okay, that is that is to me, very frightening.
So I guess what I'm saying is, look, I don't like that the story that gets us to that conversation involves technical details, mechanisms of action, physiology, epidemiology, all of that stuff.
But nonetheless, it's one step over, right?
The fact that I'm not allowed to choose to take ivermectin and I am being required to take this vaccine in order to do all sorts of normal things, right?
That is the thing that sits right adjacent to the fact that, hey, When did we forget Nuremberg?
Right?
Why is Nuremberg not on everybody's lips at this moment?
Right?
So I guess, I guess what I'm saying is, yeah, you could, you can draw a line, you can say, I'm not going to talk about anything physiological or epidemiological, but it doesn't get you out of this discussion.
Because I'm not trying to get out of the discussion.
I'm trying to keep my involvement to areas in which I'm able to have a sensible conversation based on facts and information that I have.
So I'm Whatever the what's sits underneath that conversation about freedom and personal liberty, it's not for me to comment on.
All I'm saying is, if Brett Weinstein thinks either make them works or doesn't or this person or whatever, I don't really care about that.
What I care about is, is the government forcing you to do things that you should be free to make your own choice about?
Well, you should also care about Capture, in this case, pharma capture, which I think is the most allowed capture that exists.
And you should care about the complete collapse of academia and scientific research, because in order for me to make a decent decision with respect to whether to take this or that treatment, informed consent is entirely predicated on my ability to understand what is even under discussion.
And I don't understand what is even under discussion, because the system that is supposed to tell me is thoroughly corrupted, which incidentally, isn't the least bit new.
Yeah, right.
We knew this before COVID.
And in fact, every rational person, you know, above a certain level of education was pretty well aware that something was wrong with pharma's relationship with its regulators.
And you know, that that capture meant that you were likely to have things recommended to you that might not be in your medical interest.
Look, one of the things that I've said from very early on in my sort of public life in any way is I don't understand why we don't incentivize whistleblowing.
Yes, you do.
Well, sure.
Yes, I do.
But you know what I mean?
Yes.
I imagine that is a very popular public policy with the general public.
And I don't understand why people who come forward and expose genuine corruption, first of all, aren't given lifetime immunity from all sorts of negative consequences.
And number two, are not financially incentivized to come out and blow the whistle.
That to me seems like a very simple and elegant solution to many of the problems that we face as a society.
And I'd quite like to see that.
And this is where I come back to my point is I think on issues of culture and politics, I have something to say that's of value.
And that's what I'm going to focus on.
And I leave it up to people who are more scientifically trained to talk about that side of it.
That's why we're having this what people might perceive as a disagreement.
It's just me being unwilling to engage in things on which I'm not qualified to comment.
Oh, okay.
Well, look, I mean, let me just make this clear.
What I think you are qualified to comment on and, you know, look, you and I are going to partner, okay?
You're going to talk about societal stuff, and to the extent that there's biology or something, I'll take over.
But I would like to be able to point out to you, hey, the conduct of research, that's society, that's not biology, right?
And so if I can show you, hey, there is a pervasive pattern everywhere that the supposed evidence says X, you pick up the rock and the same thing is underneath it.
And the point is, look, you can interpret that.
No, I can't because I have to be confident that there are not counterfactuals to what you're saying.
And while I like and trust you, there are other people that I like and trust that believe there are counterfactuals.
Fair enough.
And that's the point at which I have to be an expert to make a judgment.
Actually, no.
And what I would hope in that case is that you would actually hear both sides of that case.
Which I have heard.
Well, you probably haven't.
If you're not aware of the Andrew Hill fiasco, right?
The man's caught red-handed.
Now, my point to you would be the video is incredibly remarkable.
Andrew Hill is not.
What he did is standard academic corruption.
Now, you probably wouldn't know, right?
But I think the point is, our system is actually, because of the way it depends on people selling their own work, selling the importance of it, To granting agencies to employers, right?
Because that's the nature of the thing.
It trains scientists to be salesmen.
It's a disaster, right?
Because once you're in that mindset, you can't do science.
Science requires you to try to prove your own ideas wrong, right?
It's a weird skill.
So anyway, the point is, there is a pervasive problem, you can see it, I would love for you to hear the full explanation from both sides.
And then I think you would be able to come to a conclusion, one that you're fully qualified to come to not on the underlying issue, but on what is taking place in science and what is the quality of the evidence.
I disagree with you again, because, and this is a fundamental problem of our time, which I think is why we're focusing on it as much as we are.
Most people who are in my position, We make all of our decisions about things like this that we don't understand based on how much we trust the people who are arguing for the different sides of it.
We like to pretend that people sit down and analyze all the evidence from both sides.
That's not what happens.
Of course.
Right?
