Bret Weinstein on Ending Cancel Culture, Avoiding Civil War and How We Can Unify

brett weinstein thank you for joining me on the show man thanks for having me i am very excited to have you so when i'm bringing you on now in a context that probably would have been different so i've wanted you on the show for a long time because what i'm always telling people is that a lot of my success is predicated on an early realization that i had which is that i'm having a biological experience and what i mean by that is i became obsessed with the movie the matrix as uh what i'll say is the dominant metaphor for my life because it it so accurately captures the nature of what the brain does to you so i don't think that we're actually in a simulation but your brain is creating a simulation for you through which you interact with the world and i just thought okay well if it's sort of focused on keeping me alive and it's not necessarily focused on you know just representing reality like there are this many photons bouncing off of this object and you know figure the rest out from there and it's sort of packaging it in a way are there ways that i can reinterpret that package that would be more advantageous for me and so that was initially why i got drawn to you and the things you talk about and then you know over the last few months for the first time in my life um civil war is a possibility seems real and i always thought i saw myself as existing outside of history and so to now suddenly feel like hey this is deeply uncomfortable where this is headed that pushed me doubly down into your world do you find are you surprised that you and your wife became the epicenter of all of this um you know one has to be surprised because for one thing the uh events are so bizarre that for anybody to be the center of it would be weird and you know to be to be there is is doubly so but um yeah it's a very odd moment i have to say i'm quite excited by the the two things you use to introduce the conversation here because both of them are perspectives that very few people have and you're right you you are living in your own simulation no matter what else might be true and that simulation is not quite matrix-like because it's not designed to fool you in fact it's designed to do the opposite but it doesn't mean that those heuristics don't have lots of places where they create room for ambiguity and that ambiguity is an increasingly large factor in modern life because so much of what we're encountering doesn't match what our ancestors were were built for so anyway it is very important to recognize that that that package of of heuristics is both your greatest asset and your greatest liability and your second point about about civil war i can't tell you how many conversations a week i'm having with people who seem to calculate that because civil war is not common it must not be headed our way and i just don't understand how they're ending up there so it's good to talk to somebody who spotted it as a real possibility because i'm quite sure it is yeah the the other interesting part is um very few people are talking about solutions so even somebody like myself who's like okay well i'll always default to the individual what can the individual do and i identified that pretty early on in my life as uh the path that i was going to or maybe the the lens through which i was going to choose to see the world and i think that there are um very much limitations to that but it has served me so well that i see it as definitely a part of the solution but hearing people talk about the solution that's at a higher level a systems level something like that it was a true breath of fresh air to hear that somebody had ideas there to set the stage though i want to talk about there's this feeling that i have that we're in right now in terms of what the breaks are what are the things that could take us off the path to civil war because right now i feel like we're already going at such tremendous pace and there's so much momentum i'm always telling people in business momentum matters and there's so much momentum behind an idea that i think is fundamentally um designed to disintegrate and to disunify everybody that then the next question is okay well what what could counteract that force and there's this thing where my wife and i will be in the middle of an argument and i will actually call it out when it happens where i'm like we have reached that point now where it is impossible to avoid a fight and i will say it out loud brett in the middle of the argument i will say we we have now reached that point because you you get so much momentum behind your positions that until the neurochemistry of that situation changes you you can't re-see commonality you can't you can't feel the desire to connect anymore and if you don't feel the desire to connect and you don't behave in a way that will draw you back together and it is so surreal to me how you can feel that sort of click over moment where there is some sort of tipping point where now aggression and anger feeling is trumping the desire to hear new information to sort of relax and remember that you love this person do you think that we've hit that tipping point and if we have is there something other than a fight that can back us off well i love your your model and i must say it mirrors uh the way heather and i deal with things too which is there's a recognition i think for us it it's it's seated in our training as as uh animal behaviorists but there's a lot that goes on in human space that isn't really about the content right you think it's about the content because you're human and you're you're wired to process language because there's so much conveyed in it but very frequently you'll understand an argument between people best if you turn down the sound so you can't hear what's being said and you just look at what's going on and the same thing is i think true in the larger context where we are watching a battle that is over very standard stuff but it's full of very modern particular content descriptions the people who are engaged in it think that they're reacting to something much more specific rather than just a general frustration so the way out if there is one does involve a recognition that you are being carried along by something that you may have an objective and a focus but that you are being carried along with a historical process and if you can recognize what processes this looks like from the past you'll know you don't want to go this direction it doesn't end well if enough of us can figure that out and manage to convey it then maybe we can overcome the momentum as you say on the other hand i think the the odds are are against us yeah i think uh that's terrifying and i hate it when you speak so clearly and terrifyingly um because it it is hard to argue and and on the streets it feels um it's unnerving that that is the the word that i will use so when i have from the perspective of trying to achieve things in my life i have asked one question over and over and over which is all right if viktor frankl is right and i can't control the stimulus but i can control the response even in the middle of a concentration camp and that book was um just absolutely transformational for me in terms of like here is somebody who's lived through the worst atrocity that i can imagine and said ah you can predict with like accuracy of 72 hours when somebody's gonna die because you see them give up on why they are suffering and he was like if you understand there's that gap between stimulus and response and you hold on to that that you can make radical change in your perspective or the way that you interpret things which is going to then influence your behavior which can in his example literally keep you alive or allow you to die so i was like okay cool i'm i'm all for the deck it may be stacked against anybody could be maybe it's stacked against me maybe it's stacked against somebody else maybe that shifts and changes depending on the consequence or the context but if i can you know retain some of this control then i can really get somewhere and so looking at the world through that lens and coming to this sort of evolutionary understanding of things as you begin to look at the movement that's happening now and what seems to be an innate feature and i don't know if you'd call it a feature or bug but the madness of crowds and that that oh god i forget the exact quote i'm sure you'll you'll get really really close but um madness is very uncommon in the individual and basically the the default in crowds and so what we have now is is a crowd that is gaining momentum and it's moving in a direction and getting uh other people to sort of step out of the stream and get the perspective on that of okay between stimulus and response i have a responsibility and i can do something and so partly because of you and like the things you were just saying i had this moment when when this all first kicked off and i was like i just want to put my head down and i just dude you you can't imagine for for the last i mean now it's been 20 years for the last 20 years all i've wanted to do is be the next disney i just want to make rad movies and tv shows and like inspire people and you know like really bring something beautiful to the world and i only want to tell one kind of story you're not going to get a bunch of anti-hero stuff for me like i i want to my literally my stated mission is no one should ever get to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset and encountering it through story because i saying it like we're saying it now it hits people logically but it doesn't hit them emotionally we need narrative to drive down to the limbic level and and really make change do it at the age of imprinting like i've got this whole plan and i feel good about it and then i'm like okay the thought of putting my head down in the hopes that the mob passes me by makes me feel like a coward and since i know the punch line of life is exactly the following how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself it's all that matters and i have run the experiment of does wealth solve all of your problems and wealth is awesome but it does not solve all your problems so i didn't want to feel like a coward it made me step into that okay well what can i do at my own individual level to begin to tease this out so as you because you're not somebody who's giving up so even though you have a somewhat pessimistic view um can you walk us through the things that would have to be true whether or not you think people are willing to do it what are the things that would have to be true for this to stop shy of um just outright conflict well i i see a primary obstacle which is that those who see the hazard clearly don't understand where the energy is coming from and in some sense we have to negotiate a settlement in a in a middle ground where um the ability to navigate is being systematically disrupted by both sides so you have uh let's call it conservative for the moment you've got conservatives who are dubious that the objections that the frustration is real and is based on something that actually requires a remedy and then you have the uh the liberals or i don't even want to call them liberals because this is so illiberal the way they're delivering it but you have the um the self-defined leftists delivering a set of prescriptions that as i've said many times before doesn't uh seek to end oppression it seeks to turn the tables of oppression and worse it seeks to turn the tables of imagined depression oppression so that it's not even being careful about its targeting and what has to be the negotiated solution has to come in the form of a recognition that the system is rigged and that it is rigged in a way that the um the misfortune is not evenly distributed you can predict with a relatively high degree of certainty where the misfortune is going