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Aug. 12, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:08:20
“CIVILISATION IS COLLAPSING” - Bret Weinstein EXCLUSIVE On DEEP STATE CONTROL & MIGRATION - SF 428
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand and what a special day it is.
Whether you're watching us on YouTube or wherever you receive this information, perhaps you're in a capsule in outer space at some far-flung distant time, or perhaps 48 hours have passed and everything we're discussing is absolutely irrelevant because the news cycle Moves at such a pace now that Kamala Harris has probably been replaced by a cyborg and Donald Trump has probably been shot with a crossbow.
How fast is the world moving?
When will it slow down and when will we be given a reasonable perspective?
That last question at least I can ask directly because we are being joined by my beloved friend Friend Brett Weinstein.
Brett, thank you so much for being with us today.
And if you're if you're a member of our AwakendWonder community on Locals, you can watch us.
You can watch these interviews early.
Brett, you know, I'm never confident with a Stein or Steen.
And I feel like I saw you twitch.
Is it Einstein?
Weinstein?
Can the record reflect that you are the one who invoked Einstein here?
I had nothing to do with it, but yes, it rhymes with Einstein.
There you go.
That's the mnemonic, isn't it?
Brett Weinstein.
I should know by now, but it's a difficult thing to, you know, I struggle.
I don't even know who my children are, at least not all of them.
I even still screw it up on occasion.
Thanks, Brett.
Thank you for joining us today, and thanks for participating in a conversation that I suppose we should own.
We've recorded it.
But Brett, the first thing that I want to say is, I've noticed a change in the type of content that you're putting out, which I attribute to you either becoming sort of more visionary and shamanic, certainly your outfit would suggest that, Or you're beginning to panic about the sort of potential apocalyptic end times that we may be entering.
Do you feel that something is cyclically shifting in a way that perhaps Terence McKenna might have judged to be a kind of, I don't know, a kind of hyper-reality, that events themselves are happening at a faster and more bewildering rate?
There is no question that remarkable things are up and the pace of it is insane.
I will say I have been concerned just from first principles about the stability of our civilization for decades.
So that's not a new concern.
But the various, we can see various things that suggest Kind of new new level of jeopardy and it's very hard to interpret what they are.
I will say our information environment has Turned to garbage and that makes it hard to know what actually constitutes evidence how one should interpret it but the the evidence that things are unstable and dangerously so seems to be everywhere and One of the examples where this particular phenomenon started to land on me was, say, with the Douglas Murray-Medhi Hussain debate.
Both, I would say, brilliant communicators.
Both men who can put across arguments very lucidly.
Both use evidence and rhetoric incredibly skillfully.
But you don't even have to be A sort of a communicator of that standing.
I just noticed like in you know if I look at social media or various video-on-demand type platforms that I could watch if I wanted the same clip of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump and see like David Pakman on the left saying this is evidence that Kamala Harris is fantastic and that Donald Trump's an absolute imbecile and then I could watch I don't know Shapiro or Crowder or someone on the right It's almost as if the idea of an objective reality is fraying in a way that perhaps philosophy and ontology might have offered us previously.
Now we can sort of see it in media, like there isn't one reality that we're experiencing.
Well, I mean, you probably know what I'm going to say to that.
There is one reality that we are experiencing, but there are two perceptual versions of it that cannot be reconciled.
And part of that, I have a feeling, is an echo of a historical pattern that has undoubtedly been lived many times, and another part of it is probably downright inorganic.
It's just being created for us where we are being shepherded into silos that then govern what we perceive.
So I've been struggling for the right metaphor and I believe Plato's cave is a very important story, and there is a reason that we keep retelling that story in updated versions.
The Truman Show is Plato's Cave, The Matrix is Plato's Cave, and At some level, it needs another update where you have a kind of fractal Plato's Cave.
Because what you're really describing is two cave walls with different movies on them.
And the populations are sitting next to each other.
So they don't understand that they are seeing two different movies.
But that's what they're seeing, and neither of them is reality.
That's the problem.
Right, what's outside the cave is yet a third narrative and I would imagine a guy like you is well-versed in Plato's Cave and you know exactly what happens to the guy who discovers that the real world is outside and then comes back and tries to liberate his comrades.
Yes, I... And it does not go well.
He's greeted as a kind of king and celebrated, gets a lovely girlfriend and lives happily ever after, I think is how that allegory ends.
That's not how I remember it, but...
Well, I take issue with that.
I'm a scholar of the classics.
Brett, I was thinking, before we go more deeply into some of the cultural paraphernalia around this election, I was struck by, for example, when I was at the RNC, who could not be struck by the phenomena of Hulk Hogan tearing open his shirt.
And I was thinking, my God, what an outrageous and extraordinary spectacle this is.
Haughty intellectual self, metropolitan elitist self even, was somewhat offended by the kind of trash symbols that were on display there.