So, essentially, I'm making a decision based on whether I trust Brett more than I trust Yuri or whether I trust Yuri more than I trust Brett and how persuasive they are at delivering their argument and how much I personally like them and whatever.
And that's the way that decision is going to get made either way.
Well, first of all, you say that as if it's shameful.
I would just point out that actually, you know, this is this is the Cartesian problem, right?
Descartes got spooked when he realized that almost everything he knew was predicated on authority and not on his own experience.
Exactly.
And that's where we are stuck, all of us, right?
There's too much to know.
And we, you know, how many of us have run the experiments that would validate even the most basic things we think we know, right?
So, we're stuck there.
But that means that to the extent that there's a corruption problem in the authority structure, it ought to be a major concern.
And that is what I'm getting at.
To the extent that you see, hey, there's a problem in the conduit that gets us here, that's going to do this again on the next topic, right?
And we're going to keep being, I don't know, locked down, injected, forced to make decisions about drugs we don't know anything about, right?
Who knows?
We can't afford this.
And so, you know, we Step back to the beginning of the conversation.
This is my point is that actually, we don't have a choice, but to try to get civilization moved over to something that doesn't do this to us routinely.
Right?
And it is not a simple job.
But I do think I think your role is surprisingly important because the number of people who remember how to think clearly, right, who are able to do that job well and to model it, frankly, for other people who are trying to understand what to think is pretty small, right?
Well, one of the things I'm keen to model going forward is not getting involved in conversations about things I don't understand.
Way too many of us, way too many of us have concluded that the fact that we have over 100,000 Twitter followers means that we know something, or means that we're experts.
I see this, the biggest shock to me has been the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, of course.
Because I suddenly see a lot of people with whom I've naturally, I'm naturally aligned temperamentally, commenting on things they have no idea about, with a level of confidence that is grotesque.
And that's an eye-opener for me.
And I know that I've behaved in that way in the past as well.
All right, let me ask you a question.
Have you noticed me do that?
No.
No, I haven't done it.
I'm not accusing you of it.
I know that.
What I was saying is I'm accusing myself of it.
Well, no.
Look, first of all, this is a difficult This is a difficult job to navigate, right?
It's very confusing.
It's a hall of mirrors, right?
I've been very careful about Ukraine.
I have instincts about it, but I know that I don't know, right?
And so, A, I would just point out that I'm sensitive to the idea that, yes, everybody seems to think that they have to formulate an opinion.
They have to do so quickly.
They have to, you know, I don't know, they're defending their brand or whatever it is that they're doing.
I don't think it's that, by the way.
If I can interject quickly, I think we've got to a position that troubles me tremendously, which is we now formulate our opinions about what's true based on who else has the opposite opinion.
So if Team Blue has an opinion, then Team Red has to have the exact and opposite opinion.
And given that I hate Team Blue as much as I hate Team Red, And I think they're both moronic and stupid.
And I think the whole tribal team thing is the problem.
Yep.
Is the problem.
Is the problem.
I am not going to engage in any of this tribal shit anymore, in any way, because I'm just I'm really, really, really not interested in perpetuating that dynamic.
Having said that, I come back to the Thomas Sowell point, which is, that's how human beings are.
We are tribal.
We are tribal.
Well, wait a second.
Wait a second.
The problem is, it's a fractal.
Okay.
We are tribal, right?
We might be tribal in a particular, you know, a literal room of a small number of people, we might divide into two factions, right?
That room of people, you know, has an interest in the larger structure that allows there to be a room surviving, and they might be united by that thing.
And so my point is, we are tribal, we are also trapped together on the same planet, and there ought to be things about which we are not tribal.
Oh, I agree.
The tribalism is bizarre.
So the experience you had, where you saw all sorts of people who you were aligned with over issues of wokeism and the hazards therein, who suddenly were mouthing off about Ukraine in ways that you knew weren't right, right, I saw that exact thing with COVID.
Right.
And so it was fascinating, in fact, that all sorts of people who had been extremely reasonable, on wokeism were, well, Heather and I began to call it medically woke, that they came to the consensus position.
And I would just say, look, I know you don't want to be talking about COVID.
Let's skip it.
But the point is COVID revealed something.
The whatever the thing is on the other side, conspiracy, emergent property, some mixture of those two things.
It drives us to formulate positions instantaneously.
And in part, this makes us vulnerable to manipulation, right?
To the extent that the idea was, oh, the good people have Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bio.
That's how you spot them, right?
The fact that that happened inside of, was it hours, right?
The spreading of this thing is very subtle, right?
It's a Ukrainian flag, they've been attacked.
I mean, who's for people being attacked, right?
But on the other hand, the point was, it was a Jersey, right?
And that's too much of this is about Jersey and not the actual content.