to be concentrated based on historical patterns of oppression so can you can you give me um the very specific uh predictive mechanism you use is it zip code is it ethnicity what what is it well i would say zip code is by far the best um because it does capture the fraction of it that that tracks with ethnicity but it doesn't limit it to that and of course it isn't limited to that so what you really have is a kind of opportunity hoarding um by what i call rent-seeking elites oftentimes i've heard you talk about that before and one of the questions i want to ask you you had said uh because i i have generated tremendous wealth in my life and you said you know a lot of people they'll they'll cr so rent seeking being people that are sort of inserting themselves as money managers or finance people whatever they're not actually creating something they're not adding value to the system but they're extracting a ton of value just as a quick um thumbnail uh but you said there are people so i've always felt very good right cause i built a business from the ground up we didn't raise outside capital and we turned it into something and from that i created wealth and then you said there are some people who create something with good intentions and then they turn into unknowingly rent seeking elites and i was like [ __ ] am i rent seeking so now i'm like what what is that next step because i have literally dedicated my entire adult life and i'm um sort of gambling with my fortune that i can uh create this narrative vehicle that will help some percentage of people encounter a growth mindset and improve their life and and my mission is to make it so your zip code is not predictive of your future success but now i'm so paranoid that i'm doing some rent seeking that i don't even realize so what does that look like like is it just investing my money makes me rent sinking what does that look like yeah you're definitely doing some rent seeking but the good news is you're not doing it because of a defective character you're doing it because of the way the market is structured and what rational behavior looks like so walk me through what that is it you know your investment portfolio is no doubt invested in things that um if you looked at the details of how they function are just simply rent seeking um so uh you know you probably don't even know you probably are invested in some funds and those funds you know are picking and choosing equities and whatever it is and uh those those things are having an effect on you know they're maybe you're invested in a company that makes clothing and the company that was chosen for your portfolio is profitable and why is it profitable because it's figured out some way to artificially depress the wages the people who make the close so that when they get to the shop they're cheaper and people buy them so anyway there's lots of places where you can be involved in rent seeking just by virtue of automatic processes in which you're not you couldn't possibly be aware of all the things that your money is doing while you're not paying attention um so there's that and then there's also the issue probably not for you because i've heard very clearly what you've said here your objective is not only laudable but it's also i would say maybe the important leverage point you're talking about reaching young people you're talking about reaching them with developmentally relevant helpful stories that actually empower them so my guess is net you're in surplus but does that mean that everything that you're doing is positive rather than negative in this calculation it can't right for none of us i'm sure i'm rent seeking too i don't have a lot of investments but enough that there's definitely going to be stuff hidden there but the good news is you can't really be if you were to try to figure out what effect you're having on the world in every detail and you were to try to eliminate all of the negative stuff it would take all your time and more you wouldn't finish the job so you'd be left ineffective in the stuff that you're doing that's positive without eliminating the negative stuff so in some sense i don't know if you're familiar with my personal responsibility vortex talk no to me well the the short answer is that game theoretically speaking trying to live your principles in an economic context doesn't make sense you will hobble yourself you will end up in a cabin in the woods you know trying to eke out a living without having negative impacts and what that does is it reduces your influence on how society functions so the world becomes more ruthless as you try to make sure that you're not doing anything that you you don't see as positive relative to your values you actually limit your influence over the system and the system moves away from your values rather than towards them so the question is what is the best use of the power and leverage you have and for you to be delivering narratives that empower individuals so that they know who they are they are better equipped to function and making sure that that happens in a way that uh your zip code doesn't predict your success in life that seems not only incredibly noble but it also seems like the leverage point and i fully agree with you conversations like this are all well and good they don't move civilization right they can inform something that moves civilization but the stuff that moves civilization is narrative and so anyway more power to you um i don't know i don't know how well that answers the question but uh no it it begins to pull at one thread of what feels like a very tightly wound ball of yarn but i think this is you know ultimately how it begins so now getting into um the thing that i always try to hold myself to is i i only care about what has application in the real world and so i'm trying to learn things chase fascinations whatever the case may be that's actually going to make me more capable so i'll give you a background or a base assumption this is maybe a better way to say it so if somebody asks me what's the meaning of life i have a very quick aggressive ready answer i don't expect other people to agree more i think the biggest thing i want people to take away is it is possible to define that and then to act in accordance so my definition is very simple the meaning of life is to see how much of your potential you can translate into usable skill set and that that to me and then you can you know even take it one step further and say and that skill set should be something that's unique to you that you care deeply about you worked your ass off to acquire and it helps not only yourself but other people now why do i think that's the meaning of life because that is as far as i can tell given that you are having a biological experience and your brain will kick up neurochemistry that either feels good or bad based on millions of years of evolution so you're you're stuck in that there yes you can transcend your biology but you are in that biology man and so fulfillment to me is the name of the game right so fulfillment is often born out of really hard [ __ ] it's doing hard things right it is not getting things just given to you this is why i think the oppression olympics is just destined to fail because you're you're creating a frame of reference of victimhood of i don't have agency um it's uh i don't know if coleman hughes came up with this but he's certainly the person i heard say it he was like you're turning people into weather veins and you're reducing the black population to well we're pointed in whatever direction the wind of the white man blows us in and he was like basically [ __ ] that don't put me in that box i have agency like i can do things in my own life and so that to me is really where you should be focused which is how you're going to feel about yourself and you're by yourself which is a neurochemical experience which is based on all the heuristics that the brain has worked into us and in my interpretation of that it's translating potential into skill set and then putting those skills to use beautiful that's uh lovely and actually to me it seems like um a key it's a half of a puzzle that i'm focused on and i'm i'm focused on the other half typically but um there is this interesting dynamic between conservatives and liberals where conservatives see very clearly the personal responsibility part of the equation and they often times don't see the collective responsibility part and liberals are exactly the inverse and so i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about actually the way these two pieces of the puzzle fit together and it's it's a you know a yin yang phenomenon before i get to it exactly though let me say the weather veining i have not heard coleman say that but i love it it's uh it's a beautiful way of thinking about it way i think about it is learned helplessness that in effect this is just training people to be helpless because it results in rewards being delivered and the end point of that is fairly clear you're just going to create a helpless needy population and i mean anybody who's raised kids or you know even if you have nieces and nephews you know how bad an idea this is right there's no way it's going to work at a civilization level and let me push on that and see if you agree why um it's going to be bad so the reason as i hear you say that that it seems self-evident to me that that would become a problem is when you are a self-perceived i don't think this is true but when you've created a frame of reference which we can get into why i'm so obsessed about frame of reference but when you create a frame of reference that you are helpless and needy think back to inhuman in any one human's evolution not not as a population the point at which you are most needy and weak is when you're a child and what is the mechanism that every child very quickly learns gets them what they want a tantrum right you create so much like external pain and suffering that people want to to calm you down by giving you the thing that you want it's a strategy every one of us has tried and reap tremendous benefits and then we go out into the world and the world slaps us around and says stop you're obnoxious i don't want to be around you right jordan peterson's saying don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them i think that's a pretty good steering mechanism and but now like when you talk about this horizontal movement which is one of the more terrifying things that you say um meaning that this this is already permeated everywhere and so now you called it a sleeper cell recently and i thought that was super apt and just way terrifying and so you have all these people that have learned hey tantrums are very effective and my entire identity is around how effectively i can use a tantrum to get what i want my placement in the oppression olympics which i say with derision right anybody listening can see that i don't i think that that's ineffective and and i should state i judge everything by whether or not what you're doing moves you towards your goal and i judge your goal based on whether it will bring you fulfillment right so it's very easy to sort of guess how i will interpret something so if you create that scenario where the only way to win is to throw a tantrum we're doomed and so is is that or something like that what you meant when you say this just won't work oh exactly and not only does it not work for the individuals but ultimately they're going to tear down the entire structure because a structure of people that gets what they need through effectively the kind of terrorism that children engage in against their parents that structure isn't capable of producing anything so exactly how is it going to survive in the world and this actually brings me to the the other half of the uh the very eloquent personal responsibility um portrayal that you you delivered a couple minutes ago which is so