Then I thought, well, God, is it really any different than George Clooney endorsing then unendorsing or Jack Black?
What are we talking about now?
Is it just a matter of taste?
You know, because if, or Megan Thee Stallion, you know, like if If celebrity endorsements are permissible, are we just now quarrelling about the aesthetics or the class?
In a way, that does return us quite quickly to some of the key themes in the election and some of the key divisions that are being addressed.
Snobbery, basket of deplorables, loathing of elites.
In a sense, the cultural artefacts define the tension of these events.
Perhaps more articulately than policy, maybe.
Well, I think you are exactly right that the battle between the rank and file is about taste.
And when I say the rank and file, that extends into people who believe they are elites in these circles.
Hollywood turns out to be the useful, I think they are important in a political sense.
They're actually being marshaled like chess pieces.
But you're right.
It's very easy to look at the one that isn't your team and think, oh my god, do they not see it?
Do they not understand how grotesque and phony this is?
And then to look at your own team and not see it.
That's the problem.
And this is a general feature of humans.
when you come home. There's this brief window where you can see your own
culture. I find the advertisements of my own culture particularly shocking when I
return from somewhere and I think, oh my goodness, people don't, they don't see the
manipulation. They think it's not working on them and yet obviously it is. So we,
the problem is that our election is about something.
It's about something profoundly important, and it may even be the inflection point for the future of Western civilization.
I could make that argument.
But that significance does not show up in the theater that is taking place around the campaign.
That is, I don't know, there are various metaphors for it, as ponies and balloons would be an obscure reference,
but nonetheless it's a consumer good that is being used to cloak, I don't know, a couple of different Trojan horses in
this case.
So again, we're looking at ancient themes that now need a fractal reinterpretation in order for us to understand what we're seeing.
While we remain corralled within cultural arguments that I get the sense either side would be happy for us to remain within, I also feel that there are issues that are escalating in a pace that are impossible to ignore but somehow will also remain unaddressed.
I wonder if your perspective, Brett, has changed on a subject like migration.
20 years ago, when I was starting out in stand-up, I would have kind of ridiculed the establishment media for their general assertion that mass migration presents the threat of insurgency, or that some of the migrants might be terrorists, let alone anything more Hocus Pocus or a Coco like that there might be so fighting
age males disproportionately represented who a preordained signal
could participate in false flag events or even you know real
events real crises real conflicts, but my country now is Increasingly experiencing a lot of disturbance and to one
the subjects we touched upon a minute ago Like I can watch like perfectly credible
Commentators of the left talk about riots and disturbances that are definitely connected to migration
Whether that is just the way that the issues are perceived or whether they are actually connected to migration
Certainly, you know, the people in the regions where the protests or riots are taking place feel like the issue that they're confronting is migration and they will condemn the sort of commentators as sort of racist and right-wing.
But it's a subject that's becoming more and more prevalent, and the framing around it is changing.
I wonder how you feel, what kind of resolutions are available for something that's so contentious, incendiary, and by its nature, divisive.
We're going to leave YouTube now.
Click the link in the description for the answer to that question and many more wonderful musings from Brett Weinstein.
See you in a second.
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Join us over there.
Well, I grew up in Los Angeles, so this was an issue as long as I can recall.
It has always struck me as one of the more difficult issues.
In Los Angeles, there was a lot of grumbling about illegal migrants from Central America, but there was also a lot of awareness that these people were playing an incredibly economy and that it wasn't clear that the economy of California would function if they weren't there so there was a kind of grudging gratitude it always was complex I think what has largely changed is that whoever or whatever it is that is setting policy across the West has lost any and all allegiance with the population
This is all a question of moving labor and possibly voters to places where they are desired by some team that doesn't have a name, and again we are left with a kind of theater.
At the level that we can see it, that has nothing to do with the actual issue.
Yes, we have military-age males who have no... they do not, in many cases, aspire to become part of the culture that they are joining.
That ought to be a huge red flag any time it happens.
You do not want to allow people to enter your countries if they don't like them.
That's just very clear.
But from the point of view of somebody who is trying to marshal history in a particular direction and does not care what the consequences, the negative consequences are, that doesn't matter.
So I think we are living... The story of migration is...
Almost completely false.
And you could see this when Donald Trump was running for the presidency the first time, and the issue of the wall that he wanted was front and center.
I remember thinking, I have no idea.
One team tells me that a wall is perfectly insane, and the other team thinks it's And the only thing I know for sure is that I don't know enough about borders and migration to know
We're having a battle.
People are certain they know, but I don't know how anybody on either team is sure of the details.
And, you know, I think history has proven that Trump was at least thematically correct.
You can argue that a wall would be an ineffective barrier, but you can't argue in the U.S.
that it was an unnecessary one or that it was an overreaction, given what we have now seen on our southern border.