And A, I would expect and I would hope what you're really saying is that people should have a lot more disagreement, there should be a lot more a la carte, you know, I'm with you on this, I disagree with you on that.
And I don't hate you over our disagreements, right?
That's the natural, honorable adult way to do it.
But that's not the way it is, the way every topic comes down to the people on the other side of the bad ones.
Yeah.
Well, this isn't, as you say, an emergent property of social media and the environment that we operate in, which is one of the reasons why I'm actually, again, withdrawing from having these conversations on social media, because I don't actually think it's productive.
And you know how you talk about the Ukrainian flag in bio?
I don't.
It was not my experience, at least initially, that that, so for example, people probably think I'm quite pro-Ukraine.
I never put flags in my bio just because I don't put flags in my bio.
That's not what I do, right?
I just tell you what I think about this issue.
I'm not going to, I'm not, I don't want an identity to come with my opinions.
I just want to be able to think for myself.
But the fact that people experience people putting flags for Ukraine in their bio as a team signaling thing, Is a product of a system in which everyone thinks there's teams.
For me, I see a lot of people with Ukraine flags in their bio.
I just think some of them support Ukraine.
I don't think they're on team blue or team red or team this or team that.
And I think that's the problem.
Of social media is everyone is incentivized to think of everything as a team.
The people who take on an identity are incentivized to think of themselves as team that identity and the people who oppose it, which is the dynamic you're now seeing more and more, now have an identity of opposing this team that they've invented partly in their head.
Well, even worse than that, though, is that once it becomes a team question, rather than an analysis question, we have this very troubling propensity to then impose on the underlying logic a clarity that is not justified.
In other words, if somebody whose ultimate point is opposed to the one that I subscribe to says something, it is false.
Now, that's not a logical statement, right?
My point is, look, I know how analytical arguments go.
The fact is, some of your you may be arguing with me, and I may be right, but some of your points are accurate and have to be incorporated in my model.
Right.
That's the once you get into tribal conflict that goes out the window, it goes out the window.
And so, you know, I'm noticing that even the simple fact of the Ukrainian flag in bio preceding your reading of the tweet in general, just, you know, it's first.
And so the point is, How do I feel about this tweet before I've read the first word of it, right?
That's a bad habit.
That's a very bad habit and it gets us into...
You know, a place where, I don't know, the argument isn't even an argument.
It's just, it's, it's warfare.
Yeah.
It's, it's USA, USA.
It's that kind of, you know, jingoistic or it's equivalent.
Agreed.
And so, you know, one of, in my opinion, it's one of the biggest problems for us to solve as a society.
And that's one, I don't feel I'm qualified to solve, but certainly I'm qualified to pitch in on.
Right.
Because it's something that I observe quite a bit.
I talk to people who have certain views of it that I think are interesting.
And that's what I'm going to focus on because we do need this All that social media has done is brought out the instincts that are within us, but made them way more powerful, way more powerful.
And so that tribalism we're seeing, it's inherent in human beings, but we've now got a really, really powerful tool.
It's like the nuclear weapon of communication.
I'm going to quibble.
You say all that it's done.
No, you're correct.
It's not all that it's done.
It's not even all that it's done.
It has done what you're saying.
It has also armed those with resources who wish to shape our discussions.
And let's be honest, we have no idea how effective they have been, right?
But to the extent that somebody wishes to shape your view on a topic, They have some power tools.
It's almost like they have the ability to whisper in your ear because they can appear to be an organic belief system arriving in your replies, right?
And that is potent.
And you know, I struggle with the following problem.
I'm not good at keeping track of stuff, right?
I will read a paper, it's a very good paper, and then I won't be able to find it again.
And there's a whole list of things that we have known at one point that I know are important, that I, I know we are losing track of the fact that they ever even happened.
So, you know, just prior to Edward Snowden, for example, there was a He was, I believe, was a graduate student.
He may have been a postdoc at MIT who gave a talk at a tech conference in which he proved that I believe they were HP printers that could be hijacked.
These were network printers.
They could be hijacked by printing an infected document.
And what the document would do is it would cause the printer network architecture to take on a loophole that would allow anyone to use that, if they knew it was there, to use that as a portal to get into the network.
So if you had one of these on your network anywhere, and you printed a bad document, then your network was compromised.
There was nothing you could do about it.
What's more, you couldn't even update the firmware to get rid of it, right?
That printer had to go.
I don't know how many people even know that, right?
That's an important fact.
That's a huge vulnerability, but it just vanished, right?
So, there are all of these things.
Now, I also remember that the Navy was invested in software that allowed it to manage large numbers of sock puppet accounts, right?
This was in the early days of Twitter and Facebook.
The Navy, sock puppet accounts, social media.