you see the imperative as basically taking what assets you have and making sure you convert them at the maximum rate into capacity that's meaningful relative to your your values which i agree absolutely but the other thing is i think we collectively have a responsibility to recognize that being a human being is an incredible experience right it's such a gift and you could you know if you were any other creature the degree of that gift that you would have would be much less in the case of the next nearest creature or none in the case of most creatures and so we have this amazing opportunity and it seems to me that we have a moral imperative to deliver that opportunity to as many people as possible and what that means is that actually we have an obligation to preserve this this really isn't about our generation and whether we're satisfied or or anything like that this is about how long can we keep this running so the maximum number of human beings has that experience and what's more if you are hobbled by a cruddy educational system if you are constrained by the requirement that you spend your time in a stupid job that has no meaning to you because it's the only way that you can afford a roof over your head and uh get your healthcare paid for and all of that if that's what you're obligated to do then we're squandering your human potential and we should be seeking to liberate people as much as is humanly possible so as many generations as can be as liberated as possible that seems to me our collective obligation and how do you do that well you have to enable people individually to take advantage of opportunities to spot them and it just so happens that these two things fit together rather perfectly they describe what the objective of the whole exercise ought to be um so anyway we're a long way from there you know we have a system that just does not do this very effectively but we can see it from here and uh and then this goes to the last part we were talking about momentum and we were talking about um the danger of despair effectively recognizing that the likelihood of us fixing the problem is pretty small but i always think of it in terms of being on a i don't know a canoe or something headed for a waterfall at what point is the chance that you can paddle out of the path of the waterfall and get to shore before you go over so low that it's not worth your time and the answer is there is no point at which it's so low right if there's any chance at all that you can get to shore a fraction of a percent is enough giving up would be stupid if the result of giving up is that you go over the falls so to me this is where we are i don't know how likely it is that we'll succeed but i think the thing is it just makes sense to take the best shot you've got and uh sometimes you're surprised you take the best shot you got and it's good enough so what the hell else are we doing right why would we invest in anything other than trying to write our course and avoid another tremendous calamity of history yeah that's very well said and one of the things that i think will help us in fact one of the things i think that must happen if we're going to get enough people roaming in the right direction is something that heather your wife dr heather heing brought up in one of your episodes she read directly from the book tribe i have a rule when you encounter something powerful you should immediately go into it so i literally after hearing that quote got the book read it that day and the punch line is hey boys and girls like you're you you have a two-party system which is exactly as you just laid out right you've got people that err on the side of like this um compassion empathy collective moral obligation to lift up as much of humanity as humanly possible and then on the other side you've got people who are about individual responsibility not wanting um to be taken advantage of and i see a very um not they don't it doesn't break on the same lines but an equally important dichotomy in business which is the visionary and the executor often known as the ceo the the operations person and there is friction between the two in both cases so you have friction between the compassion people who want to help everybody and the people who are like come on personal responsibility i don't want to be taken advantage of and then in a business you need somebody who's a visionary and is not worried about the consequences and just new ideas crazy ideas big ideas and you need somebody who's like hey [ __ ] you have to ground this in reality and if we just spin off on all these crazy ideas nothing will ever get done and it's like i it was a huge breakthrough for me in business when i realized i'm i'm a visionary because i live in it i see it from that perspective so again my obsession with frame of reference so as the visionary my frame of reference is big ideas or how you end up building a big business and creating all the wealth for all the people being able to pay people salaries and be generous and give them vacations and all that i remember once looking out my window and there was like 20 cars in the parking lot and i thought [ __ ] i've created something that has allowed everyone to pay for these like that's crazy like you're really helping people do rad [ __ ] in their lives but until i had respect for the need for this other person to help me right and there's a great quote i think it's john ford who said or henry ford who said airplanes take off against the wind not with it and the example i hear in business a lot is you need both the kite and the string the kite without the string just flies off into the ether the string without the kite just lays on the ground so once i said okay wait a second this is exactly what's going on in our political discourse is you have each side both sides are necessary so if you're conservative and you have any temptation to alienate or hate the other side like you're missing the fundamental point you are one half the equation if it's just you it slides towards tyranny the other side if you don't recognize that you need the other side that it is the the friction between the two you set it perfectly yin yang right if you don't understand the need for that balance you slide off into madness and until both sides go hey it's cool for me to really stand for my part of this if i show respect and have this really insane desire to have the other side um if we did that then okay like people can say look i i'm just i'm wired for i can't have people stealing from me right the taxes is theft and then the other side like we can't let these people like starve in the streets if they both value each other and recognize okay this is an interplay between the two i think we get somewhere but we're so being forced into these factions factions factions and because i'm a personal responsibility guy even though i do not consider myself conservative at all because i'm freakishly compassionate um but when i i think it jordan peterson said it the best when he was like when you fractionate and fractionate and fractionate you ultimately realize that you end up with the ultimate fraction and that's the individual and that's sort of where action can be taken so i i approach it from that standpoint but when i boil it down to that the only thing i could see action that i could take to sort of bring that harmony that balance together was to not bury my head in the sand not um try to put up the don't hurt me wall of platitudes and saying all the things that i'm supposed to say but to step out and say okay there has to be a way forward and we have to speak up for that and that brings me to my keen interest in the unity 2020 plan um what is it why do you think it's realistic and does is was it born of that that need for balance oh man uh so first of all i don't want to leap right to it because you said so many important things uh but hey we can come back to it later if there's something else you want to jump a little riff well i just wanted to say that the number of different realms and different examples that we could come up with that reflect the exact thing you just said i mean we could go all day um just to give you one example that has been a focus for heather and and me um is that there has been a kind of coup inside academia where the empiricists have driven out the theorists and they didn't know that that's what they were doing but the way the university system is funded from grant overhead prioritizes expensive empirical work and what this has resulted in is basically a science of the the cos right there's no visionary stuff because effectively what theory still exists at least in a place like biology is theory practiced by uh empiricists in their spare time right it's not high quality and this has resulted in a huge amount of waste because you need visionaries who are who are good at the art of seeing what is there that is hidden rather than people who are just very focused on data data data now as a theorist i would never i wouldn't dream of trying to get rid of the experimentalists because they're so they are you know there is no science without them but in many places what we have where we see dysfunction is that one side has forgotten the necessity of the other side the tension is where the magic comes from and in our political context i am very definitely a not only a liberal i would say i'm a radical because i believe only radical change will save us but i'm not a radical because i like radical change radical change sucks it's very dangerous right i want to live in a world that works so well that i get to be a conservative that's the objective of the exercise and if you're a progressive that isn't looking to create a world in which you become a conservative then you don't understand what you're doing right and this is it's a fashion statement then it's not an objective right so anyway i think there's something tremendously deep in what you've said and personal responsibility man that is the place if you're trying to improve things that's the best bang for your buck right that's why conservatives see it so clearly and believe me in my you know the last three and a half years i've spent so much time talking to conservatives and wow have i come to understand what it looks like through their eyes yes this just it pays back you know whereas if you take the same investment and you pointed it fixing civilization in general nothing happens or you create change and it has um it has uh unintended consequences that may even be negative the whole thing may be not negative so yeah personal responsibility it's a place it's easy to understand how people end up focused on it because it works quite well but i don't want to lose sight of the other thing because you know that's the part that allows the personal responsibility to work is the context in which there's a place to deploy it it's also the part that um makes you feel good at the end so i i really want people to obsessively focus on one thing at the end of the day you have to feel good about yourself when you're by yourself like that's it that that is what you're marching towards that that is the name of the game and um as somebody so i generated wealth in in a way that i think is actually very very typical but people don't understand it they don't understand the process of building equity in something only to then finally in one sort of grand moment you go from normal um income to whoa my life is totally different i can go buy a mansion and it's literally in the the snap of the fingers so um we had built this company and i had been working by the time we got to that company i'd been working in business for by the time i got my first taste of real money was probably 15 years in so i've been working in business for a very long time and at first it started out sort of i wasn't paid very well and then it was like okay i'm making yeah great middle class then it was upper