So, you know, I'm very alarmed that the migration, it is not an accident that you in the UK are facing a migration
problem that includes a great many people who are hostile to your culture, and that we in the US are facing the same
thing, right?
And that same thing with continental Europe, that is not an accident. This is a matter of some master plan that has
been, you know, shown to elites with power and they are bringing it about without telling us what it is that they're
trying to achieve and what costs they're going to allow us to pay.
When you use the adapted Plato's cave analogy with dual walls playing out different scenarios to an audience seated
together, It seems obvious that the same way that there might be a taste issue easily discernible when it comes to figures like Hulk Hogan or George Clooney, one side enjoying the lurid peroxide and brisket tanned wrestler, the others the sort of cafe coffee merchant swoonsome hearthrob, that when it comes to a subject like migration I've
But also, you know, like when I think of the idea of refugees, people that have been displaced by war or rampant corporatism, the exploitation of, as a British person, former colonial nations, and I'm sure as an American, the global south and CIA's meddling and coups in basically every single country, South of your border there, that you get a sense, oh, does my country bear some responsibility for all of this displacement?
And the answer is possibly yes, and indeed it is yes, but that doesn't actually negate the secondary point or the point that proceeds from that one.
The same interests likely benefit from mass migration and the destabilization that it brings, even if it's in the sort of obvious and rudimentary way that it introduces, as you say, competition for wages for lower paid work and destabilizes the proletariat or working class people, whatever term you choose.
And then the kind of theories that even five years ago, Brett, I just wouldn't have thought about Bringing up, like, replacement theory, or that this is part of some global scheme to dilute, disrupt, break the national identity of countries, or, you know, Western countries, for want of a better phrase.
And now, it seems like you have to somehow be able to simultaneously hold the idea that there's a requirement for compassion for refugees, and indeed, what's the solution?
Again, you know, not to get too tangential, but like, when I hear better qualified people than me, and God knows there's
enough of them, talking about a subject like war, they point out, well what's the aim in the
Ukraine-Russia conflict? What would constitute success? When would you end it? Is it the taking
of Crimea? When does it stop?
And perhaps the same could be said with a subject like migration. What is your view?
Where does this end?
How are we going to contend with it?
How are we going to deal with accommodating a new and, as you say, in some instances, significantly a hostile population?
And how do we deal with the causes?
of this migration, the economic causes of this migration.
Is there a plan?
Is anyone discussing it?
And is the reason we're not discussing it is because, as is often the case, the plan
is playing out right now and it can't be discussed because if we were appraised of it, we would
want to prevent it.
Yeah, if our information environment was at all functional, we would recognize that we
are putting in jeopardy the very structures that we are dependent on to have a productive,
vibrant, fair society.
And I'm not arguing that we ever got there, but we certainly had the formula.
We knew what we were trying to do.
And we made tremendous progress in a short period of time, a couple of centuries, and really anybody who has traveled to other parts of the world that function under different systems has at least a basis for comparison.
And the idea that we are going to be induced to fight over a kind of theater rather than do what The American founders certainly intended, and the idea that has spread across the West, which is that the consent of the governed is the sole basis, the sole legitimacy of governance, and that we have to return to discussing actual questions, agreeing on what we are trying to achieve, and disagreeing over what the best way to do it is.
And that is just simply not where we are.
I do.
I often find when I talk to you that you say seven really important things and by the time you're done I can only remember two of them.
In this case I want to return, if you'll allow it, to the question of replacement.
Because I think it is a perfect test case for something that your audience and my audience need to be aware of.
Replacement is an absolutely You cannot introduce it into a conversation without causing people to divide into factions that cannot stand each other.
The problem is, replacement is, I would argue, a racist version of a completely obvious, totally analytical story of what I would call displacement.
I would just say the game of evolution is very frequently if not arguably always a game of displacement.
That is what creatures are programmed to do.
They are programmed to displace other creatures from resources and then grow their population and anyway there's a complex story about how that unfolds but We are stuck because people like you and me who say, look, how can this not be a question of one population entering a society and altering it demographically?
How can that not be an important story?
But the problem is, as soon as you say replacement, the question is, well, now look at who your bedfellows are.
Right?
So, I use the term displacement.
I will freely acknowledge that there's not... you could swap the terms.
If history had decided to call the theory of the radical right displacement, and I had said the alternative to use is replacement, that would make equally good sense.
But I guess my point is we have to figure out how to have that discussion without bringing in an ideology.
We have to be able to have that discussion in coldly analytical terms and just say, what does happen if you rapidly bring in a large number of people who have a coherent culture that they are not expected to change?
People who don't like the society that they're joining and make no bones about it.
How many of those people can you bring in at once before you destabilize the society into a It doesn't matter which country we're talking about.
It presumably has an analytical answer.