Huh.
That's awfully interesting.
What effect is that having?
Now, I see all kinds of discussion downstream of what Elon Musk has been saying about all of the bots on Twitter.
I think I encounter a lot of sock puppets.
That is to say, there's a real person there.
So, it's not as simple as an automated thing that can't quite pass an ELISA.
I mean, it can't quite pass a Turing test.
But they're not real, right?
Somebody is shaping conversation, right?
And people are shaping conversation about me.
This is one of the things I see is that there are certain, if I see a particularly nasty barbed comment, right, very frequently, almost all the time, I go to the bio, I click on it.
It's like, oh, this person follows a huge number of people compared to the number, a tiny number of people follows them, right?
Mostly their feed is retweets of things.
Sometimes they're things that I agree with, right?
So, it's like it's designed to cause people to feel that this is actually somebody in our sphere who thinks I'm an idiot, right?
Anyway, I don't know how big a sock puppet problem we have, but I know that the fact that I'm almost the only person who's saying sock puppet.
Why is sock puppet not an important part of our discussion about how much we are or are not being manipulated?
Right?
It's been known for a very long time that in Russia, there are whole bot farms.
People get paid to manipulate Western discourse and Russian discourse, of course.
And so in my space, that's a very well known thing of which I'm aware.
And there's no question that, again, that's a problem that's going to have to be solved as well.
I come back to the printing press, which is, we are in a disruptive period in human history.
And we're going to have to have solutions to these problems.
And I think I'm going to focus on the ones that I think I can make an impact on, and you're going to focus on the ones that you think you can make an impact on.
And that's how I think we make progress.
But I'm very concerned, Brett, about the fact that over the last Five or six years, we've all become experts in our minds on things that we're not experts on.
And I do think that's a problem.
I know you and I may sort of disagree about where those delineation lines go, but I think we've got to remember, all of us, what we know and understand and also what we don't know and don't understand.
Because you see, the problem is like, it's the same with the mainstream media.
People say, oh, we need to rebuild trust in the mainstream.
And I'm like, no, no, no, we need a trustworthy mainstream media, and then we'll trust them again.
And it's the same with medical experts.
It's the same with all these things.
We've got to, we have the tools of transparency now that we didn't have 20 years ago.
And I believe all that's happened is we've now got a glance at how corrupt these systems have been since the beginning of time, probably.
They've just become more complex and therefore more corrupt in the complexity of them.
I don't think human beings have become more corrupt or there's become more coercion, there's become more of that.
I just think we see now what's been happening this entire time and we've got to upgrade our behavior to the level of transparency that we now enjoy.
That's what I think needs to happen.
I don't think people are more corrupt than they've been.
I agree with your argument to that extent.
I think we, however, have tools that amplify the power of corruptors.
So the system, I mean, the system isn't more corrupt than a corrupt dictatorship, right?
We've seen completely corrupt systems before.
But the system, the West, becoming a corrupt democracy simulation is a problem.
I don't think it's becoming that.
I think it's always been that.
Always?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think it's ever been democratic.
I don't think it was nearly this much of a fiction.
I believe we are dealing I mean, you know, we literally is Joe Biden president.
What do you mean?
We have a an apparently senile person.
Sure.
Who is ostensibly the go-to guy if the radar suggests that the Russians have launched, right?
He's also apparently the guy who decides whether or not we defend Taiwan if the Chinese invade, and he can't keep straight what our official policy is, right?
I don't think he's president.
Do you think that if we'd had the level of insight into what happens in the heart of government that we have now, that that level of insight 40, 50, 60, 80, 100, 150 years ago, do you think we would see more corruption or less corruption?
I think we would see much more effective corruption currently.
Now, some of it is very subtle, and it is not illegal.
In other words, one of the things that corruption does is it enlarges its own capacity to wield power.
So, you know, it's a little bit of a hard question to answer because the nature of corruption has changed as the amount of corruption has changed and it's, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, saying how much is a dollar worth today versus a hundred years ago.
It's like, well, which commodity hasn't changed its utility to us such that we are able to even answer the question?
Right, right.
I'm unpersuaded that that you would see, in fact, I'm quite persuaded that you would see more corruption back then.
Well, wait a second.
Let's take someplace that I do know something about.
Once upon a time in science, there wasn't really any point in advancing garbagey ideas.
Oh, sure.
I'm talking about politics.
Well, but politics and the academy are not disconnected.
And so all I'm saying is that if we if we pressure test your idea someplace that we actually can figure out whether you're right or wrong, I'm not saying, you know, maybe that it's less corrupt than it was over in other areas, and it's more corrupt than it was in academia.
And so we could get it wrong.