middle class income and then i was sort of stuck at upper middle class income for a while and then it dipped back down doesn't matter and then come back to this upper middle class income and then in one fell swoop we sell a piece of the company and i just have a tremendous amount of never have to work again can change my family's life can you know go in any direction i want to go moment and because it was so i'm literally hitting refresh refresh refresh in my banking app because you do this call and everybody goes we're ready to wire we're ready to wire it yes go and then you wait the you know whatever seven minutes for it to hit and so just hitting refresh and i had this amazing moment where i was like the money hit and i was suddenly wealthy and i felt exactly the same and i was like oh my god every insecurity i've ever had is still here and all the joy of having to get better and push myself and [ __ ] suffer to get better and like grow and adapt and the excitement that comes along with getting better and seeing over a period of time like whoa looking back 10 years like i can do stuff now that i couldn't do before this is amazing and you go that was actually the juice the juice was i became a person capable of building a company so i'm always telling people don't try to win a championship try to become capable of a championship performance right i would rather be the guy that loses the game-winning shot in a championship but have been that guy than have been sitting on a bench of a championship winning team but not played and contributed in any way because i'm trying to feel some way about myself right so when you talk about putting it in that context of understanding look i want to be a badass i want to be the hardest core [ __ ] that ever lived partly so i can help other people so that i can lift them up because i'm in this evolutionary context of i get rewarded neurochemically i get the chills right now from just thinking about helping other people because i'm strong right helping somebody because i got strong in some way not necessarily physically but i got good at something and that thing has now helped somebody makes me feel good and if people are trying to you know um brandish their personal responsibility to become this badass [ __ ] and then you know it's it's [ __ ] you to everybody else it won't feel good like that is such a fragile place to live so getting people to understand even if you just want to be a selfish psychopath helping other people actually plays out neurochemically from a selfishly rewarding place well you have now said the first thing that i disagree with you about all right now push me forward i don't think we actually disagree but um the the selfish psychopath is such an unusual creature that i don't even i think the one thing to know about them is that your intuitions about what it's like inside that mind are bound to be off because it's so different yeah i will i will nod to that was pure hyperbole yeah good all right so then we're back on exactly the same page and and uh it's a page i i really like so when i was teaching when i was teaching college i was in a constant battle trying to convey to students what it was that i knew that they were doing but they didn't understand was the objective of the exercise you know they would very frequently either have a producer consumer model for what they were doing in college you know where the the teacher is uh delivering a good that they consume from the seats very destructive um or they sort of have the sense that this is like a proto job where they're producing useful stuff almost nobody produces anything useful in college that's not the point the point is you're you're building capacity into your mind and that capacity you're you're you're not being productive for let's say four years in order that you can be very productive in a useful way when you get out so upgrading the mind is the whole point of the exercise which seems obvious once you say it out loud but um but nonetheless it's it's obscure to people and the the point about how you will deploy those tools once you are liberated into the world is the key you know you want to be able to uh a you need to be able to sleep right if you are doing something that makes it hard for you to get to sleep probably you're not doing the right thing with those tools and so anyway glad glad we're on the same page about um about personal responsibility it's importance about capacity and uh anyway i resonate with that so should we get back to unity i shouldn't have yes no absolutely so the question you asked was is it this understanding of yin yang perspectives that led to the unity 2020 plan partly i think so i mean the unity 2020 plan is the result of decades of thinking about what has gone wrong and of trying various things and seeing what happens and in some sense the plan is ridiculously simple because the primary obstacle is not a complex one the primary obstacle is that each and every time you attempt to propose something outside of the duopoly's control you are told if you do that you are going to empower the thing farther from your values and you're going to rob the thing closer to your values therefore you're not allowed to even think those thoughts and that is wrong it's wrong for a number of reasons i would give you one example the um the lesser evil paradox has it that if you if let's say ralph nader got one vote right and the democrats lost by one vote they would blame ralph nader now ralph nader is not the villain in a scenario where he gets one vote he's perfectly entitled to get one vote the villain in that story is actually the democrats who offered such a uh a poor candidate that they couldn't acquire anything like 75 of the electorate the democrats have a go-to move frankly all they need to do if they want to be wildly popular is serve the american public but the problem is they're actually involved in an objective that is inconsistent with serving the american public they're influenced peddlers and so you can blame ralph nader for the failure of the democrats but the democrats are really responsible for the failure of the democrats therefore the lesser evil paradox that you are required to vote for that thing which is nominally closer to your values so you don't empower the the opposite is really it's a trap and in my opinion it's actually a trap that has been constructed to limit our thinking about what might be possible so the unity plan basically says look what we need in order to fix the system is people who are above politics who are patriotic who are insightful and who are capable and we need them to understand the values on both sides the tension that exists that makes the system so dynamic and functional so you don't have to be afraid of electing a unity ticket because you know that your values whether you're left or right your values will be in the room somebody who understands what it is that you see will be present in that discussion at the very top level and will have um equal power in that discussion about what we are to do and i truly believe that if you did that if you simply uh took the influence peddling out of the white house and you had people who were honorable who had the resources to solicit the best insight that they could source and who made a proper judgment on what was likely to be best for the american people i believe you would begin to see things get better rapidly and what's more i believe it would cascade through the system that there are many people in congress for example who are trapped in a system that forces them into influence peddling but if they had an option to to do the job that they were actually elected to do they'd prefer it so it's you know the fact that we see rampant corruption doesn't mean everybody's happy in that state and uh frankly i don't see any reason that we wouldn't try it right this is the best i want to start pushing on um some of the issues and i don't know if you're fully um discussing things yet i know for a while you were like hey look uh we know the game that we're playing and if we reveal too much we're just giving a strategic give to the enemy that wishes to tear this down so um if i ask something you're still not ready to talk about just let me know but um so i'm gonna start asking questions as somebody who wants this to be true and and i'll walk you through um what happened so i've been apolitical my entire life uh the system has worked well for me so i've never had a problem i've just always been like i'm gonna outwork everybody i don't give a [ __ ] what you try to do to slow me down like i'm gonna keep going and because it has worked well for me it i don't immediately find myself gravitating towards the problems now andrew yang comes onto the scene and i'm looking at i remember telling my employees the night before the trump election guys he cannot get elected like he he is on tape he said i grabbed them in the [ __ ] it's done like i i was so i was literally laughing i'm like you guys are panicking he is fundamentally unelectable it can't happen and so i was like go to bed rest everything's going to be fine and so the next morning when i say that i was like what i i was so caught off guard and taken by surprise he was just anyway a very surprising moment so that was the first time i thought whoa man maybe votes really do count like you know that i i should have voted i didn't vote never even really thought i'm like i live in california it's like it's a default you know state it's gonna go blue so never thought about the need to vote never even took inventory of am i conservative or am i liberal none of it just didn't think about it as this all starts happening and the the trump thing is kicking off and i start with just default assumptions that he's a psychopath and he is like literally ruining this country and then yang comes around because i'm like who am i going to vote for in the next election because now i realize i really do need to vote and yang came along and i'm like yo this dude and i was really into him and obviously he gets sort of railroaded off but then i had him on my podcast and i was way opposed to lbi uh ubi ubi and uh when i had him on the podcast i'm talking to him and i'm like you know man i'm still not sure if i agree with ubi or not but like i really believe in this dude like and if this dude has looked at this problem that closely and is like yo we really have to take this into consideration i'm just willing to say either i need to go figure it out for myself and do all the hardcore research or i need to find a proxy that i can trust and i felt so good about him so when you came out with unity and and off camera i told him dude you better [ __ ] run again next cycle because one you look super prescient now because this was right after covet hit um and i just really think people are going to get used to your way and there could be a real shot for you and so when you started talking unity 2020 and the people that you were putting forth that he happened to be one i was like oh there's r he gave me the clear sense of what you meant by a patriot and okay so that's the framework with which i'm now stepping into the first time i hear about unity 2020 and i think ooh this is interesting but my first problem is tick tock man we are running up against it so how are you not worried about and forget it i know you're gonna pull the plug if we can't but i'm just saying i really want it to happen so how do we get enough done in the really small amount of time that we have like can you even get on the ballot everywhere well see that's the thing everybody asks this question you have to realize something you probably hadn't heard a plan like unity 2020 before in other words you've you've probably heard the lesser evil thing a dozen times right you've heard why you can't engage in this and then the answer is oh there's actually a very simple solution to