The Dangers Of AI & Neil deGrasse Tyson Covid Argument w/ Bret Weinstein | PBD Podcast | Ep. 229
PBD Podcast Episode 229. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Bret Weinstein and Adam Sosnick. Bret Samuel Weinstein is an American podcaster, author, and former professor of evolutionary biology.
0:00 - Start
2:13 - Bret Weinstein opens up About Being accused of Racism
11:44 - Why Joe Rogan Is not running for president
21:03 - Bret Weinstein Reveals his BEEF with Conservatives
48:57 - Bret Weinstein debates Patrick Bet-David on America being divided
1:02:11 - Is Gen Z controlling the world?
1:09:23 - The dangers of AI
1:18:18 - Are guns good or bad for society?
1:30:02 - Bret Weinstein reacts to Neil deGrasse Tyson's covid argument
1:55:13 - Reaction to New York Times' bizarre comment about short people
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
You want to usher on some like a chase sweet victory?
I know this life meant for me.
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet taved?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value that hated.
I didn't run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
So we got a special podcast here for you today with an evolutionary biology professor of evolutionary biology.
We can even say former professor of evolutionary biology.
He's got a podcast called Dark Horse Podcast.
Joe and I were talking because of a clip you guys did on a podcast together, and I put it on Twitter, and it got a lot of feedback.
And I said, man, I love that clip to Natuvik.
He said, you should have him on.
I said, send me his number.
And then Rob's like, he's scheduled to come on us.
You got to be kidding me.
How weird is this, right?
But it's great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
I'm glad to be here.
Yes, you're making a lot of friends the last two years.
You're making a lot of new allies.
You're pissing off, some would say, the institution, some of the people that are telling people what to do without wanting to hear the other side of the argument, but you are definitely making a lot of friends.
I am losing friends and making more and better friends.
Are there any friends you've lost without naming them that you're surprised you would have ever lost that friend?
Well, I've now learned this lesson a couple of times.
Every time one confronts one of these really difficult puzzles in which there's a lot at stake, you lose people that surprise you and then people emerge in your life that you didn't expect.
And so, you know, in the evergreen situation, I don't know how familiar your audience will be with that.
I think it's good they know about it.
I know about it.
I think it'd be good if you share with them.
All right, I'll give them the very brief version.
And if they want a better exploration, they can look at Mike Nana's three-part documentary on it.
It really covers it very well.
Or Benjamin Boyce's channel also does.
But my wife and I were professors at Evergreen for 15 years.
And Heather was literally the college's most popular professor.
I wasn't terribly far behind.
We had a really dedicated group of students who went back and forth between our programs.
And because of the way Evergreen worked, we knew our students extremely well.
We could go into the field with them for weeks at a time.
It was a great place.
And on May 23rd, 2017, 50 students that I had never met before streamed into the building where I was teaching, chanting my name, demanding that I be fired or resign.
And their accusation was that I was a racist, an idea that they had actually picked up from some faculty members who didn't like me very much because I stood in the way of their attempt to change the college, which would have been a threat to the college if it had happened.
And I said so in faculty meetings.
And then when that became impossible, I said so over email.
In any case, that protest became violent.
It descended into violence over the course of a couple days.
And the protesters made the mistake of filming everything they did and then uploading it.
I think they uploaded it to Facebook, but it was later put on YouTube by somebody who wanted the world to see it.
And when the world did see these students confronting me, something was clearly off.
So the incident did not work out the way they had hoped that it would.
And that catapulted me into the public eye.
We requested, demanded, and then initiated the process of suing the college because they had obviously created an unsafe working environment.
Students, the president of the college, who in some ways had triggered this whole episode, ordered the police who were subordinate to him to stay out of the conflict between students and us.
And the students created a patrol.
They wandered the campus with baseball bats.
They actually battered another student.
They were looking for me, stopping traffic, searching cars, this sort of thing.
To put things in perspective, this was 2017.
2017.
Right.
Yeah.
Were these students within the school or they just came out of the woodworks to show up at the school?
These were very definitely students at the school.
And so, you know, this was, of course, downstream of a diversity, equity, and inclusion movement that had become quite powerful.
And the school was a very liberal place, and so it's not surprising that we would have seen such a movement.
And the problem is that the policy changes at the college that that movement wanted to initiate would have destroyed the place.
They were going to be lethal to its functioning.
And it was my obligation as a faculty member to point that out.
To be fair, Brett, politically, are you a pro-Trump supporter, MAGA guy?
Because if they're doing that to you, you must be a big supporter of Trump.
Well, they might think so.
I describe myself as a reluctant radical.
And the reason I say reluctant radical is that I believe, after many years of studying the question, that our civilization can't really continue this way.
That what we've done has been brilliant.
There's, of course, been lots of carnage.
But our system is not sustainable in the way it currently exists.
And so it has to be retooled for humanity to continue to prosper.
But so that's the part that makes me a radical is that I believe only radical change can save us.
But I also know that if you take a system that functions, and our system does function, and you alter it, you are very likely to do harm.
And you are very likely in your solution making to bring about unintended consequences which can be disastrous.
So I am a progressive, but I am one with trepidations about change.
And anyway, no, I'm not a Trump supporter.
I'm also not a Biden supporter, wasn't a Clinton supporter.
I believe we need to find a new direction.
Were you like a Bernie Sanders supporter at some point?
I was.
I am no longer.
I think that Bernie did represent an actual challenge to the power structure that has us locked into this bad trajectory.
But I think he's lost his way.
That said, even when I was a supporter of his, I wasn't overly convinced that he understood what direction we needed to go, but he did represent the possibility of breaking out of the death spiral that I see our duopoly as having affected on us.
Speaking of duopoly, would you say over the last five years since 2017, you've had to do more mental wrestling with who you identify with more than ever in your life, politically speaking?
No, because 2017 is not where these questions arrived on my desk at first.
I've been thinking about the question of how civilization functions as an evolutionary biologist.
I was a member of the Game B movement, which was a small group of people who were interested in complex systems and interested in figuring out what the next phase of civilization should look like.
So I had done a lot of thinking about it.
And frankly, I think people make a mistake.
they tend to affiliate with people and adopt their ideology.
And my sense is that ideology is a problem, especially if you pick it up because of the people who hold it.
So my sense is even if there was nobody else on earth who agreed with me that we have to change the way civilization functions, right, I would still be a progressive by the technical definition because I still believe we have to alter things if we're to do well.
And my job is to convince people that that's true if I'm right.
Or if I'm not right, I have to allow them to convince me that I've got it wrong and I will change my position.
So you said something, you said that we do need to make some radical changes, but if we do make it too radical, we may have some side effects or repercussions for making the changes as well.
So when we had Neil deGrasse Tyson here, I asked him about how he would change the educational system.
There's a few topics I want to go through with you.
Chad GBT, just an article came out saying they just passed the bar exam.
I want to get your feedback on that one right there.
A poll that I did on Twitter, which you and I talked about the poll, hey, which one of these is going to be the biggest negative consequence in U.S. that we're experiencing right now?
We'll talk about that.
And then, of course, we'll talk vaccine and a few other things.
But isolating this specific concern here.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, I said, how would you change the educational system to improve it?
I know on the election side, you came out with a program, Unity, something you called Unity in 2020, where the president would have a person from each side to make sure, almost like a vice president model that you have from both sides, that you can get some counsel from each one and they can hash it out in debate.
One, how would you improve the educational system yourself?
And two, election that we have, presidency that we have to be a little bit more united.
Sure.
So let me just explain the Unity 2020 structure so people understand why I bothered.
Unity 2020 was an attempt to use a game theoretic perspective to solve the problem of the duopoly.
So we can't escape the problem of the duopoly because anytime you try to escape it, you tend to empower the force on the other side, right?
In other words, if you tend towards progressivism and you put forward something that's actually progressive, you'll divide the Democrats and you will give power to the Republicans.
So the problem of the lesser evil is the thing that keeps us locked in.
And Unity 2020 proposed a structure in which a liberal and a conservative would team up and would co-president.
And this is all possible within the confines put out by the Constitution.
The president and vice president could flip a coin to see who ran at the top of the ticket, and then they could agree to switch who was at the top of the ticket after four years when they ran for re-election.
And in the meantime, they could govern by consensus.
In other words, the two of them would sit down for each policy decision, and they would hash out what the right direction to go would be for the country.
And only in the case where they couldn't reach agreement would the person who was in the top office have to make that decision, or in the case where there wasn't time for them to confer.
So the point is that formally solves the problem of the lesser evil because it doesn't award either side extra power.
And my contention is that really, if you had, I mean, imagine, look at who's currently in the presidency and who the last president was and go backwards through history.
It's been quite a while since we've had somebody who was really effective in that office.
And my point is we would be far better off if we had people who were courageous, capable, and patriotic.
If you offer me somebody who meets those three criteria, I don't actually care which side of the second one.
Courageous, capable, patriot.
Those are the three.
And if you take two of those people, one from each side, I'm pretty comfortable that two people who come from different sides of the aisle and have those three characteristics, who sit down and have a conversation about what the right direction for the country would be, will arrive at something that I can respect.
They might be wrong.
That will happen.
This is a difficult puzzle to solve, but I know it won't be born of corruption or ineptitude or – How do you avoid that, though?
I mean, it's very to say, you know, if we have somebody that's courageous, okay, people would vouch for that.
Somebody who's capable, fantastic.
Somebody who is patriotic, phenomenal.
How do you manage that?
Because the system can't filter those three things out.
An actor can become a president based on our current system that we have.
Well, let's take our mutual friend, Joe Rogan, for example.
And I don't mean to put him on the spot here, but can we agree that he meets my three criteria?
No question about it.
No question.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's say that Joe Rogan is the progressive in a unity kind of team.
Okay, what does Joe do?
Does Joe know anything about how to architect a civilization?
No.
Not his skill set.
No, but what would he do?
Bring in the best of the best.
There you go.
How hard is that?
No, no, I'm not saying with you that I'm not telling you I don't want a courageous, capable, patriotic person.
What I'm saying is, why isn't the system attracting those types of people to become president?
And now, somebody from the right may say, you're saying Trump isn't courageous?
He is.
He's not capable.
He's built businesses.
He's not patriotic.
He loves America, right?
Somebody may say, you know, Bill Clinton may fit that quality or John F. Kennedy may fit that quality.
And I don't know who your last capable president would have been in your eyes.
Do you have somebody that you think was the last capable one?
Well, let's put it this way.