Yeah, it's interesting that you say that and it's interesting that you sort of note that there are degrees or sort of a kind of a spectrum of what Hillary Clinton might refer to as deplorables that you would have to accept that somewhere on the line between sort of a civic-minded patriots and the Hades there are kind of various iterations of racist like that right and that's in a sense because we've entered a polarized society and polarity i suppose doesn't just mean a high chart highly charged discourse it means the reduction of a spectrum into two ossified opposing camps both of which exist on some kind of bell curve and it's difficult for us to
Acknowledge that.
You know, like often when I'm streaming and trying to have conversations about Middle Eastern politics or war, I have the same concern that the liberal establishment are wrong and are ultimately water carrying for global corporatism.
But in advocating for peripheral voices, it's very easy to find yourself Well, I will say I fear this and I would also say I am heartened.
up alongside groups that would have just been inconceivable to me not that long
ago, Brett? Well I will say I fear this and I would also say I am heartened. One
of the things, the silver linings to the dark cloud we seem to be in, is that
there are many people in the alternative media space who are actually threading
that needle successfully and it's not an easy thing to do with a number of us who
are able to recognize these issues without falling into the two camps that
have this incredible gravity to them.
Hmm.
Uh, is large.
We are having, I mean, right here we're having a conversation between two of us and the network of people who could have that conversation is not only pretty large, but it's also pretty well known.
So this is, this is really the battle that's shaping up.
Can we keep the narrative from falling into these, uh, incorrect wells, you know, the, The hat interpretations that cause you to imagine that what we are supposed to do next is very clear.
And maybe the next step is figuring out how to phrase the things that we should absolutely all agree on.
And there are a great many of them, and all you need to do is spot them, and anybody who is not a total zombie will recognize it.
Right?
How many people do I want in my country who don't like it?
Well, zero.
Now some of the people who don't like it are Americans.
They have every right to be here, as much right as I do.
But in terms of letting people in, do I want to let in anybody who doesn't like the place?
No.
Nor should any American who wants it to work well.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be disappointed with how it functions.
I'm frequently disappointed with it.
But it's an obvious thing.
And we can do the same thing, you know, if we talked about the environment, right?
Suddenly the world will divide and there will be those who are shouting about the climate hoax and they will see that as synonymous with environmentalism, right?
And then there will be those who can't imagine That humans are not a scourge that the world would be better off without.
But really, we should all agree that it is not the right of any generation to deliver a degraded planet to the next generation.
Right.
Maybe there are moments where we can't avoid that, but in general, if we have the option, it is our obligation to preserve the planet in at least the quality that we got it, if not return it to a state of prior health that it has fallen from.
Everyone should be able to agree on that, and my argument would be that almost across the board, there is a third position That at least at the level of values and what we are trying to achieve would unite almost everybody.
And it would bring all of the reasonable people together.
And there is a reason that that set of things on which all reasonable people would agree is not the most important political force across the West at this moment.
And it's not an organic reason.
It is being destabilized so that instead of finding that position and governing ourselves in the way that our founders intended, what we are going to do is tear each other apart over Let's take a moment for a quick word from one of our sponsors.
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All right, let's get back to this content.
It's great analysis.
And when you say it's like it's not organic, it's nevertheless likely sort of biological.
What was I listening to earlier?
It was Edward Snowden talking about how Bitcoin would ultimately, unless they were to insert certain provisions, become sort of trackable and traceable.
And, you know, obviously I don't understand it, but Edward Snowden explained it.
And he said, like, for example, there are people that might be using Bitcoin to pay for OnlyFans and they won't want people.
And I was thinking, all right, like, even when you're dealing with something like at the forefront, as it were, of technology, it comes down to something as sort of primal as shame.
And even though I've sensed that the polarizing culture wars are definitely a construct from which both sides benefit, It's fuel and raw material are embedded in our nature and perhaps easily understood with that, the maxim of, you know, we have, you know, Neolithic hardware and sort of post-enlightenment software and now like sort of late technological sort of software which sort of stimulated
Into these unnatural states, because when you were saying that for a minute, I was like, hold a minute, Brett's right.
We could like, you know, this is what the sort of success around Bobby Kennedy's campaign was for a while.
There's a lot of people don't feel like they want to be in an adversarial tribalized space.
A lot of people think that there's a sort of a return to kind of reason, but that moment potentially is passing.
And I wonder how you sort of think that our primal nature, like how much of this is a result of our nature and a kind of a manipulation of our nature and what the solutions could be and how you'd form a manifesto and communicate a manifesto that wouldn't be assailed from all sides in the way that perhaps Bobby Kennedy's has been.
You're asking exactly the right question, and I believe where you started with shame
is a perfect example.
Somehow, we decided that shame was bad and pride was good.
And you could tell a story in which that was the Jenga piece that got removed that caused civilization to collapse, which it hasn't quite done yet, but it's sort of happening, maybe a little slower than some of us expected.