But in academia, what we have is a system of incentives that has changed and has, you know, caused The, you know, look in the era of gentlemen science, and I'm not arguing that that was the right way to do science, right?
democratizing science is a great thing, right?
But when you had people who were financially secure doing science, because they loved it, there they were shooting for being right in the long term, right?
They weren't shooting for getting employed in a job market where there were 10 PhDs minted for every professorship.
So, I think in academia, I can tell you that corruption is way, way worse than it was.
I think I can also tell you that with respect to pharma in particular, the level of corruption is jaw-dropping, right?
And you know, I'm not telling you that you're in a position to know that, but I am telling you that there are people who have studied this question carefully.
And part of what I think threw us off in COVID was that None of the architecture that got booted up to persuade the government what to do was new.
They were very good at it.
They've been practicing for decades.
So anyway, I see new, more aggressive and certainly more effective mechanisms of corruption.
And I also see that the cost of corruption is that much greater because you know, a screw up can release a virus on the world that Spreads across it in weeks.
Sure, but I was talking about politics.
So, for example, just give you one example.
Do you think that 60 or 70 years ago in the United States, the links between organized crime and the people who made decisions about the direction of the country was tighter or looser than it is now?
Man, I'm upset at myself because Because I understand the rule you're trying to lay down for yourself, but is pharma organized crime or not?
Does it count?
Well, not to me.
What I mean by organized crime is mobsters.
Why?
Forget about that question.
Let's just focus on the mobsters.
Is the role of mobsters greater or less?
Much less?
Right.
So, my point is, there have been forms of corruptions that have largely gone extinct.
There are other forms of corruption that have become more pronounced because the problems of society have changed, right?
The problems that society is facing have changed and therefore we focus on this, we have less focus on that.
My point is, I am unpersuaded by the argument that things on a broad scale have got massively worse.
I think they're different and I think we have much more of an insight into how bad they've always been.
That's my argument.
Certainly in politics.
Well, I mean, I see something in your style of argument that I like.
I think it's useful, right?
Basically, you take somebody who has a perspective like me, and you say, Suppose I account for what you see with this much less aggressive version of the same observation.
Can you justify any of the delta between our two positions?
And I agree, it's difficult, right?
And it is a good pressure test.
I like it.
My instinct is very much The power of anything has changed because we're more powerful as human beings.
I get it.
Well, no, there's one other aspect to it, which I'm pretty convinced marshals in my direction here, which is There is always a competition between those.
Morality is effectively the willingness to self-limit, to not take advantage of opportunities that you have for some reason, for some higher value.
Okay?
If we take people who are moral, they are inherently more constrained.
Okay, if we take people who are amoral, they have all the tools at their disposal, every single tool that the morally constrained have plus whatever tools the morally constrained won't use.
And so my point is the greater the power of our tools, the greater the asymmetry between the moral folks who are self constrained and those who will use every tool at their disposal to accomplish their objective.
I quibble with part of that, which is it also increases the power of people who are moral.
But my point is, yes, it increases them disproportionately, perhaps, perhaps on some things, maybe.
All I'm saying is, I think we, you and I were talking about this before we started doing it on camera, which is the sort of perpetual philosophical argument between conservatives and progressives.
And, and I was telling you that somebody introduced me to Hayek's, why I'm not a conservative.
And his point was essentially, if conservatives want no change and progressive wants as much change as possible, the thing neither of them is really addressing is the direction of travel, particularly conservatives.
They struggle because they're trying to stop change or slow change, but the direction of change is dictated by the progressives.
But in my opinion, most of the change is directed by technological and scientific progress that we see that is not party political in that sense.
So yes, the tools are becoming more powerful.
It increases the power of the bad people.
It also increases the power of the good people.
And if you look at the broader trend, I don't think we're in a worse place now than we were 100 years ago in the 1920s.
We are done.
We are simultaneously in a better and worse place.
That's my argument.
We are in a more dangerous place.
That's my argument.
But if we were to right the ship at the moment, you know, we have what we need to make a pretty good, stable planet.
And that's my argument.
My argument is that we have the tools to make things a lot better.
We have the tools to make things a lot worse.
And all of us has a role to play in using the tools that make our lives better to improve it.
And attempting to negate some of the negative consequences.
And all of us are going to do that in line with our own values, our own expertise, our own morality.
But I am not persuaded that we're going to hell in a handbasket.
Well, I mean, let me just defend my position.
My position is, any of us can see that the Good governance is not a dominant force, that we have reckless governance, and extremely dangerous tools whose capacity to do harm is growing.
And so my real point is, The technology is going to do us in because we are not paying attention to the fact that we have to find, let's put it this way, probably if we had great governance, we would still be doing an okay, but not wonderful job of managing all the new hazards we're creating.
It's not simple, right?