I don't want anything to rest on whether or not my evaluation of somebody's characteristics is accurate.
I could be fooled by somebody.
But yes, I think there are people.
I mean, you know, again, Joe Rogan meets those criteria easily.
I would say Tulsi Gabbard seems to meet those criteria.
Looks to me like Rand Paul meets those criteria.
So there are lots of people.
Your question about why such people don't tend to end up, and I wouldn't say it's that they don't tend to end up attracted to the idea of governing.
They don't tend to survive.
That's my question.
Not attracted because Tulsi did, Rand did.
Joe doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
At least that's my understanding from.
He's too smart.
Yeah, he's too smart.
But that's also the thing.
A lot of times, you know, I had Catherine Gill, I don't know if you know who she is, or Michael Porter, they wrote a book called The Industry of Politics.
So I had them on four years ago.
I don't know the exact timeline.
I had them on a few years ago.
And both of them lean left, but they had this idea about how to elect a president in a completely different way.
It's a model that's more on Andrew Yang, the direction he's going with forward party, and he's also kind of pushing a third party person to get elected.
But a Tulsi Gabbard, when she was on the left and she said anything about Hillary Clinton, boom, they ousted her.
Now she's out as an independent to win.
Or Rand Paul.
Rand has very good ideas.
A lot of people from the right like Rand Paul.
He's got audacity.
He's got courage.
He went up against Fauci.
He's not afraid.
He has values.
He's got principles.
He stands up for him.
He seems reasonable.
He seems smart, intellectual.
But why the current system doesn't allow those types of talent to make it to the top?
Well, it's worse than that.
Our current system ensures that if you make it to the final round of the competition, that you are excellent at corruption.
And that's really the problem is that you have an evolutionary dynamic in which we are constantly forcing the people who will ultimately have that kind of power to demonstrate that they are exceptionally good at figuring out on which side their bread is buttered.
And then when they get to the top office, we're shocked that the corruption continues.
And so another aspect of the unity proposal was that it effectively took courageous, capable patriots and sped them past the system that forces people to become excellent at corruption.
Now, somebody who had been sped past that corrupting steeplechase would be in a position to purge the system below them of corruption.
If you try to do this from the ground up, the corruption will win.
If you did this from the top down, I'm not in general a fan of top-down solutions, but in this case, I don't believe there's another way you could do it.
If this hypothesis or experiment actually came to life, this unity party, this ticket, correct me if I'm wrong, speaking of Andrew Yang, I believe your proposal was Andrew Yang on the left and General Bill McRaven on the right, I want to say in 2020.
That was the initial formulation of it.
So if that came to be, it's a two-part question.
How do you think that governance would look today, 2023?
And you call yourself a progressive, almost even a radical, your words.
That to me sounds as moderate as it gets, meaning someone on the center left, someone on the center right come together.
I guess maybe it's not moderate as you're shaking your head.
I guess how would they be faring today if that ticket did come to life?
And what would the moderate versus radical approach be?
That's a great question.
So I will say I am a radical because I believe only radical change can save us.
But it's not like I like radicalism.
I don't like radicalism.
I don't.
You are a radical, but you don't like the concept.
I'm a radical because in 2023, that's what's required.
I don't want to see a radical civilization.
I want to see a civilization in which the tension between conservatism and progressivism results in dynamism, which we've seen.
I mean, that's what built America and the West.
Dynamism.
It is that tension, right?
What you need is progressives who can see what solutions actually might be worth the freight.
And you need conservatives to put the brakes on them to make sure they don't get carried away with fanciful notions about what might be that are utopian nonsense, right?
It's both things.
So I have said sometimes in the past that I am a radical who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative, right?
Some may say you sound confused.
Right, they may.
And then they're not getting it because, you know, and this is one of the problems I see on the left, is that people fall in love with the idea of progress.
They don't understand how dangerous it is.
And so the point is we can't reach a place where they'll stop, right?
We can't reach a place that's good enough that they will stand down and say, all right, how do we, you know, we've succeeded.
How do we keep it?
How about this, just to be clear?
If you could send a clear message, clear, concise message to your friends on the far left, and then a clear, concise message to the friends on the far right about this unity ticket, what would your direct message to these types of people be?
I think the message is if you don't break out of the dynamic that you're stuck in, then this is going to be a short ride.
We don't have a good plan to go forward, and we need one.
And frankly, we're 30 years late.
We needed to see this 30 years ago.
Then we would have had time to do this.
Now we're in an emergency situation.
And I would just say it is, as much as I see conservatives have completely lost patience with liberals.
And they've done this because the liberals at the moment seem insane.
And so I would ask them to rethink that and just recognize that this is actually the moment at which conservatives have a very clear and vitally important role to play.
But it is not to the exclusion of progressives.
Where do conservatives lose you?
So for them to get somebody like to, where do they lose you?
What would they need to do to get you?
The number one thing is conservatives need to understand that the environmental crisis is not synonymous with climate change, that we have a clear environmental crisis.
What we are doing to the planet cannot be undone ever.
And so we must figure out how to stop doing it.
And that's true irrespective of the reality or fiction involved in climate change.
And I'm pretty convinced there is both.
So that's one.
What else?
Where else do they lose you?
The idea that we should return to a prior state with respect to how we deal with each other socially.
So there is a recognition that something has gone very wrong, for example, in the relationship between the sexes.
That's simply true.
It's gone very wrong.
But we can't go back.
There's nowhere to go back to, right?
Things began to change radically at the...
What do you mean we can't go back to?
Be specific.
So when you're saying they want to go back to, what do they want to go back to?
A traditional relationship between men and women.
And there are aspects of a traditional relationship that I think ought to be resurrected.
But we can't go back because what changed our circumstances was the introduction of reliable birth control.
That was the thing that changed.
And everything else are, it's sort of a cascading set of dysfunctions that have arisen downstream of that because what it did is it removed the central logic of the system.
And I'm not claiming that the central logic of the system was fair.
I don't think it was.
But the central logic of the system was reliable and had been reliable literally for, well, there's an argument to be made for hundreds of millions of years, right?
The reality of male and female and the relationship between those two phenomena had had some consistency for hundreds of millions of years.
It had certainly been consistent for human history and prehistory.
And then suddenly the introduction of birth control alters that relationship in a fundamental way.
And there was not the, I mean, there was a certain amount of consternation over what would happen, but it wasn't, I don't think it properly understood that it was going to Rob the system of the incentive that had driven civilization forward.
So let's stay there.
Okay.
So one, conservatives don't have climate change as their priority, is what you're saying.
Not climate change.
This is the problem.
Environmental sustainability, let's say.
When conservatives hear somebody say environment or environmental crisis, their mind transmutes that into global warming because this has become the flagship issue.
And the problem is, conservatives, I believe, are correct that they detect nonsense around that issue, that they are being told something that is not a complete story, that where they're told we must follow the science on climate change.
We have an emergency.
And then the science amounts to models that they cannot evaluate.
They have the sense that something is being smuggled in.
And I don't think they're wrong about that.
However, that's not the same thing as saying climate change isn't real and important.
And more to the point, the issue of environmental sustainability is a real issue, irrespective.
Even if you found out that climate change was a complete fiction, right?
It doesn't change the fact that we are in an environmental crisis that urgently needs our attention.
So those are two different things, though, right?
Because what you're saying is, one is, I don't know if conservatives are saying that climate change is fake and it's 100% fabricated, et cetera, et cetera.
When they're saying the money is being used, let's not fool ourselves.
There's a lot of gaslighting going on behind closed doors.
I mean, did you see the clip?
These guys at Rebel News Media, did you see them interviewing Greta Thunmark?
Did you see that fake op-ed she did with the police in Germany and that video?
And then this, have you seen this one?
Or no, where she's, you haven't seen this?
I'm aware that it exists.
I'm trying not to process it too much because I don't even know what it is.
But the point is, like, she was doing a picture, like, she got arrested and then she tweeted saying, I got arrested by the German police.
And then these guys at Rebel News followed her.
If you can just click on it, I've gotten permission from them.
They responded back to me.
Watch this.
In Germany.
Because it looked like you did that in several takes, didn't you?
Watch this.
You were posing with the police.
He's answering for you.
He's answering for you.
He said you had an agency.
Oh, sometimes I wish I had one.
It would be much simpler than the group of black people.
I don't know media.
You don't know who is filming you in Germany?
He said he knows.
He says it was an agency.
Exactly.
Come on.
Get up.
Do you normally have reporters defending you?
Yeah.
It's very like Les German police and our WA Fossil Fuel Company, which stage arrests.
How many times did you were you arrested?
Because you posed for several times, didn't you?
Sure.
So, for example, that's not a conservative that says, why are you making propaganda videos using a young girl who's no longer young?
She's 19 or 20 years old right now.
I'm sorry, I don't like to be gaslighted.
That's not a conservative thing.
I relate more to libertarian philosophy, but if I have to choose between you two on who I vote for, I'm going to go on one side.
I think the position from conservatives haven't debated a lot, haven't had a lot of these guys on on that specific topic is, look, we don't know.
You know, where the left says, no, we know this is the number one crisis we're dealing with.
And the conservatives are saying, we don't know for a fact.
You know, the Earth's been around for a long time.
How do you know for a fact?
How do I know for a fact?
Let's keep that as a discussion versus I know for a fact, right?
And then the second part you talked about on going back to, you know, family, well, family nucleus, you know, going back to traditional family values, birth control, you know, which 1950 kind of changed the game when that came out.
Well, sometimes, you know, I see that as a test we do.
Like, I would assume as a scientist, I'm not a scientist, but we run a company and we'll say, let's test this comp plan to see if it works.
And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, this comp plan produces terrible results.
Guys, let's go back to the old comp plan.
There is nothing wrong with that.
You know, when you introduce a new compensation structure or a new model or a new segment or a new show and you're like, dude, this is a terrible show we just launched.
We did 10 of them already.
They don't like it.
Let's just cut it.
We're not going to continue funding this show.
What's wrong with saying this one area we were willing to be gentle with and open-minded to?
Guess what?
It's not producing the right results.
We got to go back to the principles that produce results.
So are we talking about climate change or are we talking about family dynamics?
Oh, nothing's wrong with it except that it's never going to happen.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is prior to reliable birth control, there was a structure that was imposed on us by nature.
And again, I'm not defending it as fair, but what it was, was coherent.
And that structure came from the fact that human babies are incredibly expensive to raise.
And I don't mean that financially.