What you're talking about is the interface between a creature, humans.
You're correct about Neolithic hardware and post-industrial software or whatever version of that we would want to clean up.
But the real problem is every creature is dependent for health on living in an environment that is a close enough match to the one in which it came to be.
And human beings are utterly extraordinary in the sense that we have, our genome has offloaded much of the heavy lifting and all of the heavy lifting involved in what's uniquely human to the software layer, which allows us to be updated with a software update rather than a hardware update, rather than a genetic change.
So that is why we can take A platform that was pre-farming for 200,000 years at least.
There's no way to start that clock, but millions of years if we relax the species boundary a little bit.
Nonetheless, you've got this pre-farming creature living a high-tech life.
Reasonably comfortably, because the software can be swapped out of the platform, the hardware platform is a generalist platform.
The problem is, the pace of change is so high that we cannot evolve the software to match the environment.
for one thing, even the environment you grew up in is not the environment that you're an
adult in, and so your developmental program produces a suboptimal output for your adult
environment.
And the punchline of this is, if you were a mechanic working on a car, right, car comes
in, doesn't start, you don't know why.
You would behave scientifically, you would change one thing at a time, and you would
see if it altered anything about the behavior of the car, right?
And then you'd put it back and you'd alter the next thing, put it back.
So that at the point that the car starts, you know what happened.
And if you get through all of the things it might be, and nothing has caused the car to
start, then you know you have two problems.
And now you start saying, which combination of things will get the car to start?
What we are doing is, every generation, we're changing dozens of fundamental things without having any understanding of what they do and how they work.
Right?
So, let's... The new atheists are, I'm sure, sick of hearing me say this, but Deciding that because there's no evidence for a sky god, that the vast investment that every human culture has made in a spirit realm is a mind virus, it's an error, it's a pathology, is insane.
The fact that you don't know what those beliefs do does nothing to the logic that says whatever they do is very frickin' important.
Right?
Throw it out at your peril.
And that's really the point.
Okay?
We threw out religion.
At our peril.
We threw out shame.
At our peril.
Every time.
We threw out the logic of the universe that derived from the fact that sex was a very high stakes activity.
This one absolutely caused us to become unhinged, and I'm not telling you that it didn't do fantastic, wonderful things.
It brought women into the... I'm trying to say this delicately, but the stuff that men used to do, the stuff of history that women were excluded from by virtue of the fact that they had this other very important role that very often was not recorded in history.
Birth control allowed women to participate in that story of human progress in a very significant way from which humanity has benefited.
However, it removed the logic of how humans are supposed to interact and it caused us to go crazy.
That's predictable if you understand that That our societal health is no different from our psychological health is no different from our physiological health.
These are brilliantly architected systems in which there is no manual that tells us what does what and how and when you change something the chances that you are going to make things better are low and the chances that you are going to make things better without a massive set of unintended consequences is near zero.
God, that's such a great answer, there's so much there.
Towards the end of what you were explaining for us, Brett, you came to the wide notion of progress, which I think is one of the great myths of our species, and indeed the very notion of modernity is predicated on the idea that there is a telos, which Functionally may as well be a kind of religion, like a movement towards God, a transcendence, whether that's for an individual or a species, that we are progressing, that there is something linear, some gradient upon which we are moving, all of which are sort of like sub-biological categories that I imagine one way or another hang from the vine of our terminal time here.
I wonder if we lose something in the sort of common image system that I introduced,
but which you're plainly more familiar with, of software and hardware, because when you
started to unpack the adaptability of that software, it made me curious as to whether
we were moving beyond the realm of the solely biological, and you'll know that I'm moving
towards the supernatural, because the fact that so much of our potency cannot be charted
either because it's built upon networks that are difficult to observe due to their complexity
or because they exist in a realm for which there isn't even sensory instruments yet.
And that for me is odd, that when we could have given an example such as diet as an easy
way of charting how our adaptations could be disadvantageous, the sort of high availability
of sugar and fat being perhaps...
The most obvious one, and the introduction of sedentary lifestyles and technology, you instead adopted for sort of the ontological shift that secularism most plainly classified the removal of God, the slow removal of God, and the replacement of deism with kind of humanism, materialism, individualism, progressivism, all of that whole rubric, I would say.
A flow out from the, you know, sort of the Nietzschean regicide or deicide or whatever the right word would be for that.
Then I wanted to sort of touch too upon that there might be more subtle determinants that are difficult to observe that are actually the sort of currents that are moving our culture.
That was something that I sort of started to think about when you talked about the advent of birth control and how that sort of moved Um, an entire class of people, an entire sex of people, and we're sort of now seeing how kind of Baroque that expression has become.
Different forms of identity, different forms of reality, sort of subjectivism becoming sort of oddly materialized.