Even really smart, uncorrupt people are going to have trouble figuring out where to draw these lines.
In the absence of that uncorrupted structure managing these things, it's a ticking time bomb, right?
And so my only point really is, we got to get to the 18th century tools aren't up to this challenge, they're not gonna be able to do it, right?
The values that were discovered and inscribed in our founding documents, those things I believe were mostly right and very insightful, but the mechanisms are too feeble.
And so we got to solve that problem.
And I think that means recognizing that problem.
And that's dicey, right?
Because, you know, it's one of the things that we have a hard time discussing because of either the inherent flaws of social media, or the sock puppeting of us all into false beliefs, or who knows.
But I do think It's, it's urgent because, because the tech that will do us in is growing.
And so like that, one more thing on your point about Hayek, which I didn't know that Hayek had made that argument, it comes close to actually the model that I use.
Which is why I call myself a progressive.
I think we have to change.
Radical change is the only thing that can save us.
But it's extremely dangerous, right?
I'm not enthusiastic about radical change.
I just don't think we have a choice.
That said, I often say that I am a progressive who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative.
And one of the things that I find missing from our political landscape
is that people don't understand conservatives often don't understand that they have a vital role to play preventing progressives from excess but that basically the question is well how much you know which problems are worth solving which ones are we likely to make worse you know it's a question of how much leash to give us for progressivism the conservatives have that role and it's important and you're right it's not a directional role right but that
Liberals do not seem to understand that it's not just simply good to be liberal, right?
That if you're headed somewhere and you really believe that it's a place to be, then when you get there, you gotta quit, right?
No, but that's the inevitable problem with progressives is because they're utopians by the very nature of their worldview, they're incapable of understanding that there's a point where you need to stop.
Because until you reach utopia, why would you stop, right?
We are going to this beautiful place in the future.
Why would you stop 95% of the way there?
That's the problem.
That's why they need constraining by other people.
And you've also got to remember, a lot of this conversation is time-specific, it's geography-specific.
This is why I don't understand anyone who has a fixed ideological position.
It's like saying, right, you're driving a car, what's better?
Do you speed up or slow down?
Well, you've got to know what else is going on, right?
So, you've got to know what's happening in society.
What are the technological changes that are driving what's happening?
And how do you respond to those?
So, right now, for example, sitting here in the West, I feel like the pace of change is getting out of hand.
And we're getting to a point where we're introducing technologies and modes of behavior and cultural innovations to society that are coming too quickly.
And that far too many of them are untested as to their benefits.
And many of them make me wary as to the downsides, right?
But if I'm sitting in Russia right now, I am a massive progressive.
I think that society needs a lot of change.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
So this is why these fixed ideological positions, in my opinion, are just stupid, frankly, because what you're saying is for the entirety of the circumstances of my life, I'm going to have the, I need to slow down.
I need to speed up position.
When you're driving on a road, you need to be able to flex with what's happening around.
And that's why I think, in many ways, the cultural war issues that we've got going on, they're kind of stupid in a way, because we're not engaging with the real issues that we need to engage with.
And people are too tribal to see the merits and arguments of the other side.
For example, in this country, we've got a massive housing crisis, which prevents young people from buying a house.
And you've got conservatives running around going, oh, people aren't having enough kids, there's no family values.
Well, what did you think was going to happen when you prevented them from having a place to live?
Right?
That's on you.
It's not on progressives.
It's not progressive capture of institutions that have made young people into all of this stuff.
Or people complain on the conservative side, complain about hookup culture.
Or you think that just what just progressives got a hold of universities and now kids are having sex all the time in this transactional way.
No, that's a product of technological revolution in the 60s and technological revolution of the internet and technological revolution of the dating market, right?
Are all those things caused by progressives?
No, they're technological.
So you have to have a new form of responding to these new challenges instead of going, let's go back to the 1950s, right?
But people don't want to play that game because it's much more comfortable playing the I am team blue, I am team red game.
And it does my head and it's incredibly frustrating because instead of looking for solutions, we're now looking for team allegiance, which probably we always have done anyway, right?
So that's the place I'm coming at all this from.
What are the solutions?
There are certain things I can advocate for that I think will solve some of the problems we're facing.
There's certain influence I can bring to bear on some of the people who make those decisions.
There's a certain role in shaping the conversation that I can play on the issues that I understand well.
That's what I'm going to do.
Right.
And you've got a role in doing that on other areas.
And that's what you're going to do.
And there are other people who will disagree with us, who have a role in doing that and holding us to account.
And that's the beautiful dance of the free debate that we have, which we don't have in the rest of the world.
And this is why I wrote my book called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, because the West is the only place we're actually able to do that properly.
Right?
I know there are problems, but we are still able to have open conversations about stuff, for now, you might argue, about the things that matter.