I mean the investment that goes into a human baby is like no other creature.
What that means is that it requires more than one person to raise one, which then means that a woman would be crazy if she had a choice to choose to produce an offspring that she would have to raise alone if she had the option to raise it with a partner.
So it is that extreme cost which falls initially entirely on women that they can then redistribute with a partner.
That cost drives the system.
On the flip side of that, you have the fact that sex for men is one of the maybe it is the most potent motivator in the universe.
There is nothing that tops it.
And so in a world where women guard their reproductive capacity carefully because they do not want to accidentally produce a child for which they will be fully responsible for raising it, men have to live up to whatever standard women set in order to be worthy of a sexual relationship, which is the ultimate goal of the evolutionary exercise.
That was a coherent world.
Not fair, but coherent.
You introduced birth control in which sex and reproduction are now technologically separated from each other.
And that logic no longer works.
Now, it took decades for it to fully break down, but we are at the point where this logic has now given way.
And young people do not inherently see the logic of finding a partner.
They don't inherently see the logic of producing offspring.
And while not having a partner and not producing offspring are valid choices, I would defend people's right to make those choices, the degree to which people have lost sight of why they might want to do those things should be alarming to us.
Is your position pro-choice, pro-life?
Is that what you're saying as your second one to make it a little bit more specific for the audience?
I'm not really advocating for a solution here.
We could talk about what solutions might be.
No, no.
The question I'm asking is like when I said, what do conservatives need to do to get your vote?
And you said, number one is sustainability, the fact that they don't even want to give the, you know, where I said to you, I think the left is more certain that there's climate change.
The right is just saying, let's be skeptical and let's be open to the fact that maybe there isn't.
Maybe this is a natural cycle.
The second one you said, how, you know, 1950, the birth control.
So is your second one saying that the right is too convinced that it has to be pro-life where it's pro-choice?
You know, this is a funny issue.
I have known for, since I started thinking about it decades ago, that there was vastly more agreement on the issue of choice than we acknowledge, that our discussion has become extremely polarized.
But most people fall out in a camp that believes there is some right to terminate a pregnancy very early while we are talking about something that is has certainly the potential to become a human but does not have the characteristics of a human yet.
And people grow increasingly uncomfortable the closer we get to the moment of birth.
That's where almost all of us are.
Now, there's a group of people who has a religious perspective that I respect, which says you're interfering in a divine process.
Something has decided to produce a child and you are deciding to override it.
And that is the reason that a certain brand of religious conservative does not see any room for terminating a pregnancy.
But that is a small fraction of the population.
Most of us believe there is some right to that technology and that that right grows less and less compelling the closer we get to the moment of birth.
So, you know, by and large, I don't need religious conservatives to give up their commitment to their understanding of how the universe works.
And frankly, I think the bias that this is a sobering decision is the right one, for sure.
But, you know, how should society be governed?
Well, it should be governed approximately where we all fall out.
We're not overly comfortable with this process, but we believe that it has to exist in some form for lots of reasons.
I mean, you know, rape and incest being an obvious, an obvious case where for most of us, the idea that a rapist can inflict a pregnancy on a woman and that she has no right to end it is preposterous.
Yeah, by the way, that's also where conservatives are conflicted, meaning amongst each other.
So I don't know if that makes sense.
Like some of them are from the standpoint of, no, even if it is rape, even if it is this, even if it is that, you know, you still got to do it, which, you know, that's considered extremist if a person wants to take that position.
And some say, no, that's not the part I'm talking about.
The part I'm talking about, which by the way, I saw a joke the other day by a guy, I'm going to give this guy a shout out, Jeffrey Asmus, which I thought was very funny.
Have you seen this one where he gets up and he says, I never understood why conservatives are, Republicans are pro-life.
He says, Republicans should stay pro-choice.
He says, you know why?
He says, wait for it.
It's going to take you five seconds to get this.
He says, why?
He says, because most kids that get aborted are liberals.
Did you get it?
So you're sitting there kind of thinking about it where what a heavy joke right there because if you think about who and what ethnicity pro-choice hurts the most, it's, you know, most of the abortions in America, if you can look at the data, you know the data already yourself.
But okay, so let's let's let's go past this one.
Let's go.
By the way, wait, I think there's one point that needs to be on the table because I do know that conservatives are conflicted amongst themselves about this question.
And there is an argument that absolutely belongs on the table in that argument or in that context.
The argument is there actually has to be a right for a woman who has been raped to terminate that pregnancy.
And I would hope that it happens as early as possible for many reasons.
The reason is an evolutionary one.
If you create a scenario in which a woman is forced to carry the product of rape to the point of giving birth and raising this child, you are opening up a strategy for rapists to reproduce.
And the problem is that you're taking a very extreme position.
In what way?
I mean, so here's a part that both the left and the right does, that they take an argument that happens less than 1% of the time and they use that as the basis for the argument on why 100% of the other side's position isn't right.
But I'm not saying that.
But that's a very small, minute position, you know, and case that we're talking about.
Why?
Tell us why.
Because rape is not something that is, you know, as if we take 100 of the pregnancies that happen and we say, well, let's really get some data on what caused these pregnancies.
One night stands, boyfriend, girlfriend didn't, you know, use a condom.
You were on the dates you were off, you forgot to take the pill.
How often do people forget to take the pill?
There's a lot of kids that are born because somebody forgot the Wednesday pill or the Friday pill.
You know, you got somebody that just wants to have the kids because the tax code benefits somebody having kids and getting free money from the government.
Another one could be, let me lock up a guy who's got money, man.
If I have his baby, he has to pay me child support.
The tax code benefits women getting pregnant to a certain sect that do take advantage of that system.
But to say rape, rape would be at the bottom of a— Very low, low— Very small fraction.
Let's keep it that way.
That's my point, is that if you open the door to a strategy in which a rapist who can trigger a pregnancy can basically force a woman to give birth to that child and in most cases to raise it, what you are doing is you are inviting a future in which rape is more common, right?
Because it becomes a viable evolutionary strategy.
I don't know if I agree with that because there's two things to it.
Forget about the viable strategy.
One of the strategies of raping is you're going to jail.
So the crime, the punishment, we can make that more severe, where in certain cities in America, it's not treated that way.
Certain cities in America, it's kind of like, well, you know, he's okay.
Let's give him a second chance, third chance, fourth chance.
There's a lot of cities in America that have rapists walking around because they're forgiven rapists.
That's not the fact that we're saying let's keep the baby if you're raped by a man.
That's because of laws are forcing some people to say, I can get away with murder and rape.
Well, I would certainly support Stronger laws in cases where you actually prove a stranger rape is the case that we're talking about here, then my sense is somebody who would engage in that doesn't, you know, doesn't really deserve a second chance.
If you're capable of that, what are the chances that when you get out of prison, you're going to be, yeah, the chances you're going to do it again are high.
But the fraction of rapes that are actually successfully prosecuted is low.
And so both things are true.
Yes, by driving the penalty up for somebody who gets caught, you can reduce the viability of this strategy, but not sufficiently.
And so all I'm saying, as an evolutionist, I know it's a rough argument, but the argument is you don't want this strategy to be a winner.
I don't think conservatives are going to be sitting there supporting that.
But the question then becomes to so flip it.
So you've got two sides here.
As a person who is you and your wife, Evergreen, you're the top professor.
Your wife's the top professor.
You're right behind her, top professor.
So essentially, you guys are the top two professor in school.
15 years, you got a 16-year-old.
You got an 18-year-old.
I think it's fair to say your kids are not going to go to Evergreen.
Is that a pretty good assessment right there?
No, they won't think of Evergreen.
But here's the part.
As a parent, and now it's different when you're a 29-year-old progressive versus a 44-year-old.
I don't know your age, but I'm assuming we're the same age, 44-year-old progressive.
I'm 53.
Well, great.
You look good.
Okay, so a 53-year-old progressive, you know, your optics have changed.
You're looking at it from your kids.
You're seeing how you were treated.
You're seeing how maybe you were even on their side and arguing on their side.
Now you're sitting there saying, listen, you know, certain things in life of values are no longer the same.
What I used to vote for, that was number one, that was number 13.
What I voted for, that was number two, now it's 28.
But what I've thought it was number 17 is now number two.
What are your top three, four, five reasons on to say, I think this party has what I support and I think this party does.
What are the top four or five things you vote for?
Well, I should tell you, neither of these parties are viable.
They're both so deeply corrupt that I don't see either of them being resurrected in some form.
And, you know, again, this is exactly why I say reluctant radical.
We are now at a place that we have to radically alter this system in order for there to be a system at all 200 years from now.
And I care very deeply about this.
I do have two kids, as you point out, and I'm very concerned about what world they are emerging into and what world they will produce children in.
So I wish I could say, look, here's what you need to do to fix the Republican Party.
Here's what you would have to do to get the Democrats back on track.
This is too far gone, right?
These are both influence peddling rackets, and we suffer from it daily.
I mean, and I know it's a very dangerous topic, but I don't think we're ever going to get a better peek at how the system really works than looking at the pandemic that we have just experienced, right?
That's the quality of governance that we've got.
It's not good enough to manage a species playing with tools as powerful as the ones that we have.
It's just not going to work.
Can I ask just one follow-up before we go down to the next topic?
I just wanted to revisit what you basically said about birth control.
And because it's very high on your list, essentially, it's what intersexual dynamics, how men and women operate together from a human evolutionary standpoint.
Question is this, you know you kind of use the, the metaphor of the gas and the brakes, with the progressives and the conservatives kind of reining in like, listen relax, pump the brakes a little bit.
Progressives are bringing up ideas conservatives yeah, not too much.
So to use that concept of birth control, you said that for men, sex is the most potent motivation in the universe, and women birth control.
I believe it was right around 1950 where that was introduced to society and women kind of had their, their ability to choose who they're gonna have partners with.
You know the argument of hypergamy and all that.
Um, my question is this, you said that um, you know, women essentially are the gatekeepers of sex.
Men will do what the women tell them to do, and it's.
It's at the point now where uh, you know, the toothpaste is out of the tube or the genie's out of the bottle.
Women have birth control.
They're fighting for their rights.
We saw what happened in the midterms.
It's supposed to be a red wave.
All of a sudden they try to.
You know, take away abortion rights boom, all of a sudden it's not a red wave, not whatsoever.
Women have this choice now.