that puzzle ballot access has this element if you think well ballot access is a matter of collecting signatures there's a date in every state and that's it then we're cooked that's true we are cooked you can't do it that way it's not the only way so the question is is there something that you are not seeing and i can promise you there is can i promise you that we're going to get there oh i absolutely can't what we need is a groundswell in order to find out right everything depends on people realizing what i think even in what you just said i think is missing which is i don't think there's any guarantee that something recognizable makes it to 2024 for andrew yang to run again i think andrew yang is thinking that it does right in fact i saw an interview in which he ominously said that he had signed something that said he was going to step out of the race this time and not do anything that might interfere with it who is asking him to sign what this is a democracy who knows what the future holds why would any honorable person ask somebody who is clearly capable qualified for the job why would you take anybody off the map with their signature shouldn't a handshake do it and say look under foreseeable circumstances i'm not planning to run shouldn't that be good enough for just about anybody so anyway something ominous is a foot in our system that wishes to take andrew out of circulation we saw it act during the primaries right we saw all sorts of shenanigans played in order to to limit his influence i think it's very clear why you know again the democratic party does not want to represent the public because it has other priorities andrew yang would clearly represent the public so he's a non-starter frankly i think he'll be a non-starter in 2024 or 2028 you know whatever it is right the problem within the current system well let's put it this way why is he behaving like a good soldier in the current system if the current system cannot allow andrew yang to be andrew yang i mean there's something just seriously off so in any case the um the thing about andrew yang that i really like and the reason that i named him as a member the the left leaning member of the the prototypical ticket is that he is uh very insightful he's clearly motivated by the right things to be honest with you i'm not sure i believe in ubi as presented but my sense is there it's a problem that needs to be addressed ubi is a proposal it proves that andrew is interested in the right things he's focused in the right place personally i would argue that something like participation income might be a better instantiation but here's the thing i know for sure let's say that andrew yang found himself in the white house there's no problem saying look ubi was a cool idea here's why it doesn't work here's an idea that fixes the problem with ubi and addresses the same thing that it addresses andrew yang would look at it and if he thought actually that does work better there's no obstacle to it right he would accept it or if he understood something about participation income that wasn't as effective at ubi he'd throw back that argument and we'd find out right there's no there's nothing in the system there's no reason he'd be committed to it there's no constituency that is favoring ubi that is actually driving his claim to believe in it so again it's just a simple matter of let's let democracy work by taking people who can afford to listen to any idea who don't have a dog in the fight personally who can actually speak on our behalf so yeah andrew's perfect for that because he's smart he's open-minded he's a patriot i mean hell yeah so as we um there's some way that you guys see that we can get on the ballot in time when do you plan to announce announce uh who the candidates are and what does that is that process of selecting those candidates something that you pass off or do you have to have the unity um the unity party that you know has their own sort of version of the dnc that does this like what because i i will say i'm i'm the guy that um you probably are aiming at convincing right like i'm ready i'm ready to be convinced but right now i feel like if i wasn't obsessed with you as a thinker um i just wouldn't pay attention because i don't have enough details yeah so it's like and if i'm saying that like there's just not enough details here so i'm just not even going to think about it because i go to a pessimistic place they're never even going to be able to get on the ballot it's just too [ __ ] late um and that there is hopelessness in that but i think that that level of sort of um just unquestioned hopelessness right i've i'm only processing through this because i'm sitting in front of you now right so otherwise i wouldn't it just would be sort of background like oh that would be cool but you know we're just it's just not going to happen in time okay how do we give the the you know the optimism and the sense of like [ __ ] this could really happen okay so there are a couple answers to the question one i don't think there's any point in actually attempting to deliver a ticket if we don't have the ground swell that makes it plausible because for one thing what it does is it actually damages the people who we would name right we want them empowered in order to empower them to to work on our behalf they have to be drafted into this movement which requires the ground swell if we don't get the ground swell then it doesn't make sense to do it however here's the thing that i think you're looking for let's say that this plan fails and we're not on track by uh well we can't actually say when because we don't know how the ballots are going to be delivered and therefore when voting is actually going to take place but let's say we're not on track in time but let's say that we have managed to [Music] to accumulate a movement of people that understands that we are now rolling the dice with all of the most dangerous processes on earth right a the world superpower is now gambling with the possibility of civil war right we haven't even begun to talk about what happens if we fragment not only is there no geographical solution that suggests itself in this case but um somehow we're talking about not only a nuclear arsenal but we're talking about nuclear reactors that need to be carefully managed how you know how is it transitioned to some other structure in which the united states ceases to exist going to work so all i'm saying is the magnitude of the danger that we are putting the world in even before you get to the question of what happens next if the united states fails because we tear ourselves apart that empowers um china is china the next uh you know poll of the of the world single pole um you know is it going to be russia what happens in the absence of a powerful united states we're putting the world in jeopardy here so we're putting the world in jeopardy the process seems to be moving incredibly rapidly such that we can have a discussion about whether or not there's going to be something to salvage in 2024 or not this is an amazing level of danger that we are putting ourselves and the world in in light of that it seems to me that it makes sense for every person with ears to hear that predicament to gather around well what is the chance that we can road to shore why wouldn't you take a shot at something like unity 2020 and here's the thing if it fails to elect a ticket to the white house it could still cause um all of the projects that aim for a better world to to collect into one we've got the open source movement we've got the cryptocurrency movement um we've got makers we've got game b right all of these things we've got idw all of these things aim to solve problems in the legacy world why wouldn't they join together and understand that in effect the entire game is can we bring the things that we've learned in all of these different contexts into a structure that has the power to implement them or to clear the obstacles so in essence the answer to your question is whether we succeed or fail in 2020 we can succeed in creating the best hope for the future will it be enough nobody can guarantee that i certainly won't but is it the best hope we've got i haven't heard a better one so you know what's holding us back from just simply getting behind this idea it doesn't carry any ideological content that would cause anybody to look at it and say oh that's not that's not me right that's it has deliberately been pruned of ideological content so that it can uh it can cause these other things to gravitate to each other and isn't that the movement that we're looking for one that understands um the uh the value of crypto and open source and and all of these other things i think the real answer to the question of what's holding us back is you don't have sex appeal yet so like what what is going to be the hook you know what i mean so part and and i have not thought through this well enough to know if what i'm about to say is actually true or not i feel very confident about what i just said you lack a hook that's sexy enough to get people i'm excited but there is there's so much noise right now um i i can't tell you how much my youtube viewing habits have changed in the last like three months it is so surreal to me even to think um like now i'm i'm just sort of almost like i'm watching news right i'm looking for things that came out right now that are super contextual to what's happening in this moment there's there's a cacophony of voices um and because i was apolitical and didn't watch news i didn't even realize that um that news had become kabuki theater and it's so weird to see like if i see this same thing being covered on cnn versus fox it actually looks like different things happened i mean it's so [ __ ] bizarre and not having an allegiance in either direction i'm just like this is fundamentally problematic like if you follow this out to its natural conclusion you're just more and more and more polarized because there's this weird friction in fact i know i'm going a field of where i was originally headed but this is actually interesting so there's a weird friction as you adopt one narrative or the other of the same factual thing that happened but one narrative feels right to you feels like you're now cheering for your team yes they're covering it in a way that speaks to me there's friction in in the other one because neither are true so the other one isn't oh i'm getting to truth it's you're asking me to actually adopt the opposing team's narrative which already didn't resonate with me on a subconscious level anyway so now that i'm consciously looking at it it really feels anathema to who i am this does not feel good i don't like this so it is far easier to go from one interpretation to another if both had a sincere effort to get to the facts and one just missed something or you know that wasn't said as well as it could be and so you could gravitate to oh i see this is actually what happened cool i can make that leap but when the sense making apparatus is intentionally now so deep into the world of narrative i can't cross that divide and so that's what scares me is there's already people seek things that confirm the confirmation bias confirm what they already believe but that's a lot less problematic when the disc confirming evidence doesn't trigger some weird destruction of your identity in the way that now it forces you to because you have polarized narratives and how we get past that and have sex appeal is where like this starts to worry me so my we we you cannot let me end this interview without us talking about shut down stem which to me when i look around and i go okay people with guns and riots and stuff okay that's all troubling but the one that scares the [ __ ] out of me is shut down stem and we can get into why but the once people detach themselves from what works what moves you towards your goal then it is it you you can no longer