In most other places, that's not what's happening, right?
In Russia right now, every single independent media outlet is shut down.
Completely.
Completely shut down.
Not censored, not prevented from being on this platform.
Shut down.
Destroyed.
People fired.
People have to flee the country.
So, yes, we've got problems in the West, but I think what we've got to do is have a positive vision of engaging with these problems.
And part of that is, I think, people engaging with the problems that they are qualified to engage with.
That's why you and I are having this discussion.
Well, okay.
I agree with most of what you said.
I certainly agree with this issue about fixed political positions.
It's mind-numbing.
You know, I sometimes say that conservatives are defending the gains of past liberals, right?
I mean, that's what they do.
So, yeah, fixed position is, you know, dead on arrival.
The question of limiting yourself to that which you're qualified to discuss is a problem.
Let me just give you the following.
Again, I'm going to resort to the scientific place because I understand it best.
You might think, somebody might tell you, if you want to make advancements in the field, the first thing to do is to learn what the field understands about everything.
And then when you've got that under your belt, you're qualified to make progress.
It's not how it works.
It's really not how it works.
And in fact, you'd be surprised at how often in the history of science, Breakthroughs actually come from outside of a field.
And there's a reason for that.
A field can talk itself into a cul-de-sac, and you have to be outside of it in order to see what they're doing wrong, right?
And so those aren't the experts in the field.
Those are people who can simply spot bad thinking.
So I guess the point is, I first want to disabuse you a little bit of the idea of the qualified.
Right.
Lots of people who are nominally qualified are not qualified.
And part of what makes them unqualified can be corruption.
Equally likely, they may be unqualified because they studied the right subject, but they don't have the right toolkit for thinking about it.
In other words, if you're a biologist, and you think like a physicist, You're done.
Because the fact is complex systems behave in a way that is not analogous.
And so, you know, being able to think in that way is, is vital.
I also think that there's an interface between, you know, who's qualified to talk about Well, is it people who study the host?
Is it people who study viruses generally?
Is it people who study epidemiological patterns?
Is it people who study evolution?
Is it people who, you know, the point is, there are a lot of places to stand.
And what you really want isn't, I mean, the central point, I agree with all of you, all of what you just said, the only point I'm making is, whatever the expertise of those people, and whether they're qualified to talk about COVID, the one person who's definitely not qualified to talk about COVID is a guy who studied politics and economics and then did stand up comedy.
That's all I'm saying to you.
Well, You know, part of what happened, I mean, COVID is a political problem.
And the political dimension of it, I've been talking about and will continue to talk about as long as it's relevant.
Right, right.
Look, ultimately, I guess I would I would introduce the idea this way.
This is not the place to be talking about Science, this is not the place to sort out the science.
That's my point.
Well, but the problem is the place to do it is in the universities and they're done, right?
The universities can't figure out whether you're male or female.
I agree.
Okay, so the point is the world of heterodox podcasts and everything that surrounds it is the equivalent of the The hills, we are the rebels in the hills who have fled the universities, or in my case, been driven out by a crazed mob.
And we have gone somewhere else.
And we are having those conversations.
And we are having those conversations much more broadly, because the narrow things that we would ordinarily be talking about, are actually connected to everything else.
So Believe me, I don't want you talking about stuff you're really not qualified to talk about, but I also know that there is a broader conversation in which all of the people who can still remember how to think are talking about their quadrant and we reach into each other's quadrants.
We have to be very careful as we reach into an area that we don't know something about.
Maybe our role there is to ask questions.
Here's what I don't understand.
You're saying this, but it doesn't add up to me.
What am I missing?
So anyway, I, um, There aren't very many people out here to do this.
Well, I, you know, you're a very good guy.
You've got a very good mind.
You have broad expertise.
It doesn't extend to a lot of other stuff, but you know, in the broader conversation, do I want you drawing hard and fast lines about where you're allowed to, you know, ask a question or voice an opinion?
No, because none of this should be sensitive to that.
The fact is, unfortunately, This mechanism, hashing stuff out, it's how we come to think.
It's us collectively thinking.
I agree.
I agree.
I agree completely.
And all I'm saying is, I think it would be better if you had this conversation with another scientist.
With whom you could have this conversation in the way that you're no longer able to do in a university, and that's the way that it was done.
I think that's really important.
The reason I'm saying all of this and the reason I'm being so resistant to what you're saying to some extent is, you remember how you talked about modeling certain behavior?
This is what I am modeling, at least I'm trying to.
You know how you talk about crossing over from your field of expertise to others and whatever?
I think we do too much of that now.
That's my opinion, but people may disagree.
But I see I saw a little bit with COVID.
I saw some people going off the deep end, in my opinion, on it.