So my question is this, you said it's too late to go back to essentially a make America great again concept, or whatever that was, or traditional women these days you kind of highlighted this is one of the biggest problems in society today is women having the option of birth control and aborting baby, or just not having the baby altogether the morning after pill.
What solutions can be brought to the table now?
I know you said you didn't have all the solutions, but you know women aren't going back in the kitchen, they're working.
They're making more money than ever.
They're liberated.
Many of them are, though many of them are not to the extent but changing.
But I will tell you this.
But I will tell you this, let's you.
You're saying that because results are now okay.
So there are some things that takes a couple decades to test, to know it doesn't work.
This is one of the reasons why I didn't take the test, because i'm like i've taken a lot of different vaccines who have decades of tests trials five, ten years.
I don't trust nine months of testing right, so to say, you know, women are not going back.
I don't know if I agree with that, because I think a lot of people are sitting there saying, I tested this.
I'm 52 years old single making 180 grand, and i'm miserable.
I wish I would have gotten married.
I wish I would have had a different situation.
So the the results on who is happier today isn't the 185 year old female executive, not married, no kids.
You know market value isn't the same, and having to choose on who to date, you know it's not the same anymore.
So there are a lot.
This is not everybody, i'm not telling you everybody is.
Some of them are going that direction because woman powered this, woman powered that.
But the way we judge uh, you know, as as at least i'm speaking for myself is there are a lot of things that we're certain about, not a lot of things we're certain about.
Most things we're not certain about, most things we're skeptical about.
This is why, when I asked Neil Degrasse Tyson, I said, tell me about debate.
He says I don't believe in debate, I don't like debate.
Well, I like debate because a lot of times I sit there and I look at things and i'm like maybe this is the right direction we're doing, maybe this is the right thing that we're doing.
I don't know.
Let me get the data interesting.
That's an interesting point he makes.
She makes a very good point and then five 10 15, 20 years.
Oh shit, that was a terrible experiment and I was a part of it And I lived 20 years in this experiment, but we're going to know this is not the right thing we did.
Okay.
So you were going to ask a question.
Well, I fundamentally do agree with what you're saying that in general, in society, there's need of corrections, and sometimes there's over-corrections.
I think what's happening in this instance with birth control is there was a correction and women's rights and feminism, all great, but there's clearly been an over-correction where it's like, all right, women have gone off the deep end in some regards of being too liberal and have the ability to do way too much, like you're saying, the traditional woman.
I guess what's your take on this and what can be improved in gender relations?
Because I believe that's how you started this.
All right.
You do remind me of Neil deGrasse Tyson and your question about education.
Let's return to that afterwards.
But I wouldn't phrase it that way.
What I would say is that there were spectacular benefits to the consequences of birth control.
The liberation of women is a triumph, right?
You had one of the sexes was hobbled in its ability to contribute to the most interesting parts of building a society because of its disproportionate responsibility reproductively.
Birth control freed women to do all of the most amazing stuff involved in being human other than producing children.
The costs of that, however, have been spectacular.
And so this is why I say we can't go back.
What are the costs, though?
Well, we used to move mountains, and we moved mountains based on the fact that the system was coherent.
So men used to move mountains.
Why?
Well, in part to become worthy of women worth partnering with, right?
That was the logic of the system.
And it put men on the moon.
You take that logic out because now sex has become mundane and we aren't the same people that we were.
We're not as good to each other.
We are not moving in the right direction.
The coherence in the system.
You don't think so?
You don't think we are good to each other?
What intel or study shows that we're not good to each other?
Well, I mean, let's put it this way.
I don't want to pretty up the past.
Obviously, there was lots of terrible stuff, including lots of lineage against lineage stuff that was for at least a few decades definitely waning.
It may be returning now.
But yes, I think at the moment we are being terrible to each other.
We don't.
Are we really not being terrible to each other?
Are we being told that we're being terrible to each other?
We are two different things.
We are being induced to be terrible to each other.
We're being induced to be terrible to each other.
Can you unpack that, please?
Sure.
Let us take the, I mean, you can take any of these issues in which we find ourselves so very polarized.
You know, you can take the abortion issue.
We're really not that far apart in terms of what people say to each other over the dinner table about what they believe.
But, you know, politically, it's an unresolvable issue.
Likewise, everything that happened over, you know, COVID, you were either pro-mask, pro-vax, anti-early treatment, you know, or the inverse, right?
That was nonsense.
The fact is, this was a complex system in which we all had a shared interest in figuring out what was going on, but we could barely even stand each other, right?
That's the commonplace thing that we see on almost every issue.
And so I don't think how it works, I don't know.
But that it functions to keep us back on our heels so that we are incapable of moving in a coherent direction is clear.
It is serving somebody's interests.
It is protecting something that has power and has everything to lose if we are able to find our humanity and move forward as one people, right?
I mean, we're supposed to do that.
That's what patriotism is.
We're supposed to love our country and we're supposed to figure out how to govern it and we're going to make mistakes and we're supposed to be honest about what they were and figure out how to do better in the future.
But we're incapable of that because we're now divided into teams, right?
We are loyal to a jersey rather than a nation.
We've always been divided.
And I think that's natural for us always.
Like, hey, I'm team smoking weed.
I'm not.
I'm team going to church.
I don't believe in God.
I'm team Lakers.
I'm team Clippers.
I'm Team UFC.
I'm team football.
I'm team.
That's what makes us awesome.
That's what makes us unique.
The part that I think where, Brett, we kind of fell for the trap is my wife is right now going through the journey of health.
And she's like, the other day, four documentaries, back to back to back to back to back.
And she's sitting there looking at documentaries from both sides.
One documentary is executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio.
The solution to the world is we all have to be vegans.
The other documentary is Food Inc.
Look what big business in, you know, in the food industry is doing.
Big food is catastrophic what they're doing and how they're manipulating food, what they're putting in it.
And we're buying into it, right?
Because it's a business model, right?
Even with big pharma, there's big food, there's big pharma, there's a lot of things going on.
And then there's big media.
Media's job is for us to hate each other.
The more there's conflict, the more there's challenge.
They figured it out, the more money they make.
The more we're divided, the more there's an enemy, the more there's the monster, the more there's, you better be careful, the more there's, look at World Economic Forum got together to tell us there's an extraterrestrial, you know, crisis we're facing and we're wondering if ET is showing up, you know, because the first thing I think about is ET phone home.
What are we doing?
They contacted ET and we don't.
I mean, what is, but people are buying into this bullshit and they're falling for this trap.
So, but behind closed doors, dude, I'm sit.
I got a lot of people I sit down with.
We disagree with.
We have great conversations.
And, you know, one could be a Muslim.
I'm a Christian.
I say, listen, man, you have to understand that.
You don't know what you're talking about, but we walk away and having great drinks together, great food together.
Maybe they don't have the drinks, but we have great food together.
But the point is this.
The point I'm trying to make is I don't know if we are as divided as we're being told we are.
I don't know if we are.
Maybe I'm wrong.
No, you're right.
And in fact, there was a very interesting study a few years back called the Hidden Tribes Report in which they actually went through it and they found that there were really five coalitions, but that the majority of us exist in a large, what they called the exhausted middle, right?
Where we basically agree on things.
And I believe this is absolutely true.
This has also matched my experience of talking to people.
I always try to talk to people who are, you know, people I'm not supposed to be able to relate to.
And it's amazing how much basis there is for us to get along.
The problem, though, and you hit on it rather directly.
We are built to compete, right?
Evolution, this is the most fundamental aspect of evolution is competition.
It's how we became great.
And so our tendency to compete with each other is the engine that drives the system.
The problem is, or one of them, is that the competition has been between lineages, and it has built everything, right?
It is our attempt to get ahead of each other that has caused us to discover all of the things that have made us powerful and insightful.
We can't keep doing it, right?
The lineage against lineage competition has to end because our tools are now so powerful that if we continue playing that game, it will be our undefined.
Lineage against lineage, meaning I'm black against white.
you know uh asian against middle you're talking about like yeah i'm avoiding the word race because race is a bastardization of the real concept Well, we're not.
Again, I don't think we're doing that because I see more white people marrying black people.
I see more Hispanics marrying Middle Eastern.
There's a famous comedian, Tehran.
Shout out to Tehran.
Black Persian comedian.
His name is Tehran, the capital of Iran, but he's black.
Can you pull up what Tehran looks like?
If you saw Tehran in the streets, you would never call him Tehran.
You would call him maybe Tyrone, but not Tehran.
And that's what Tehran is.
And he's funny.
I like him a lot.
I saw this guy years ago, and he's still at it, doing a great job.
But I'm seeing more people that are interracial relationships, and it's happening on both sides, by the way.
You go to Christians, you go to atheists, you go to all sides that's happening.
Maybe not as much on the Muslim side because a lot of times Muslims marry Muslims or even Indians will marry.
But even that has opened up a little bit where they were going through, you know, hey, arranged marriage.
And that was back in the 70s and 80s.
Some families are still doing it, but it's only 25% as arranged marriage where it used to be 100%.
We're becoming a little bit more understanding to say, hey, we got a lot of things in common.
You and I may disagree on eight things, but dude, we agree on 92 things.
So let's kick it.
Let's have a great conversation and let's debate the eight things we disagree with.
Maybe we only come down to four or three or two.
But I still think the lineage part is probably less today than before.
Again, it goes back to the media's telling us we're racist.
The media is telling us you're a white supremacist, the evergreen professor who doesn't want all he wants to do is a all whites meeting and other people are not invited and how dare you?
You better kick them out.
And then the school have to pay you and your wife a quarter million apiece or whatever the number was that they had to settle with.
They had to pay you guys, right, for what they did.
So I don't know about that.
I think we are more and more open.
Like when I was dating girls and my dad one day, he says, look, I would like to see you marry an Assyrian or an Armenian.
I said, dad, very slim chance that's going to be happening.
Okay.
It's most likely going to be a black girl because that's what most of my girlfriends were.
Or it's going to be Hispanic or it's going to be somebody else.
But maybe end up being Middle Eastern.
Well, ended up being a white girl from Texas.
Okay.
And we got four kids.
We fight.
We do our best to be happy.
We try to make our family work.
Do we agree on everything?
No, but I think we collectively, those stories need to be told rather than these bullshit stories that blacks against whites.
Stop it.
And by the way, the ratings are showing Americans are sick of that philosophy.
The ratings, if we gauged whether we're divided or not, Brett, the ratings would show we're getting more and more united because we want to watch less and less of CNN and MSNBC because they're getting crushed.