in any effective way move forward and that's what worries me so when i think about what the effective way forward here is in this moment with unity 2020 you have to capture the imagination of people and you're competing against a narrative that gets people feeling like there is a dragon to be slayed and they're willing to run down the streets it's intoxicating and even if like dude i know you know mao's china um the the revolution the the red guard that rose up and you had students actually killing teachers and dude when i stop and think about what i was like in high school and this really bothered this really bothers me i remember when jordan peterson said when you look back on world war ii don't imagine yourself hiding um you know a jewish person in your addict think of yourself as an ss guard and i thought oh god but when i think about me being 16 during the uprising of the red guard i had to put dunce caps on my teachers and you know hit them with a stick i would have dude because it just it felt so i felt so right about everything at that age well i get that i have to say i uh i think jordan peterson is right although personally i've there's not i feel a certain amount of security that i wouldn't have ended up an ss guard no no that not not because i'm jewish let's let's put me in uh you know in uh in an i don't know aryan skin or something somehow there's something about me that is uh so incompatible with a certain kind of authority that i just it's important your movements with evergreen make that hard to argue yeah well anyway um let's go back to the question of um sex appeal for one um here's the thing there's a saying that i'm very fond of it's a hopi saying we are the ones we've been waiting for right and i think it's just impossibly deep actually and so here's the thing you're you're a guy who's trying to build a new disney right you're the sex appeal guy right you know we're in danger that's part of why we're having this conversation so the question is what is the answer to that i know full well that you're right that at some level what i have deployed reaches a certain number of people who were ready but it doesn't reach a large enough group now it's not that there's anything wrong with the idea i'm sure of that but you're right the question is can you deliver it narratively in a way that people get it instantly they understand what it is why they have to be part of it and it seems to me that this is the same the same question we were dealing with earlier the dynamic tension that really is where all magic comes from right you need an idea that'll work and you need somebody who understands narrative and sex appeal and all of that so that it can uh it can live and how do we do it yeah as a sex appeal guy i will tell you you're never going to get it off the ground without real people because you're asking me to get excited about a faceless idea and um we've we're seeing now with some of the movements going on that are creating madness you can do it um and i think over a long enough time period you could get people behind this idea but if you think about the current wave of madness which i don't even know what name to assign it but it started in the 60s 70s i mean this has been going now for 40 or 50 years and it was a long game strategy and it's worked really well but you talk about and this is so important and so powerful the the so when i public speak my my message is almost always revolves around humans are the ultimate adaptation machine and the way that you say that is we've offloaded a lot of our abilities not to genetics but to culture and by putting in the software layer we're able to change very rapidly so if i had a gun in my head and you said dude you know the mechanisms that are at work here what do you do i say i need people and i need people with personality i need people with charisma when barack obama came along ignore the the effect of the policies when he got elected man it was [ __ ] electric and i was over the moon i loved the slogan um the whole notion of hope um having uh a person you know i mean we're we're still shouting distance from the civil rights movement and in what was it 42 years later you have a black president i mean i was like [ __ ] yes man like that was so thrilling to me and when coleman hughes and i were talking not too long ago i asked him like who do you think could have led us who what president would you want leading us through this moment now he's someone who's been very critical of obama and he said obama and i was like [ __ ] you might be right because you know in this weird world where moral authority is like you almost just have to take that off the table and he's such a powerful orator so you need an orator who actually you need a dual set of orators who i can see actually functioning together that i don't think they're going to get into a stalemate that i believe have like they're they've got that tough nut hardcore [ __ ] but at the same time like we're we're gonna fight for people and lift them up and and i have to believe that they can coalesce and work well together which is another fear that if i have i'm sure many other people have which is like dude my wife and i run our company together now when the lawyer set it up i said create the ultimate divorce nightmare i do not want 51 percent i want 50 percent my wife's going to 50 and yes that means that we could hit loggerheads and this could all blow up but because my highest value is my marriage i want to send a very clear sign to my wife i don't need authority over you because she was like no no you take the 51 i was like i don't need that i'm going to be able to convince you you're going to be able to convince me because i want to listen to you i want whatever best idea and in in our the wedding sense we are both patriots we care about this business we care about this marriage we're both willing to do what is right now finding that in two people is going to be crazy hard but if you could find them and then we had somebody to rally around somebody that could inspire us give us chills right when they're up there and they're like because there is a martin luther king's i had a dream speech put to music dude it's unbelievable and if we had somebody that can rally like that i i will make the assumption you've read long walk to freedom no oh my god you're going to love it nelson mandela long walk to freedom [ __ ] blew my mind and it it made me ache for the fact that i read that after he died and i was just like i need to know somebody like this so if we had a leader look you've talked about this i'm literally singing from your hymn book we need this dual pair of leaders to be inspiring to give us the chills and it has to happen right the [ __ ] now which is why i'm like how i don't see how you pull this off i get why you're not naming them but i don't see how you pull it off unless you do well in some sense i think you're pointing to the right answer which is what drives this is patriotism in the best sense of the term which means that uh the people you're talking about have to be willing to take the risk and i don't think it's a huge risk i think people in general understand that we're in a very tough spot and therefore anybody who takes a shot at doing something on our behalf is is worth honoring even if it doesn't work but somebody has to take the reputational risk of saying actually you know what long shot as this may be we're in dire straits and uh i'm stepping up so i guess the question is um if i accept your framework and i think your framework is uh largely accurate then maybe maybe it's time i don't think it's so hard to find people who could inhabit the role we have a list of people on both left and right who i think make for compelling pairs the question is is anybody ready to step up in a dangerous moment without uh without the guarantee that uh the ground swell will emerge in other words are they willing to precede the groundswell rather than follow it all right well now now i'm going to be um god is it's possible that what i say i will ultimately think was not wise but i'm going to say it anyway [Music] courage is precisely what we need and there there is nothing more exciting for me than somebody who is like look yeah this is this is very dangerous to my career but i actually believe it and because i believe it like i'm willing to die on that hill like my thing is i i'm always when i really have conviction on something and first of all i have strong convictions loosely held right if like the example you gave with ubi and um yang it i think that's very apt and that was exactly what drew me to yang was it felt like um if he saw something that was oh yeah that's more effective like he just wouldn't miss a beat he would be like cool let's get behind the more effective idea that to me finding candidates that have the courage despite any sort of huge safety net to step up and do nobody knows that more than you how scary it is and i cannot tell you i've looked at what happened at evergreen and brett without you to show me the way i don't know that i would have been the person to have the the guts it's not that i wouldn't have been able to think through it as clearly as you and so without your guidance on a frame that i could because intuitively i knew something was wrong but i wouldn't be able to articulate it like you can and so if we can get leaders that can articulate it and show us the courageous move and inspire us and give us chills and leave us in awe then i think you'll you'll get that groundswell and i don't this is a lot of words around one simple sentence you have to we have to demand of them the courage to step up right now or they're not it will never work yeah i think you're right i think you're right and i uh i accept the formulation and i'm going to i'm going to figure out how to apply it because i agree at some level i think it is a demonstration of the exact characteristics that are necessary in the people who could do the job if elected so in some sense it's the test case yeah that that seems true um so we'll set that aside i'm super excited uh about that the thing that scares me going back to shut down stem i'll tell you a story that i think will make you laugh because of uh both the the what i end up on is so universal that it it does not need to be created it only needs to be uncovered and then the fact that i could be at this age in the year 2020 and not have been aware of it so in business business is [ __ ] hard people go broke all day long and actually building something that works is is unimaginably difficult so when you get to a point where you're like dude this is all systems i can teach these systems to people i had a realization at one point you're only as good as what you can write down so i thought cool i'm going to give to my staff exactly how to make progress and my whole thing is first principles thinking so you i call it the physics of progress and the reason i call it the physics of progress is i'm saying there's nothing below this there you can't reduce it any further and but i had never articulated it in my own head i knew how to do it i just had never stopped to write it down so i was like okay what is this all right everything starts with your goal cool where are you trying to get to then you have to identify the problem that stands the impediment that stands between where you are now and the goal that you're trying to achieve the end state that you want to exist at okay well you have to create an informed hypothesis about how to overcome that goal and that informed hypothesis by its nature has to include levers basically actions binary things you either do or do not do so that you can run the experiment and then there needs to be data that you look at which nine times out of ten you can identify the data ahead of time that you're going to judge whether this was a success or not and so then you run the experiment