And then I wanted to query Your use of the word logic, which might be replaced with a word like custom in some senses, because there's no reason to suggest that in a cosmological sense it might not be quite a parochial thing, before returning to the idea of shame, which I have obviously a more pejorative take on, but I wonder where you'll go with it.
I was discussing shame laterally because You know, we talk about it a lot in recovery, shame, and I've often considered it to be the ground floor of sort of personal decimation and a kind of suicide fuel, that there's a lot lower you can go than shame.
But that doesn't mean that from a teleological sense, say, it needn't it couldn't function and indeed ought function as a kind of
catharsis because when I was talking about it recently I said that what shame perhaps is
is the acknowledgement that personal reliance has now absolutely failed and you are
going to have to become available to a new set of ideas and in my culture that would be of
course God or Christ that once you've arrived at the point of shame you have wasted your
resources are gone now you are spent and you are done and the elevation of pride in various ways and
the word pride to a virtue as opposed to a sin is an argument that's more commonly had.
But I just wondered, really, Brett, I know there aren't questions really there, there's
just a sort of a palette of musings for you to unpick. No, no, it's wonderful and it has caused me
to write things on my notepad that I have a feeling if somebody were to find this notepad they
would want to get me to a shrink quick.
But I swear these things make sense.
Let's Let's just put a couple of pieces of toolkit here, and I think they will wrestle a coherent picture out of what you've just said.
First of all, we make some... There's some simple things to say.
Human beings, no creature, does expensive things over long periods of evolutionary time for no reason.
All of the stuff that we do, whether we're talking about chemical stuff that we do, or behavioral stuff that we do, that's expensive and goes on, has a purpose.
An evolutionary purpose.
Doesn't mean we know what it is.
In many cases we don't.
But it's fair to say, something is an adaptation, but I don't know what it's for.
In the case of something like shame, it's an obvious adaptation.
Shame costs you something to have.
It costs you something in multiple ways.
I mean, there's the trivial, potentially trivial cost of the just neurobiology of shame, right?
It costs something to experience the emotion, the neurons that allow you to feel it, it
costs something to make.
But more importantly, shame alters your opportunities in life.
It alters your opportunities in life in ways that sometimes remove the possibility of increasing
your fitness by producing more offspring or whatever.
So, it is a conspicuous adaptation.
The idea that we have to justify that it may be doing something useful for us is nonsense.
The burden of proof is on anyone who says that it's a bad thing inherently.
No.
Just, you know, it's like any sort of negative emotion.
It's there to drive you away from things that are evolutionarily bad for you, even if they might be good for you in the short term.
The wisdom that comes from having something like shame is about protecting yourself and building a better life in the long term.
The second little piece of toolkit that I think we need is there's a temptation to divide the world into cultural phenomena and biological phenomena.
And I fault my own discipline for allowing people to come to think this way.
Both culture and genes are biological.
They are equally biological.
Culture is a biological solution for problems that the genes were in a poor position So, culture itself is the genes solving a problem by removing things and putting them in a system that is capable of adapting much more quickly.
That means that when we get to all of the stuff that exists in our culture, the beliefs, and this is what you're talking about, the relationship with the spirit world, what we can say for sure, logically, is that's there for a very good reason, or at least it has been.
We can't say for sure that that reason continues, but the point is, until you know what it was for, you cannot say that the utility of that has been diminished.
And so, I would say many of these things, I would use the analogy of chi that underlies the practice of acupuncture.
As far as we can tell, chi is not a substance.
We can't find qi, but practitioners who believe in qi and act in a way to control its flow through the body have a demonstrable positive effect on their patients in predictable ways.
So I would argue, qi, and I don't mean to diminish it this way, I have to talk this way in order to keep this rigorous, qi is a metaphor, the utility of which we do not understand, and that does not reduce that utility one bit.
So, I think I'm very comfortable living in a world in which I know that there are tremendously powerful metaphors that, as far as we can tell, do not land on substances in the universe.
They do not describe processes in a precise way, but acting as if they do is good enough for the overall job.
And then this goes to the last point I'll make here, which is You describe this sort of false belief in progress.
I also believe it is false in a way.
We are obviously changing.
We are becoming more powerful.
There is an argument to be made that that is progress.
We are also becoming better at being fair.
I would say in the last decade or two we may have backslid, but we were making great progress on
getting along with other people and ignoring genetic spellings which are irrelevant to us.
But, the game that evolution is really playing is for us to think that what we're doing is progressing, when really what we're doing is persisting.
Evolution is not about how you got to the present, it's about whether you got to the present.
It's very hard to get into the future, and the farther we look into the future, the harder it is to do things now that will allow you to be there.
That's really the whole game.