We want to watch less and less of Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kemmel because they're making fun of people that disagree with them.
And we're more like, dude, just stop it, man.
Where's the Jay Leno days?
Where are the Letterman days or Johnny Carson days?
Too much gamesmanship.
We don't want to do it anymore.
I think we're making progress.
Again, I may be wrong and I'm just seeing it from one lens, but I actually think we're making more progress towards being united than being divided.
If we turn on too much TV, we are being divided.
If we don't and we just kind of talk to people, we're a little more united.
All right.
Let me try this from an evolutionary framework.
Please.
Lineage against lineage competition is what forced us to become so capable.
The reason that our brains are so disproportionately large compared to other creatures has to do with outthinking each other, right?
We've been in an arms race and it has made us all smart.
That tendency manifests as racism throughout much of history.
You are absolutely right that that thing was disappearing rapidly.
For most of my life, everybody knew that it wasn't a good thing.
And where we are is we are in a tension between two valid evolutionary reasons to collaborate.
One of them has to do with genes.
That's the lineage versus lineage thing.
The other has to do with reciprocity, right?
When we put aside genes and we collaborate with somebody because they have some insight that we don't have, and by partnering, we get emergence where the sum is greater, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
That is a much better way of competing.
The problem is the gene-based competition is more fundamental, right?
It has existed longer.
And so as we lose touch with the fact that we are all actually jeopardized by the same things and we would all benefit by heading in the same direction, we break down into that tribal mode.
And that is where we are, right?
We are being divided.
We went through a period in which it's not like racism had disappeared, but it was disappearing rapidly.
And now it's back with a vengeance.
You are right.
People are sick of it.
And so they are now defaulting into demonizing people for other stuff, right?
Maybe it's not the color of your skin, but it's the fact that you're unvaccinated and you're putting grandma at risk, right?
So that desire to see the world as us and them is still haunting us.
And we have to get past it because the future will be very bleak if that's the driving force.
The future that we need is the one that the West figured out, which was put aside the gene stuff, collaborate because it's a good way of getting ahead, right?
That melting pot idea is the thing to be resurrected.
And I'm concerned that we are seeing it break down.
We are not tending it.
And it is falling apart in front of our eyes.
Can I ask you just a very simple question?
You know, back in the day, it was maybe people your age are a little bit older.
The boomers, are you a baby boomer?
I am not a boomer.
Okay, you're Gen X.
I apologize.
How dare you, man?
We went from 44 to 65.
I'm sorry.
He looks great.
Again, I'll revisit this head of hair you and your brother have.
I don't know.
Not only are you the client, you're the player president of the hair club.
But anyway, the boomers were kind of responsible for Woodstock changing the system.
And then you can go back a generation before that, whether it was a silent generation, traditionalists.
These days, here's my question.
When you, you know, the face of wokeness and the face of, you know, all this super progressiveness, at the end of the day, our college campus liberals, 20-something-year-olds, Gen Z. Is this sort of just every generation, the young people are going to have their causes they identify with, and it is what it is.
And they're the future.
Sorry, 68-year-olds, 72-year-olds, 80-year-olds.
It's now your time has come and gone.
And move on.
It's now Gen Z time, the woke time.
How much of that is just on them?
And this is their philosophy, and they're the future.
And it's like, it is what it is, buddy.
How much of that is on them?
I wish.
Unfortunately, it's on us.
And this actually is a perfect way to get back to your question about education.
The problem, or at least I would argue, one of the most major problems is that we have broken the mechanism by which young people come to understand how the world functions.
Now, that has happened in a number of different ways, but it has accelerated very rapidly in the last decade or two.
Because of the iPhone, I'm assuming, and the internet?
It could have been a lot of things.
It happened to be those two and a few more.
You know, porn, lots of stuff.
But the problem, if you think back into what human beings fundamentally are, human beings are a creature in which you have the hardware package, the body, and you have a software package that is loaded in after the child is born primarily.
That software package is capable of turning you into anything.
You can be an Inuit hunting large sea mammals by kayak, right?
Or you can be a Maasai herdsman, or you can be a collector of swallow nests in a cave in China, right?
A human being can be a lot of different things based on what software package it gets, right?
It can be an Aztec.
But what it cannot do is live in a world where by the time an individual becomes an adult, the software program that it picked up in childhood is already obsolete.
There is no mechanism to deal with that world where it is changing so rapidly that the world you're born into is gone before you become an adult.
And that's the world that we're living in.
In our case, it happens to surround technologies like iPhones, like the internet, like pornography.
These things are radically altering the realities.
And this then brings us back to the question of what should we do to fix education.
And the answer, at least a big part of it, is actually staring us in the face.
What is so distorting about the technologies that come to us through screens is that they are not obligated to adhere to rules, right?
On the internet, if you say that you're a woman, then I guess you are, right?
Because who's going to say differently?
In reality, if you're a man and you say that you're a woman, there's something to talk about, right?
That doesn't appear, that doesn't match the person I see standing in front of me.
So the way to take a generation and educate it so that it does not grow up to be a world full of suckers is to force education to include things that are obligated to rules, especially physical rules.
So when Heather and I were teaching, among the things that we did was we would assign students to teach themselves any skill, right?
We had an assignment we called Learn a Skill.
And the idea was it didn't matter what skill it was, but it had one requirement.
The skill had to be one where you didn't need some person to tell you whether you had succeeded or failed.
It had to be obvious.
If you were going to build tables, they had to stand up.
They had to be level.
You don't need someone to tell you you did or you didn't build a table.
You didn't or you didn't fix an engine.
You did or you didn't play a song that sounded musical.
Those are all physical realities.
And the reason that that is so important is that in a world where everything that you learn is learned socially, you can be persuaded of things that are absolutely false.
If the professor at the front of the room is a fool, but they're in charge of your grade and they say lots of foolish things and you dutifully write them down in your notebook and then you spit them back out on the test, you are being anti-educated.
That's never going to happen in the context of an engine or a garden or anything where it's physics that dictates whether or not you succeeded or it's biology that dictates whether or not you've succeeded.
So my point would be somebody who gets really good at operating in the physical world is not going to be a fool, right?
They may lack some skills.
They may not be able to do calculus.
They may not be articulate, but they won't be a fool.
And so we have to include these mechanisms that are not socially conveyed in our education at a high level.
And frankly, most people can go through school and never encounter these things.
They're no longer a part of the regular curriculum.
Would you do us a favor and go maybe slightly deeper and take a sort of an abstract idea and be very specific?
Like, what are you doing with your 16 and 18-year-old kids to educate them so they don't become fools and victims of modern society?
You know, we do all kinds of things.
We troubleshoot our vehicles when they fail.
We build additions onto our house.
We fix the plumbing when it's not working.
And, you know, these things, they're not only incredibly useful, but they're also rewarding.
There's nothing quite like taking something that isn't working for reasons that are mysterious, going through the process, which, by the way, ends up being a scientific process where you determine what it is that must be going wrong with it.
And then you discover, hey, I must have had that right because there it is working now.
That's a very rewarding process.
It's very interesting because you, I would say, you know, obviously you get paid to use your brain and your mouth, but you're making your kids use their hands to accomplish things.
That must be very intentional.
Well, it is and it isn't.
You know, I sort of grew up as a tinkerer.
I was always, when people would come to do work on the house I grew up in, I would follow them around like a puppy dog, watching everything they did, understanding how the house worked and all of those things.
And so, you know, it's not like I have to go out of my way to teach this lesson.
It's intuitive, but it also, it works like gangbusters.
Some may say you're just getting free labor out of your kids.
I don't know.
That is definitely also the case.
Let's talk about, let's transition to a couple different topics.
This has been great.
We got 45 minutes left and we got a few topics to go through.
So ChatGPT is passing the tests required for medical licenses and business degrees.
I don't know if you saw this or not.
Pull up a little bit so we can kind of cover this.
So the viral chatbot that has raised concerns from teachers and academics over its ability to cheat on essays and exam has now passed a Wharton MBA final exam, the United States medical licensing exam, and components of the bar exam.
And this thing's only been around since November, by the way.
A Wharton professor conducted a study in which he used OpenAI GP3, GPT-3, the language model on which it is built on, to take a final exam of a core MBA course.
concluded that GPT-3 would have received a B to P minus on the exam.
The professor Christian Terowish founded that GPT-3 performed the best at basic operations management and processing analysis questions.
For these, the chatbot provided both correct answers and excellent explanation as to why an answer was selected.
In the paper summary, teacher acknowledged that GPT-3 is by no means perfect.
At times, the bot made mistakes in simple mathematical calculations and wasn't able to handle more advanced process analysis questions.
The study further fueled the conversation that academics are now having as a result of GPT-3, GPT-A advanced writing skills regarding exam policies, et cetera, et cetera.
So some professors are extremely concerned.
Some are worried.
Some are saying this could question the existing business model, teaching model, universities.
How concerned are you?
How excited are you?
How little do you care about this?
I don't think anybody is worried enough.
I think the hazard of what we're facing is almost beyond what we can imagine.
And I'm saying that even though I know what you have to focus on if you want to comfort yourself that this isn't so terrible, you know, you can focus on the fact that this model has no capacity to be conscious.
It's simulating meaning without knowing what it's saying.
But I don't know how long that lasts.
I do know that this is a pretty good spot check of where we are in the trajectory that results in general artificial intelligence.
And I don't think we are remotely ready for what's coming.
And I will point to the most obvious of these problems is already critical.
And you're hinting at it in what you're reading here.
But the fact that it is going to become extremely difficult to assess actual competence should alarm us at the highest level.
To have the possibility, you could have a conference of people all consulting whatever descendant of ChatGPT happens to be available at the time and talking to each other as if they know what they're talking about.
We've already got a problem with our experts who don't mostly seem to know what they're talking about.
This is going to be 100 times as bad in a world where they can be consulting something that sounds very knowledgeable and may in fact be completely on the wrong track, which I would point out is another argument and maybe even a much stronger argument for including real-world physical interactions in which you do not have to assess whether or not somebody knows what they're doing.
They either fixed your engine or they didn't, right?
It either runs or it doesn't.
Those kinds of things are not going to be easily faked, though even they, right?
A mechanic who does not know what he's doing but is able to consult this device in order to figure out what is likely causing a problem is going to become less and less capable.
So I don't know what we're supposed to do about it, but I do know we're not ready.
We're not ready and the rate at which this is going to get better is clear, right?
Exposing it to larger and larger data sets is going to make it better and better at simulating this kind of interaction.