and then you look at the data and you analyze it and then that's almost never going to have gotten you all the way to where you wanted to go but it gives you more information you have a better informed hypothesis and now you can run another test and so you repeat right you analyze the data and you repeat and so i call this the physics of progress i give it to my team and one of the guys on the team was like oh the scientific method and i was like what do you mean and he was like he pulls something up on the internet and he reads it off dude oh almost verbatim it was like the scientific method and i was like oh my god this is hilarious but made me feel much better that you really have reduced it down to as far down as it's going to go like i mean this this just is the nature of the world and how it works so now here i am railing in my company i'm teaching it in the class the physics of progress i'm like look this is just a scientific method recontextualized for business uh and then you know all of a sudden i see this and and when i'm doing it by the way what i'm trying to convey to people is this is just the way it works like there's no i'm not being fancy i didn't invent something i've you know brushed dirt off of something that is inherent and then i saw shut down stem and i was like oh here we go um why you're the only person i've heard bring it up a and b why are you worried about shut down stem um i agree with you it is absolutely the most terrifying piece of this um it's also the most absurd piece but i think the reason that it is so terrifying is that it speaks to a willingness to [Music] uninvent insight in order to make progress right and that tells you what kind of progress they want to make so to the extent that one is willing to take a tool as universal as the scientific method and to critique it a to declare it some sort of a uh a european thing right to declare it white in order to nullify its power to speak is um i mean i guess i guess i know exactly what it is it's plato's cave and you know you started uh talking about the matrix and plato's cave is the matrix and the thing about the the matrix in plato's cave is the desire of most people many people some important force not to be enlightened right that there's something that is served by you know the killing of the person who's seen what's outside the cave when they come back and try to report that's the the most frightening process of all and those of us who have tried to convey something about the danger that we are in know that there is this um this force of resistance that is very powerful that wants to kill the messenger in order to keep doing what it's doing and uh to hear it spelled out i mean that we are fighting about so many things which are just simply unambiguous that five years ago you would think there's no way we're ever going to have an analytical argument about whether or not men and women are effectively the same thing right because everybody everybody knows that they're not the same thing right and then to find yourself there and to find yourself trying to fend off arguments that make no sense tells you that there is some that the momentum behind this is not driven by any sort of analysis it is driven by just a naked desire for power and i think the thing is we know how that ends we don't necessarily know who the winners and losers are but it ends with something of which we will all be terribly ashamed and spell out why that's true i agree aggressively but i want i want you to say why that's true um so i've been thinking a lot about this of late and it occurred to me at one point that the united states is special and it's special because it attempts to do something that i know is possible but is very very difficult which is to step out of the normal evolutionary dynamic and do something better so the normal evolutionary dynamic has us cooperating on the basis of our relatedness the same reason that you know you uh will aid your kids before you aid somebody else's kids works at a population level which means that a kind of racism is wired into us as the default mode of uh of cooperation and conflict the united states aims to set aside those population level differences to foster a cooperation based on something else you know it's in some weird sense it is the the christian insight of um you know the story of the good samaritan that relatedness is not the basis on which we should uh view each other favorably that there is something to be gained by being inclusive empathically inclusive and collaborating because it makes us stronger the problem is as great an idea as that obviously is i mean it's been incredibly contagious the number of countries that have followed our example and you know modeled themselves on on our pattern is stunning for us to instead of completing the project instead of actually bringing ourselves to a place where opportunity is evenly distributed to go in reverse and to reinvigorate the population against population conflict means that effectively all there will be in the end is power and the limits of compassion will be genetically defined and that is the recipe in which you find people genociding each other or cooking up reasons to go to war across the border whatever it is it's it's uninteresting to be sure it is shameful to return there after having discovered that something else is possible and i just i can't imagine why anybody is going to be surprised that the outgrowth of putting race first is going to be um you know i mean maybe leonard cohen got it i've seen the future brother it's murder i really hope not you said something not too long ago that um was both hilarious and uh it made me work it's exactly what people aren't doing you said i want to emphasize one word people extrapolate and i was like yes yes please like follow that logic to its natural conclusion and that sums up why i am freaked out by um them coming after stem because it was uh the one thing that i held on to was okay if you just get people to follow their own logic you realize how problematic it gets and they would have to do away with logic altogether and they're never gonna wait what and it's like they're actually getting rid of logic it's the the moment in the argument where you're like i'm not even gonna say anything i'm just gonna ask questions because i know if once i ask a certain number of questions they will get to the point where they realize oh [ __ ] i actually okay cool i see where this goes because it never occurs to you that they would actually throw out um measuring progress having a goal seeing if you're actually getting towards that goal like and so when they start going yeah like the the second most disturbing thing to come out of all of this was the um smithsonian like these are all the things that are white and are there for problematic and it was like hard work progress measuring results striving to be the best i was like what the [ __ ] is happening you you literally i have so i have to get into a little bit of my story you know a smidgen of it um so when you're working in manufacturing which is where i was working you're in the inner city so you're around only people of color i mean almost exclusively and so i'm encountering all these people and i'm like okay tom are your ideas real because you always say it doesn't matter who you are today it only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there well if that's true tom then you'd be willing to hire convicted felons would you not and i was like yeah actually i would and so we put out on the street as they call it that we would hire people we would consider people for employment even if they had a felony record and so we ended up getting all of these like way low income people that had really struggled had trouble the law former drug dealers gang bangers like guys with the teardrop tattoos and all that and i was not everybody but i was very impressed with the number of people who were extraordinary people incredibly capable um able to do stuff they just had a weird ass frame of reference and if i could give them an empowering frame of reference then you know they could go on to do something and walking them down the line of like hey here's how you improve something you have a goal you set it you have a metric that you're marching towards that just seemed if you can get them on that path then you've really got something that's going to take you somewhere impactful but once you strip away that ability and you say hey that's white um and so you don't want to act white or be white i'm like the one thing you've given me that's allowing me to help these people like we had one guy he went from he took the job because he wanted a front for his drug money okay imagine that he comes in he interviews because he hears this crazy guy is willing to hire people with felony convictions he had been to prison not for drugs oddly enough but he had been to prison for something else and then was dealing again and but had to show his parole officer where he was getting the money so and he tells me all this to my face later once we've been we had gained trust with each other and he was like dude you've changed my life you've changed the lives of my kids like this is going to echo for generations there was one guy that called me i hadn't spoken him probably in six years he called me this a few weeks ago he's like tom i'm on my way to a job getting paid almost a hundred thousand dollars i would never have believed this was possible and i just had to thank you and i was like this this is why instead of buying an island and retiring like i've doubled down in my life because i i see the number of people that oh change my frame of reference i didn't get smarter i just look at things differently i'm using metrics like i have a goal because that was my whole thing to them you have a goal and my thing i always preach is do and believe about yourself that which moves you towards your goals right so if because a lot of people get stuck in these loops if i'm stupid i'm dumb the world's against me whatever and so i'm like does that belief help you achieve your goal no cool then don't don't buy into it even if the world really is against you even if the deck really is stacked against you accepting defeat does not move you towards your goal so don't do it and so when i read that and i was like what are you doing like you were stripping people of the most powerful possible tools by saying there the tools themselves are somehow corrupt because of who quote-unquote created i'm like this [ __ ] madness it either works or it doesn't yeah it's it's crazy heather and i have uh long wondered about this audrey lord quote about uh you can't take apart the master's house with the master's tools and it's just the most disempowering viewpoint i'm not even entirely sure what she meant but the way this is understood it just takes the most powerful things at that human disposal and keeps them in the hands of those who have had them longest i mean it's just it inverts the process of of ending oppression and it's hard to imagine why anybody who sees their objective as ending oppression would embrace this you should you should want to capture those tools and you should want to learn to wield them as effectively as you possibly can right the tools don't know who's wielding them they work because they work and if you're going to rule out things uh that work because of who discovered them first and i'm not even sure it is who discovered them first but who you know our collective narrative says discovered them first then you're just you're never gonna get anywhere so yes it is incredibly frightening to hear people go up against logic and science um and you know the funny thing is evergreen did allow us to have these conversations up close and personal and so i think a lot of people dismiss the idea that people are against stem people in this movement are against it