Humanity should be behaving in ways that maximize the chances of us being in the distant future, and many of the means to that end involve us seeing beyond our traditional animosities, seeing beyond our genes' desire to have us exterminate each other and displace each other, and We need that enlightenment, whether it comes in a metaphorical chi-like story, or it comes in a literal story, or it comes in a story that works at both levels because different people need to hear it different ways.
That's the game.
Can we figure out how to phrase our jeopardy such that people wake up to the fact that they do not want to be caught between You know, Hulk Hogan and George Clooney, right?
That's not the game.
That is a distraction.
That's two different movies on two different cave walls that have very little to do with reality.
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Without accepting the pragmatism that you're offering of surely our function is to endure, to sustain, to not overly narrativize evolutionary or epistemological journeys.
We have to, if we're going to reject the idea that sort of staying alive is a principle then we are literally I suppose at the cusp and perhaps even beyond it of nihilism.
When you talk about there being a kind of a, I want to say, revolving or at least, there's a word for it, you might know it, like in the heart there's a valve that opens and closes like that, you know?
Yeah.
I was thinking that you're suggesting that the valve between biology and culture is like that, that there is not a hard line between biology and culture, that cultures are an adaptation that comes out of biology, and of course I suppose you can't argue with that.
But when you sort of talk about where the line between a discernible, identifiable, solid, immutable, substance-oriented reality and a set of metaphors is, I wonder if we once again enter into a kind of a comparable problem if that culture is responding to a kind of chi of the
Gaia body in a sense who is it that's maneuvering chi or power around to influence and control a
culture who is situated in the needles and who is determining where it flows and I wonder if
You know part of what you're suggesting with acupuncture is that there's a kind of a sort of a Tinkerbell power to it
Or maybe even a sort of a double slip power that that chi collapses into obedience
according to the faith of the practitioner because surely culture is being
orchestrated in that manner not only orchestrated in terms of its melody but in terms of the
establishment of the stave upon which the tunes are being written and you've sort of acknowledged again from a
kind of practical and almost you know the sort of contemporary talk of being cultural
Christian sort of seems you know redolent here but that's not the type of Christian I
am.
I'm the type of Christian that believes that the creator of the simulation came inside the simulator and died in order to collapse together two sort of adverse and opposing realities.
And I just find it so...
Beautiful that virtues that might otherwise be arbitrary and at best just survival strategies acquire in Christianity, but you know in other places I'm sure, but I'm saying specifically in Christianity, a radiant meaning where practice and beauty and atemporality and omniscience and omnipotence all swirl together in the figure of a man that sort of seems so sort of near to summarizing it that obstreperousness aside
Why not sort of accept it in faith?
And there's something that happens that I don't get, except to rely on a metaphor that one of my teacher's sons came up with, and it seems apposite that the Olympics he's on, that there are some concepts that are so hard to lift that you may as well be a power lifter, temporarily able to raise a bar above your head for a second before dropping it.
And when I sort of approach Christ like that, sort of like, you know, and I know that it's with grace and with faith and that, if anything, suggests letting go rather than clutching and grasping and straining.
But what I'm saying is, is because of the limitations of my ability to hold knowledge, the limitations of my instruments, because stitched throughout the Gospels are his continual allusions to Yeah, you're not going to really understand this.
I'm going to just have to do it in parables for you, but parables so neat, and then his life becoming a parable, then the whole library of books becoming some commingling parable that...
And then you think, like you were, you know, towards the end of your other lovely last answer, Brett,
you said that, you know, if the aim is for us to stay alive and to survive, we're gonna, you know, like,
you know, if I question everything with the same rigor that I know you inquire of Christianity,
not that there aren't things, you know, with the whole book taken as a whole, that, you know, can be glaring,
then we would be able to collapse everything, you know, from, well, that's not what they say about molecules now,
well, is there really a little bar connecting those molecules? Does it look like that when they spin round one
another?
Is north really north? Is up really up in infinite space?
Is the Global North the Global North?
What do you mean East-West?
What do you mean underwater?
Where's the water, the vapour?
Where's the vapour, the gas?
When does the gravity start?
You know, all of it!
It's all... On some level, none of it is stable, Brett!
None of it is stable!
Except the cross!
Except the cross!
Um, okay.
So I have this principle that I live by.
I don't want to say I live by it, I think by it.
And the principle is, all true narratives must reconcile.
Okay?
There are no contradictions in the universe that can't be.
Now, our understanding of the universe is full of contradictions.
And frankly, our philosophical understanding of ourselves, if we Contradiction with itself.
But I do believe that if you pursue a rigorous understanding of the universe you will eventually converge on a story that is completely narrative that is beautiful that describes our struggle to be one thing and to not fall into being another so in other words I don't I don't talk this way because I think everybody needs to
Think about the universe in atomic or subatomic terms.
I think it's useful to have some knowledge of that, and frankly I think it's all of our birthright to understand what a ridiculously beautiful planet full of wonderful and curious creatures and other phenomena we live on.