And that's if it stays unconscious.
The question of what happens if this doesn't stay unconscious or this stays unconscious but its descendant picks up consciousness is even more troubling.
But go to ugly place.
Good, bad, ugly.
Worst case, what happens?
Is it the fear that I actually want you to go there before I tell you what I think is the fear for some people?
Okay.
First of all, we don't need ChatGPT to take us to the worst case scenario.
We are already losing our capacity to understand the world we live in, to manage the tools that we are creating, to live in harmony with each other.
We are losing those things in the present prior to ChatGPT.
All of those problems get worse.
This is like an accelerant, right?
This is like you had a house fire and then you just threw gasoline on it, right?
Now we have a raging house fire.
So I don't know that this is or isn't the thing, but I do know it's not going to help.
At this moment, we can't deal with this.
And this is not the last time that's going to happen, by the way.
We had a world, we had an internet, and then we dumped smartphones into it.
And it was like an accelerant.
It took the derangement that was arising out of natural algorithmic processes within the internet.
And they got vastly worse when people were constantly confronted with their phone and the ability to interact in this way all the time.
So we've seen that.
We're going to see it again with fusion power.
Fusion power, which I believe is the one technology that potentially bootstraps us out of the system we're in and into one that is sustainable.
But if you just added it to the system tomorrow, if you read the paper tomorrow and turned out we'd accomplished scalable fusion, it would likely make things worse and not better because we're not ready for the world that it creates.
So I don't know what the name of that problem is, but the we're not ready for that problem is a very serious one.
And we can swap in one technology after another and, you know, it will create different disasters.
What's the most dangerous invention we ever had?
What's the most dangerous invention ever?
The most dangerous invention we ever had.
Or innovation, invention, innovation.
What's the most dangerous invention where we invented it?
We're like, oh, shit, this is not good.
You know, it's an almost impossible question to answer because, you know, if I do the job right, it'll probably be something like paper or the mirror, right?
Those things kick loose processes that may drive our extinction in the end, right?
They won't, you know, there's not going to be a mirror the day the president hits the nuclear button and it all goes up in smoke, right?
But the point is it may be the kind of self-awareness that comes when you see a photorealistic impression of yourself, you know, two feet away, right?
It may be that the thought processes that follow from that are the reason that we will ultimately destroy ourselves.
More approximately, of course, we do have to talk about things like nuclear weapons.
Boy, do I think we just got a wake-up call on the biology front with COVID?
I mean, yeah, this was a lot, a lot better than it might have been, but this is the first round, and we did not do very well with this test.
Let's put it that way.
Okay.
So we're going to get to that here in a minute.
Let's stay on this topic of the most dangerous invention.
You said it could be the mirror or paper, but probably nuclear is where we're going to go or, you know, other things, right?
Say paper, I'm really hinting at written language, which is of course also incredibly marvelous.
I'm not arguing it's not fantastic.
So, so if guns, when guns were first invented, they called them the great equalizer.
Who were they good for?
Who were they bad for?
Well, this is one of these places where I have changed my perspective.
I long believed the Second Amendment was the greatest error in our Constitution.
I no longer believe that.
And that doesn't mean that I look past all of the terrible, unnecessary carnage that arises because guns are easily available.
But I'm watching tyranny erupt in places that I never would have expected it.
And I am wondering if the founders did not very wisely understand that this day would come and that it will be very hard for tyrants to succeed in America if the populace is armed.
So again, I know people will hear something in that that I'm not saying.
The cost of having these weapons commonly available is huge and frankly, completely unacceptable to me.
Really?
So the cost.
So you went from pro-Second Amendment to now saying it would be better if we didn't have guns.
No, no, the other way.
So now the benefit of having it is good versus not having it.
Even though I appreciate the tremendous unnecessary cost of these weapons being common, right?
Even though I see that cost, I believe nothing will be more destructive than if tyranny, I mean, we've already seen lots of hints of tyranny in recent times in the U.S., but if tyranny takes over our nation and the West, we are in even more serious trouble.
So I believe the harms that do come from these weapons being common will be dwarfed by the harms of things like what we saw in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, for example.
So let's go back to the question.
Yeah, so let's go back to the question.
So who, the invention of gun, the great equalizer, who did it hurt?
Who did it benefit?
I think I don't want to pretend to be an expert on that question.
It would take me a lot of thought to get to an answer, I believe.
This is what happens when you ask a former professor of evolutionary biology.
Very rarely do I have an answer more than an evolutionary biology scientist, okay?
But who did it hurt and who did it benefit?
I think who it hurt the most were bullies, right?
People that could just strong-arm you physically or in any capacity.
And who did it help?
It helped weaker people.
Sometimes you might say the weaker sex helped women.
I think at the end of the day, if there's two very strong people, a man and a woman, or a weaker man and a very strong man, and all of a sudden the weaker person has a gun, essentially that's the great equalizer.
So I think it hurt bullies the most.
And if you extrapolate that to governments and you take a look at bully governments, whether it's Iran today with the mullahs, whether it's in Venezuela where you can't have a gun or any place where the society or the civilization or the people don't have a weapon to defend themselves, you're going to be at the whim of tyrannical governments and bullies.
So to answer your question, I think it helped weaker people defend themselves.
All right, but I want to push back slightly.
No, no, I'm way smarter than you.
Please tell me why I'm wrong.
I believe your argument is correct as far as it goes.
And the question is, is it correct in the end?
You can take that same argument and you could apply it to nuclear weapons.
And you could say, actually, what we want to do is have every country be armed with nuclear weapons because then big countries won't bully small countries.
If you did that, the nuclear war that we will ultimately face will be that much sooner, right?
Because you have that many itchy trigger fingers that could initiate the thing.
And so I'm not convinced that even, I mean, look, we saw that nuclear weapons did produce peace.
It worked.
But in the end, is that their net effect?
We can't measure that because we're not at the end.
So I don't know what the net effect of guns is.
I do believe the effect you're describing is real and important.
The only caveat that I would say, I can't believe I'm pushing back on you right now, is that the capacity for these nuclear weapons in the wrong hands could literally end Earth as we know it.
Whereas a gun or an M16, yes, there could be some carnage, but you're not literally blowing up the world.
So nuclear weapons, to a certain extent, is that threshold where it's like, don't cross that line.
Brett, you can't let a Playboy argue with you.
This guy's resume, it's just, it's not, you're a former professor of evolutionary biology.
He's a form of an evolutionary biology.
There is biology there, but it's a little bit more.
It's different.
It's different school in the lightning nightlight scene.
It's a different thing.
Let's go through that.
Let's go through that.
So, okay, so guns, specific guns, not nuclear.
Guns benefited, you know, the average person's like, listen, that guy's been bullying the city.
This time he comes around, hey, you can't do this anymore.
You got to get out of my house.
Okay, shit, I'm not messing with that family.
I'm out because I got a gun.
Fantastic, right?
It's like when you got the sign in a backyard, beware.
There's a pit bull, a German shepherd, and beware.
And there is no dog.
But that sign itself gets some people to say, I don't want to mess with that place.
And there's a study showing that there's a percentage of people that don't mess with a house that just has that sign.
Whether there is a real dog or not, it still helps you to create some safety.
Nuclear, fine.
Internet, you know, a lot of people were worried about internet at the beginning.
You have radio, you have TV, you have all this stuff, right?
Who did YouTube scare?
Who did Anchor or, you know, Spotify benefit and hurt?
If we think about who YouTube and Spotify and these places hurt, it hurt mainstream media.
It scared the crap out of the bullies that have been telling everybody one side of the story.
Now you got to sit there and listen to the number one podcast in the world, Joe Rogan, telling you a different way because he's got a guest that got you thinking.
Now we're going out there doing research, going to Google, which at one point we were concerned.
So does ChatGPT, ChatGPT scare intellectuals?
Is it where intellectuals are sitting there saying, and professors are sitting there saying, uh-oh, if this happens, like in the insurance industry, I'm in the life insurance space.
The moment they started doing predictive analytics without meeting underwriters and saying, Brett, you don't need to do blood and urine anymore.
We don't need to do that anymore.
We don't need underwriters anymore.
Here's a test we're going to be taking on you.
We're going to get your social media score.
We're going to get this.
Based on that, your preferred elite underwriting, you're healthy.
You're going to live till 85.
Mom lived to 89.
Dad lived to this.
You're going to be fine, right?
We don't need underwriters.
Underwriters sat down.
They're like, dude, no, you can't stop this.
I made a quarter million a year.
There's no way I want you to get rid of my job.
This is scary, right?
But guess what?
That's innovation, getting rid of underwriters.
Could this model get rid of some educational system that will replace professors and they're sitting there worried saying, hey, I've been bragging about how smart I am.
Now I can't do that anymore.
This is not cool.
Yes.
And, you know, we have just watched the entire expert class fail a real world test, right?
We watched all the universities, every science department, they have all just failed a major test.
So, and, you know, if you were inside that system and you kept your wits about you, you knew that there was a problem with competence.
You knew that a lot of that was fakery and nonsense, right?
It sounds, it looks like science, but it doesn't function like science.
If you actually understand the magic that makes science work, you knew it wasn't taking place in these departments, that it wasn't taking place in the major journals.
And so on the one hand, it is possible that something like ChatGPT helps us discover the level of incompetence that is putting us in jeopardy, which would be great.
But my concern is that it actually arms the next wave of incompetence so that it sounds competent.
And so it's harder to detect.
And my guess is that latter problem outweighs the benefit of the former.
Well, I mean, you took me to a whole different place.
We've already been having that.
I mean, we have a president that is giving speeches of people that gave this speech 10 or 20 years prior to him and sounding very presidential and getting caught plagiarizing John F. Kennedy's speech or Ted Kennedy's speech or all these other people's speech.
So plagiarism's not going away.
People sound very, very intellectual.
I think what is going to be interesting is we can right now produce a robot if we don't already have it that would be the UFC champion for every weight.
Okay.
We can probably produce a robot.
I don't know if you've seen that one robot that shoots three pointers and how accurate it is.
Have you seen that one or no?
Steph Curry of robots?
No, no, it's not even Steph Curry.
It's better than.
Steph is 43%, 42%.
This guy is like just hitting him left and right.
Okay, perfect accuracy and he's shooting the ball.
LaRobot, James?
LaRobot Jordan.
So, you know, we're already going in that direction, but do you really want to see robots playing?
No.
You know, if we can create a robot to go into UFC and fight them, am I really intimidated by that?