People who were not qualified, suddenly they've got an opinion about whether this particular drug works or whether this particular format or whatever.
I see it now with Ukraine.
I'm sure I'll see it with lots of other things.
The The dopamine hit from the likes on the Twitters and the Facebooks and whatever is so powerful that many, many people are now addicted to having the hot take that their tribe expects them or wants them to have phrased in the right way with the right amount of sarcasm and humor and destruction with facts and logic and whatever of the other team that They are now moving into that field.
And I think that's bad.
I think it's dangerous.
And I am trying to model not doing that.
That's what I'm trying to do here.
And I'm trying to say to people, yes, you've got 50,000 Twitter followers.
Yes, you've got 100,000.
It does not mean that you know what we're talking about.
And I say that first and foremost about myself, right?
I actually think if more of us model that we'd have a healthier online conversation.
Well, I think the irony is, we were doing it, right?
IDW was a prototype of exactly that.
And I have become fond of the idea that IDW was effectively a protocol.
I do think it was a prototype.
I do think it is vital.
And that effectively, we need it back because, um, Well, it was understood to be a group of people, and because it was understood to be a group of people, when that group of people could not have a civil conversation, It wasn't a thing.
And it needs to be a thing, whatever IDW is, we need to be able to have difficult conversations across any of these lines, and not make it personal.
And so anyway, I hope it returns.
I don't see another way forward.
Because again, I think that, you know, we are the rebels in the hills, and the rebels in the hills are going to have to descend from the hills and impose some kind of reasonable standard on how we govern ourselves, because the people who are governing us now are incapable of doing it well, right?
We're going to have to point the way.
And In any case, yeah, we I guess, you know, I think what we've established here is that there is That we have not ourselves all figured out exactly.
We have not been explicit with ourselves about where we will go, where we won't go, why we will, you know, transgress this line and not that line.
And we probably should, right?
We should, you know, I have a favorite line from, did you ever watch The Wire?
Oh, I'm a massive fan of The Wire.
Massive fan of The Wire.
Okay.
Omar Little at some point.
Has been, uh... Oh, Mont Devon Little.
Yeah, he's been arrested for a murder he did not commit, and he is attempting to persuade, um... Bunk.
Yeah, he's attempting to persuade Bunk that he wouldn't have committed this murder, despite the fact that he freely admits that he's committed many, and he says, a man's got to have a code.
Yeah.
He says, you know, I didn't do this because it violates my code.
That's what his point is, and so I think the thing is, we all do need to have a code, and What's more, we need to know what it is so that we know when we're in danger of violating it.
Yeah, and check if I'm wrong about this, but my prediction for this conversation when you put it out is a lot of people will be extremely dissatisfied with it because we all want a hot take now.
We all want certainty, and we all want a hot take, and we all want a guy who's got an opinion and it matches what we already believe.
And we've become very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
We probably always were, to be fair.
And so that's, I think, a really important thing going forward for me in terms of my code is not having false certainty about things about which I'm not actually certain because it's incentivized by the mechanisms that we're using to put this conversation out.
Well, this is a perfect note to end on because I'm going to predict the exact opposite.
And here's why.
In my world, as I travel around it, I find that there is a bizarre, but I think it's delightful, a hunger for disagreement amongst people who clearly like each other, right?
That when people hear others disagree, and it doesn't make them angry, and they actually work to understand what is being said rather than to, you know, Take a cheap shot that is funny or whatever.
They gravitate to it.
And because I think it's so rare, right?
This tribal tendency is so strong that people just fall into it, even people who in principle know better.
And so anyway, my guess is going to be That people will really appreciate the fact that you and I didn't agree and didn't reach agreement exactly, but clearly hurt each other.
And now we've muddled the experiment, of course, by putting our predictions on the line.
I'm wondering if there's a way we could rescue it by editing that off.
Well, I will say, To those of you who are watching, if you are going to make a comment, it is certainly not scientific at this point, the experiment is unblinded, but if you can try to remember what you thought about the conversation before we discussed what you might think about the conversation, and if there is a delta between those two, if your mind has been changed by something we have said in this very tail end, then say so, right?
Yeah, I liked the conversation until, or I didn't like it until.
Let us know.
All right.
Konstantin Kissin, it has been an absolute pleasure.
I am so thrilled to be sitting with you in person.
I hope it isn't long before we do this again on one side of the pond or the other.
I look forward to it, my friend.
All right.
Your book?
An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, out on July 14th.
Out on July 14th.
Very much looking forward to that.
People can find you on Twitter.
At Konstantin Kissin.
And Trigonometry, of course, on YouTube.
And Trigonometry, of course.
Advertising subtly for you the whole time.
All right, wonderful.
Well, thanks so much.
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