So I want everybody I want every child to look at a bird and understand that it's not that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
They are actually looking at dinosaurs.
This is what dinosaurs became, and frankly, the number of dinosaur species on Earth today is larger than the number of mammal species.
It's more than double.
Right?
You're living in the age of mammals, but somehow the dinosaurs still outnumber us.
That's a fascinating fact, and every child has a right to that fact.
It's a delightful one.
But!
I'm not arguing that we should all live our lives by the analytics of the world.
You can't.
It's too cumbersome.
Right?
We are narrative creatures.
We have to live narratively.
It's the only way for life to function properly and for us not to be drowned in complexity every instant.
We are built to be free of the requirement to be conscious about most things so that we can reserve consciousness for things that actually deserve it.
And we don't live there.
We live in an environment that's so confusing and broken that we have to be conscious all the time just simply not to hurt ourselves.
That's unnatural and bad for us.
So, I hear what you're saying loud and clear and I don't disagree.
My point is just simply, some of us need to do this from the place I'm coming from.
Most of us probably need to do this from someplace closer to where you're coming from.
And the fact that those things will converge as we get good at doing these things is natural.
And I would also say, if I say something like, the game is about persistence, right?
I'm not talking about persisting in some ugly but durable state.
I am talking about having to achieve the values that we pay so much lip service to in order to persist.
You have to solve the problems that jeopardize us in order to have humanity here for another thousand or two thousand years.
That's going to be a difficult job.
The number of things that we will have to get past, the number of systems that are currently being liquidated that we will have to stabilize and reinvigorate, that is not a simple job.
Persisting is tough.
And I like it as a goal because it will force us to achieve Our potential... to live up to our potential.
And we are falling down on that job at this moment.
Terrible.
Brett, during the last 10 minutes of our conversation, an incredible storm has erupted here in the United Kingdom.
I'm not speaking figuratively.
There was a collapse of thunder, great sheets of lightning, and now a downpouring of wonderful, refreshing rain.
And surely the abundant plants in the bucolic splendor that surrounds this studio We'll soon be expressing botanically the meteorological glory that is currently unfolding and perhaps the storm of our conversations may yet yield fruits and plants and one day forests because it seems more valuable to me than being caught between the poles of George Clooney and Hulk Hogan with no disrespect to either of those men as cultural artifacts but potentially as
Political avatars, we might strive for better.
Brett, thank you so much for your time.
It has been a great pleasure.
Can I mention one thing before we go?
Yeah, what is it?
We are planning what I think is going to be an epic rally on the Capitol Mall, September 29th.
It is called Rescue the West and it is very much about achieving the things that we have been talking about here today.
The West is not a geographic description.
It's not a list of countries.
It is a belief in a level playing field.
So we want to unrig the world.
You are Beyond invited, we would be delighted to have your presence at Rescue the West and I hope that any of your viewers and listeners who will be anywhere near Washington D.C.
September 29th or can get themselves there will join us because it's going to be, I think it's going to be tremendously invigorating and cathartic.
There will be speakers, there will be celebrations, and I suppose an attempt... I mean, given that it's so close to the election in your country, what are the... are there any sort of immediate or local goals?
Well, we are going to achieve comedy, we are going to have Music.
We are going to have profound speeches by an all-star lineup.
The only one of the human modes we shall be excluding is tragedy.
We are going to have excellent security.
We are going to protect everything right down to the grass.
But the real goal is to take this movement which has been struggling to find itself and to give it a voice coherently in one place to declare the values that we have lost track of and return us to the course of achieving that fair, beautiful, unrigged world and taking us off the path to self-destruction that we seem to be on.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Brett, if I can make it over there, and I know I've got a few things that I want to do in your country during that time, then please God, I will be able to participate.
I know that you in particular have a deep and flexible understanding of the type of alliances that will be required.
We'll post a link in the description for that event so that you can see how you can participate.
Brett, thank you so much.
Brett Weinstein for joining me for a very fine time today.
See if you can spot the mnemonic devices that I'm using and rejecting the mean sheen and Thank you so much, Brer Weinstein.
It was one of my favourite conversations that we've had and I've enjoyed all of them.
Yes, I've enjoyed all of them too.
I have a feeling there's a lot we could discuss and it goes to all the best places.
Yeah, we've not discussed like marriage or bringing up kids or pets or heartbreak.
There's so much, you know, I'd like to just one day pillory you right there within the seam of your actual academic excellence, which you have used as such a wonderful route for so many fields of knowledge.
All right.
I look forward to it.
Thanks, Brett.
Thanks for joining us today.
And I will speak to you again soon.
Thank you.
It was great fun.
Well, thank you very much for joining me for that conversation with Brett Weinstein.
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And please support our movement and the wonderful movements that Brett's discussing.
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We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
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