Probably not.
Now, the future of robots that are military, that's a different story.
That's concerning.
But, you know, intellectuals debating.
Like, if you were to have a debate with ChatGPT, you're probably going to lose the debate, not in a sense of who's right or who's wrong, who can recite more information and remember and memorize.
Well, the ability to memorize as an individual, it was very valuable skill set 20 years ago.
Today, you know, you can just go somewhere and do it.
But I think we're still going to want to see a hand-to-hand combat with people debating and going out versus just debating a machine.
Right.
And the question is, will you be able to know what you're seeing?
So I used to tell students that you are here in this classroom to enhance the capacity of your mind.
You are not here to learn things, right?
Things are now freely available on the internet.
You don't need to go to school to access them.
What you need to do here is practice how well your mind functions.
And so, yeah, you know, today, I would beat the pants off ChatGPT because I wouldn't let it come down to volumes of information.
On a volumes of information question, then, you know, if ChatGPT 3 can't do it, ChatGPT 4 will.
But at the level of the ability to Reason, and I'm not arguing that there's no ability because we've actually seen it, right?
The fact that this thing can write code and fixed code is incredible.
And that is a kind of thinking, even if it's not doing it in a way that we recognize as valid cognition.
But we do have to worry about what the future is going to look like.
And I already don't think that we know exactly what we see when somebody's giving, especially somebody very powerful is giving a speech on television.
But we're going to be in a world of confusion once you plug this thing into our mechanisms for sensemaking.
It's going to be, all I know is it's going to be interesting to see what happens next.
This thing is not going to be slowing down, by the way.
It keeps getting smarter and smarter.
Let's talk about COVID.
We had Neil deGrasse Tyson here.
Did you watch the clip where it was specifically the COVID clip, him and I talking about it, and he was giving his point of view?
When you heard him, I'm sure you were saying to yourself, Patrick, say this.
You know, he needs to know this, and what about this?
And what about that?
What was your take when you heard Neil deGrasse Tyson give his views on the vaccine?
I had a number of responses.
First, let's give him his due, though.
He was way out of his depth, but the point, his underlying point isn't incorrect.
It's just not applicable.
So his underlying point was that there is a game-theoretic problem that surrounds issues of public health, and that we are in a position to do ourselves great harm if we don't recognize that issue and address it.
And to give you a trivial example that everyone will agree on, the fact is that washing your hands after you use the toilet is not about protecting yourself.
It's about protecting other people.
And we formally and informally enforce a rule where people have to wash their hands because the benefit to all of us of having people who prepare our food, for example, wash their hands or anybody who's going to touch a doorknob is so great compared to the cost that we each pay for washing our own hands that it's a slam dunk winner, right?
So that kind of game theory exists potentially in the space of things like vaccination.
And I would just describe it this way.
If you had a good vaccine, one that really provided sterilizing immunity to a serious disease, then, and it had some risk, right?
There's what we call a free-rider problem, which is if you imagine that you start vaccinating people for this disease and that the benefit comes from having more and more people vaccinated so the disease can't find vulnerable individuals to use as vectors, then the closer you get to vaccinating everybody, the less value there is in vaccinating the next person because you've already got a population that has herd immunity.
So if you want to not experience, not face your share of the risk of that program, then you don't get vaccinated and everybody else is taking the risk on your behalf gives you the benefit too.
So the free rider comes out ahead because they get the benefit of the vaccination program and they don't pay the cost of it, right?
That's a real problem in the context of an actually good vaccine that carries some risk with it.
And what it will do is it may drive the number, the fraction of the population that gets the vaccine down to a point where we don't have herd immunity and the disease continues to circulate, right?
So that's the problem that he wants to solve.
The issue comes that we have a completely polluted set of information available to the public about the nature of the so-called vaccines that were deployed for COVID, about the effectiveness of those vaccines, that's those so-called vaccines at preventing disease, serious or otherwise, and the safety of those inoculations.
So what you heard in your exchange with him was a guy who effectively believed the public health apparatus in what it told him and couldn't imagine how anybody would reach a different conclusion.
Now, many of us, including me, did reach a different conclusion.
And, you know, for all of us, it started somewhere.
For Heather and me, it started when we were hearing about these so-called vaccines for the first time.
And we were told, like everybody else, that these things were highly effective against COVID and safe.
And when we heard the claim that they were safe, we knew something was wrong because there is no conceivable way.
There is literally no way they could be safe, right?
They could have been harmless.
They didn't turn out to be harmless, but they could have been harmless.
But safe implies that you know at the point that claim is made that they are harmless, that they don't have any long-term impacts that are worth knowing about.
And they hadn't been around long enough.
There was no prior example of such an inoculation used in another creature that would have allowed us to determine that.
So if these people were telling the truth, what they would have said was, well, I don't want to say because I think we now know that this wasn't the truth even then.
But if they had said, we don't know of any harms and we don't believe they are likely, but we cannot promise you they don't exist, right?
Then it would have been a very different story.
But at the point they said, oh, these things are safe, the point is, ah, that's a lie.
I don't know why it's a lie.
I don't know if they're solving a game theory problem and they actually believe that or they're solving a business problem and I'm the mark.
I don't know.
But I do know something's wrong with the claim.
And at the point that we realized something was wrong with that claim, we started to dig.
The further we dug, the worse it got.
And, you know, that sort of led us to a second line of inquiry, which was, well, what is the likelihood that a inoculation based on this technology would be safe?
And the answer was very, very low.
And the reason I say that is because the technology in question, especially the mRNA inoculation or transfectant, was so radically different from anything that had been successfully deployed before that the chances it was going to have some impact on the immune system, on the circulatory system, on neurological systems, the likelihood that there was going to be something in there that it disrupted was extremely high because complex systems are that way.
There are so many interrelated parts that there's no way to predict what the impacts will be.
And the likelihood of improving a functional organism with such a thing is low.
So I have two questions for you.
Sure.
One, did you watch the Pfizer CEO at Davos being chased down and asked and all the questions and they didn't have a response from, did you see that?
By the way, that clip is not on YouTube, so we're not going to be playing it.
It can be on Twitter.
You can go find it.
We'll put a link for it if people want to see it.
But it's a very interesting back and forth for two or three minutes, and the guy walked for a long time.
The question I got for you is the part, and this is where a lot of people message me.
The interview got nearly 100,000 comments is what it got.
Not in the span of six years.
In the span of two weeks, it got 100,000 comments.
First six hours, it already had 40,000 comments.
Neil deGrasse.
Yeah, there's a part where he says there's a public health contract.
that you have signed implicitly as a citizen of a country where in part we depend on each other for health, our wealth, our security, and the like.
And that contract is in the best scientific evidence available at the time.
If you do not get vaccinated, you will put other people in this organization at risk.
And that organization does not want to take that risk.
So you do not have this job anymore if you decline it.
So in with any public health decision, there has to be a consequence to you not participating in this social contract.
Which social contract is he talking about?
Public health contract is he talking about?
Well, this is exactly what I was getting at when I said we should give him his due.
In principle, he's not wrong.
The problem is that the person or the entity into which you have entered this contract, without your choice, by the way, but which you have been forced to enter this contract, is in breach of that exact contract, right?
That is why this is a non-question.
That is why there is exactly no right to mandate these things, is because in order to have any legitimacy to such a policy, you would have to take every precaution to protect the public from the perverse incentives inside of science, inside of pharma, inside of public health, and no precautions were taken.
In fact, what appears to have happened is the complete capture of the system that should be protecting us.
So in the case that you had a truly dangerous disease, you had, let's say that we had a true vaccine, something based on a reliable technology, something like an attenuated virus-based vaccine, in which proper testing had been done by an independent authority, which had evaluated the level of adverse events to be low,
had looked at past examples of similar vaccines and said the likelihood that there is something hiding here that we don't know is low.
Here are the all-cause mortality statistics on previous vaccines that have been out for many decades, right?
Then there would have been at least the basis for a discussion about a mandate.
But we are so far from having a structure that is capable of managing that responsibility that it is inconceivable that those mandates would have been justified.
And of course, the fact that they did not instantly get removed at the point we discovered these things did not block transmission of the disease tells you this wasn't about public health in the first place.
This was about something else.
I don't know that we know what that something else was, but it wasn't good.
It wasn't about us in the public.
It was about something.
Perhaps it was business.
That's the best case scenario is that this was greed driving this, but it certainly wasn't keeping people safe.
Money.
That's the floor.
The explanation could be worse, but at least this was runaway greed and a complete indifference to the suffering and death of other people's children.
Can I just ask a simple question?
This is not my wheelhouse.
I would like the audience to maybe get some very specific, clear answers.
Every country had sort of a different approach.
Every state in America had a different approach.
We saw what happened in California lockdowns, New York versus Florida, DeSantis, all that.
If you could give a grade to America's response as a country, and then what countries out there would you give an A to in the response to everything that happened in 2020?
I don't think an A was possible.
If we're grading on a curve, Sweden did not have the old educational system.
He wants to know whether he got an A or B. Right.
Planet Earth got an F minus on this one.
And, you know, Planet Earth got an F minus.
That's not even harsh enough.
Like, let's just be clear about this.
No matter what ended up being true about these so-called vaccines, about early treatment, about the proliferation of variants that comes from the vaccination campaign, no matter what we conclude on all of those topics,
at the very least, we have a virus that appears to have been the product of a circumvention of a law that was created by Congress to protect us from gain of function research that resulted in Anthony Fauci using a proxy to offshore that work to the lab in Wuhan, China, where they appear to have enhanced this virus's capacity to infect human beings.
Every single bad thing that happened to us, including the trillions of dollars of wealth that got evaporated, all of the people who have been killed by the virus or some consequence of lockdowns or some consequence of these inoculants, right?
All of those costs come from that error.
So, you know, this is a self-inflicted wound from one end to the other.
This is the greatest blunder in human history.
And for the same people who were responsible for that blunder to have been put in charge of protecting us when they clearly had perverse incentives was insane.
Any country to get an A on this exam would have had to call that out and say, actually, this can't be managed by the same people who created it.
We need to find the best minds, the most independent minds, and we need to start with a fresh sheet of paper that doesn't involve those people and figure out what the right thing to do is.
And if we had done that, even after the virus had gotten loose and spread around the globe, we would have done vastly better.
Would there have been deaths?
Yes, many.
But we would have done vastly better.
So the fact that at best provinces ignored the global response and did their own thing and saved their own populations, right?
Uttar Pradesh used ivermectin, right?
Do we know what the consequence of that was?
Not exactly.
But we don't know because there is an obsession with not finding out, much as there is an obsession with not finding out what adverse events are actually happening at what rate, right, from the mRNA vaccines.
So we simply have to escape the people who have control over what questions we are allowed to ask, what we are allowed to study, and we need to figure out what happens so that this can never happen again.
So let me ask you this question.
This is my challenge, and this is kind of where I was going with it.
What things are the left certain about, and what things are the right certain about?
What things are liberals certain about?
What things are conservatives certain about?
That they're not correct?
No, no.
Either way, listen, here's the Republicans are wrong.
The Democrats are wrong on this.
100% they're wrong on this.
Or we, the Democrats, are right on this.
We, the Republicans, are right on this.
What things on both sides are they certain they're right or wrong?
You know what I'm asking?
Not exactly.
So, for example, I'll give you an idea.
We make the right, the right thing to do is to get the vaccine or else, you know, the world's going to die.
The right thing to do is climate change.
We have to make that a priority because in 12 years, we may cease to exist.
You know, the right thing to do is we are 100% right.
Climate change is real.
You know, what things would you say the left is 100% certain they're right and the other side is wrong and then vice versa?
Well, I mean, I think this is just a different puzzle than the one you're asking about.
We have teams, right?
We have a blue team and a red team.
These things amount to jerseys.
And the fact is you have good soldiers on both sides, right, who wear the jersey and believe all of the stuff that the other people who wear that same jersey and go to the same parties believe.
And so it's just like a really insane slate of things that have been incoherently put together, right?
And it's really the hallmark of low-quality thinking that people sign up for the full slate, right?
It would be normal if the people that you were aligned with politically had a set of beliefs and you thought, well, I'm with them on this, this, and this.
I'm halfway there on this one, and I disagree with them on these two, right?
That would be normal.
But the idea that, oh, yeah, the New York Times, it speaks for me.
Wow, you got to be some amazing level of confused if you think.
I got a story for you.
I'm going to show here in a minute.
Not right now, but keep going.
And to give credit to New York Times, maybe it's not credit, but you'll see here in a minute.
Well, I look forward to hearing about that.
It's been some time since the New York Times deserved any credit.
You'll see what it is here in a second.
But anyway, so we could go through those slates of disagreements on both sides.
And the problem is that all of these things require adult-level nuance that isn't found in either of these simple sets of prescriptions.
So let me maybe set up why I'm asking the question.
Okay.
For me, I come from the school of thought of, man, we don't know.
It's a test.
We're testing.
And we could be wrong.
Meaning, Sweden took a test, took a risk.
Hey, work out for them.
DeSantis took a risk.
Could have worked out against them.
Sure.
Worked against them.
But it worked in his benefit.
Cuomo took a risk, got him fired, maybe for other reasons, but he got fired.
Newsom took a risk.
Not a good look for California.
You know, Illinois took a risk.
Texas took a risk.
South Dakota took a risk.
A lot of people took a risk.
Every leader took a risk.
The risk to me that was annoying was when people were 100% right, that they are 100% right, rather than saying, look, this is the strategy we're using to beat the enemy.
None of us know 100% whether we're going to be right or wrong.
Nobody knows 100%.
But this is the choices that we have.
Our encouragement is, if you're afraid you have an option, go take the vaccine.
But, you know, we feel confident about the amount of research that we've gotten so far.
Obviously, if we had five or 10 years, we would be more certain because we've done more testing.
But if you're still comfortable taking it, in the military, they came up to us.
Remember back in the days, anthrax shot?
So they came in the army.
This is how it was for the army, by the way, just so you know.
Now it's starting to make sense because I'm going back and realizing when my, you know, kind of like they came and they said, you guys are taking an anthrax shot.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
Well, you're government property.
And so the sergeants are talking to us and Sergeant Braxton, are these guys telling the truth?
You signed that contract, man.
In that situation, you did sign a contract.
You are government property.
You are theirs for eight years, right?
So guess what shot we had to take?
We had to take the shot.
Now we would say, so how much do we know about what's going on?
Not, you know, typically first line of defense, first testing goes through military, and you're a part of it, right?
Do you know how many people took it?
We're like, dude, am I going to grow, you know, fourth arm?
Am I going to be a two-headed Assyrian?
You know, what's going to happen here, right?
But people were scared.
And a lot of debate was going on.
But they told you this could cause a lot of side effects.
You have to sign this waiver that the military can never be held liable for XYZ.
And we had already signed it anyway, so we didn't have a choice.
But at least it's to say this comes with side effects.
You take the medication, what does the medication say?
You know, they made Philip Morris put what on the cigarettes.
This could cause cancer, bro.
If you want to smoke it, smoke, but you could die from cancer.
Guess what?
I'm okay with that because you're telling me what my risks are.
My concern was they were too confident that their way was 100% the right way, and the opposition had no opportunity to question them.
That was my biggest chance.
So when I'm asking a question about, you know, which side thinks they're more certain in different areas, the left was very, very certain their way was the right way or, you know, hit the road if you can take a different approach.
Well, two responses.
One, I noticed as my kids were growing up that I would ask them what they thought was going on in some case, and they would tell me, and I would say, how certain are you?
And they would say 100%.
And I would say, wrong.
And so anyway, I started to force them to put a number on the likelihood that they were right would get along.
And it could be a very tiny number, right?
But the point is, you need to have what, right?
It can be a fraction of 1%, but it can't be zero, right?
And I would also say that in the context of COVID and most significantly, the vaccination campaign, there was a nightmare scenario for Heather and me.
And unfortunately, we had to root for it, right?
This was torture because on the one hand, we were confident that we could not be confident of the safety of these things.
Nobody could.
There was no way you could have certainty about their safety because they had not been around long enough to know what their consequence would be a year down the road or two years down the road.
And that's a reasonable level of skepticism.
It should have been uncontroversial.
But the problem is, what could have happened is we could have said, hey, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
These things can't be safe.
That has to be a lie because nobody knows what happens three years down the road.
And there could have been no consequences, which would have been the best outcome by far, right?
And it would have ruined our credibility because most people don't understand that to say that is not safe is different than saying that does harm, right?
So we left the door open to any possibility and just said, look, the only thing to be certain of is that we can't be certain of something like safety in this case.
And so we had to root for our own destruction.
We had to root that the vaccines would be harmless.
And it was a very uncomfortable spot to be in because, you know, on the one hand, you want them to be harmless, of course.
And on the other hand, I don't know what we do for a living after that.
So that's the predicament of adult-level nuance, right?
It's not a safe business.
And How confident are you that now that McCarthy and some of the guys pushed, they went 15 rounds until he finally was announced Speaker of the House because there was a lot of deals being made where they're going to go investigate Fauci and all of the vaccine stuff.
How confident are you that Rand Paul and his camp, they're going to get to the bottom of this?
And we're going to find out exactly how this thing got out, how much, you know, like just the same thing that we learned about Twitter files.
Are we going to learn new things about it, controversy about it?
Are we eventually going to get to the truth?
I doubt it.
Really?
I don't.
I think we will get to more truth than we've got, but the system has a way of protecting itself.
And what it's going to do is reveal no more than it has to.
And so from our perspective in the public, if we don't want this to happen to us again, we have to push so that the amount that it has to cough up is a greater fraction of the whole.
But no, I strongly doubt we will fully get to the bottom of what happened here.
Quick point about this 100% level of certainty in general.
Like we've all been around those people.
It's like, how confident are you?
100%, bro.
I'm telling you, it's 100%.
You know how, like, in polling, we've seen the pollsters get it wrong for decades now.
Why can't they implement this margin of error?
It's usually, what, 3%, give or take?
Why can't we take that and put that into people's opinions or even something as essential as COVID or anything like this?
It's like, all right, you can no longer say 100%.
Sick question.
Sick question.
We got two minutes.
So this is what I want to do before going there.
Can you pull up?
We have to give a shout out to New York Times, our sponsors, especially after this article you read.
I'm sure you guys are going to be buying their magazine.
I'm convinced you're going to be subscribing to them and reading every article of theirs.
When I read this, I'm like, what?
Like the level of stuff they write.
I mean, you think this is a joke.
Okay, here's New York Times.
There has never been a better time to be short.
Okay.
So this article goes down, keep going down, and it says how it is bad.
Get something I'm saying.
From where I stand at 5'7, being tall is widely held fantasy is superior.
It made sense to fawn overheight when facilitated ages ago when necessary is defending yourself.
If you go all the way to the bottom and read this article, you know what it's really saying?
How tall people should stop having kids, okay?
How shorter people are better for society.
Why we should go back to being shorter, not being taller, why it's not fair.
I mean, the average person who has logic who reads this says, who even approved this opinion to be written with the brand New York Times?
Unless if you're just trying to get a lot of eyeballs for people to talk about it, okay?
What do you see with the level of credibility New York Times has today?
I know you're a big fan of this.
I know you're like a big spokesperson for them going around always trying to get people to subscribe.
I mean, I'm just endlessly shocked and disappointed by the New York Times and The Washington Post too and really all of the mainstream media.
But the question is why?
Is this Project Mockingbird just simply one?
Or is this the breakdown in competence having produced a newspaper that wouldn't know news if it hit it in the face?
Or would you secretly fantasize about owning them?
The New York Times?
I never fantasize about owning the New York Times.
No, you wouldn't want to be like the editor-in-chief or...
I think they've done too much damage to the brand for it to be anything other than funny.
But what's your level of certainty, though?
100%?
90%.
Where are you at on this?
That it would be good to.
Oh, the New York Times, I'm at 3%.
Leave a margin of error.
That's a callback to my family.
There you go.
I like it.
Okay, by the way, I wish we had more time.
Truly enjoyed it.
I just looked at it.
Like, oh, shoot, I need another two hours with this guy.
I really enjoyed being.
I'm looking forward to bringing you back, and hopefully, next time, Rob, next time we do it, let's do it at a time that's not on a dream team call so we can go more than two hours because two hours with Brett is not enough time.
We're just getting started.
But for folks who enjoy today's podcast and you'd like to find more information on Brett, Brett has a podcast called The Dark Horse, if I'm saying it correctly.
Dark Horse Podcast.
Dark Horse Podcast.
You can find it all over the place.
What's the main place you'd like us to push it to if you were to go to one spot?
Spotify.
Spotify.
Let's put the Spotify link to the podcast so people can go find it.