because they haven't heard somebody say it while looking into their eyes oh yes science really is a white thing it's like what are you even did you just say that i mean that's almost all i need to know about your proposal for the world is that you just don't understand even the basics of you know where liberation would come from right so yeah i wish i wish i could convey that better i'm glad somebody heard me say extrapolate and knew what i meant because i really very interesting it's the missing parameter if you just take what you know to be factual and extrapolate from it you can see where we're headed and it couldn't be more frightening it it really couldn't be more frightening and staying on the notion of um one thing that bothers me is people are always looking for a reason not to listen to somebody and so i i have beliefs and i wrote these beliefs a very long time ago so they have nothing to do with the current moment like you said that they are the things that have worked in my life and i wrote them down so i could give them to other people um because i really am obsessed with equal opportunity and that's been a passion of mine now for more than a decade and look i've made moves in my life that i will say put me beyond reproach in terms of like i said hiring you know former felons or felons but no longer in prison and just putting my money where my mouth is and you know seeing what happens and it really i find a disturbing trend that people jump to any reason they have not to learn from somebody so i mean it obviously extrapolate it becomes cancel culture and i was given an example yesterday and i thought this actually really um it it is the trap that i would be curious to see how somebody who has this ideology um would handle it so let's say that you have a daughter somehow worse if it's a little girl for me anyway you have a daughter and she is um in anaphylactic shock her throat has closed and you call 9-1-1 and the most vile and despicable person in the world answers that call but they know how to perform an in-field tracheotomy and so they can save your daughter do you hang up the phone and try to find somebody else who you agree with and you'd be willing to take their advice which in my opinion makes you an even more despicable person because you're now making your child suffer and the risk of death you know is now skyrocketing or do you say i don't give a [ __ ] that you are the most despicable person on earth you have a piece of information that actually gets me something that i need and that i want and my thing is dude i i it is a litmus test from which i will say i can't understand i can't understand your world view like your value system is so divorced from mine and i'll say mine is probably like if you boiled my value system down to just its basic basic basic irreducible building block it's do things that alleviate human suffering it's going to be something like that that's sort of the the thing below that like if somebody disagrees with that then i i'm at a loss now i no longer how to communicate i don't know how to communicate so that argument to me is is the sort of ultimate extrapolation of i'm trying to shut that person down because they're a bad person i don't want to hear their ideas my thing is look if there were two people in front of me and one was a despicable person and the other was somebody who inspired me and i thought they were amazing and they both have the same information of course i'm going to gravitate towards the person even in subtle ways of rewarding them with my thanks and praise and and you know i have chosen them and of course that will feel good for them i get why i would want to lavish people who i really believe in with that so cool all things being equal i get it we're all going to self-select to you know celebrating things and people that we like but shutting down learning something and now this brings you to like if unity 2020 is is the concept that you're just one of the things you really want to get out there one of the things i'm most desperate to get people to understand like to really understand at a visceral level it's that skills have utility they let you do things and you don't read a book to check a mark off you don't go to college to impress your parents you take architecture classes so you can build a bridge that doesn't fall down and once you understand that and that if you can do something other people can't do like you've now just moved humanity forward or you're a small group forward like that [ __ ] is real and uh when i say that i i don't see like this recognition in people's eyes of like hey the point of learning something is to actually be able to do something and so my my new thing is to get people to understand your mind is not a library your mind is a laboratory and once you realize ah the point of this knowledge is to run tests against it to see what actually allows me to influence the world and my obsession is power let that echo and let lightning strike and sinister noise play because whenever i tell people that i come seeking power people get freaked the [ __ ] out until i say let me define power for you power is the ability to close your eyes imagine a world a world better than this one and then open your eyes and be able to make that world come true because it's going to require you to do things and if you don't have the skill set to do those things you are disempowered so yeah getting people to understand that feels like an uphill battle sometimes no i it's beautiful and i resonate with it a hundred percent and in some sense i think what's happened is we've so badly botched the job of educating people that they register in some sense that it's too late and so the mind-numbing prescriptions that were being delivered i think are surrender that basically people who understand that they have been effectively cognitively maimed are not really interested in the idea that the right way to solve the problem is to to increase the capacity of your mind to find new possibilities and bring them into the world um so instead it's the temper tantrum that you started with which you know i get it we can't do that but i get it i understand that they're they're angry and they have a right to be all right i want to shift gears because i would be horrified if i had an evolutionary biologist uh two hours with them and i did not ask a question that has been on my mind since i was like 15. brett is weird as this question is it actually means something to me and i ask it in all sincerity why is the clitoris on the outside well okay this is a good question um let's put it this way i don't think the focus should be on the anatomical structure right there's bound to be an answer to that let's put it this way the fact that testicles are on the outside is also an interesting oddity but let's say the interesting thing is that selection has altered the meaning of sex for humans right it has delivered us an incredible gift which we are now treating so horrifyingly but the gift is it has turned sex into a bonding mechanism and what that means is that unlike almost all creatures human beings have sex when the production of offspring is not a possibility that is to say people have sex after menopause they have sex when it's not the fertile moment in a woman's cycle and that i think people don't understand how unique a situation that is and what it implies is that human bonding is a a novel phenomenon that requires both parties to feel rewarded by the activity so in some sense the orgasm has been democratized by selection and a mechanism for generating it has been provided by adaptation and interestingly the mechanism for generating it is not it's not a simple button right right it's just not a simple button it actually requires an empathic connection in order to to tune in to your partner well enough to deliver the goods and in some sense that's the magic of the thing is by creating a puzzle surrounding sexual gratification in women the necessity of a close connection is is introduced into pair bonding is that making sense it is i have a loaded question uh waiting if that is the natural break point so um my question is it am i wrong in assuming that for literally thousands of years and maybe far longer than that that um it was neglected and that generation after generation after generation of women failed to have a life where orgasm was a regular part of it due to that which if that's the case it it does not seem that evolution would land on that as a strategy it may be a byproduct maybe a total accident but it seems that it probably isn't a strategy unless and this was i can't remember where i read this and it was so interesting to me that i thought could this really be true that it was put on the outside so that women it wasn't like if you think of the penis as a a very um it's external it's easily touched by anybody who wants to bond and certainly in other animals you'll see it isn't just the person that they're i'm having intercourse with that will reach out and touch them what in a way that we would call sexual as a way to ease tension or whatever and so i thought is this a way of putting something on the outside so that women also have just a social bonding a way to soothe or you know extend sort of an olive branch of kinds you know between two people could be male male female could be female female and that it needed to be on the outside to be more easily accessible well that's a really interesting question i don't know of any evidence to support it i will say i am doubtful that the orgasm in females was it may be true that in european culture for example it was um it was turned taboo and therefore a kind of uh you know generating orgasm for females is kind of a lost art but i think in many other cultures it's quite clear that there was an awareness of the subtleties of sexual pleasure for females so in any case if europeans really did lose touch with uh with female orgasm i believe that's an anomaly it probably has a meaning to it in other words there are um it is true that the structures that exist are adaptations and it is true that religious prohibitions against their access are also evolutionary adaptations and so there's a question about what what is being managed by these these tensions um but i love the idea that placing it on the outside means that it is not strictly speaking a a an intercourse triggered phenomenon that of course raises questions about the g-spot and its location but anyway it's an interesting it's an interesting line of questioning i understand why you're obsessed with it it's fascinating and clearly selection had something in mind um i will say the fly in the ointment of this discussion might be one of anatomical constraint in other words because the clitoris is made of the same tissue that the penis is made of it may be that its position is actually um constrained by the amount of shared blueprint that male and female have in terms of where tissues end up so i i don't know that is super interesting um there is certainly some logic to that but the um so in terms of the design of the clitoris if i'm not mistaken there are um elements of the uh the nerve that wraps around um the vaginal canal which that always made more sense because then at least it seems like it's sort of in on the act and shows that that you could put theoretically those tendrils anywhere and that one would assume that nature ran some sort of experiment where there was more involvement um you know on because there are some women at least as i understand it there are some percentage of women that can have orgasm from traditional uh penetrative sex so it becomes um you know a question of why if we think of that as sort of an experiment that nature ran why did it not go all the way why did it hit some uh percentage of women but not all especially if and i am sort of making the base assumption that women are more likely to get pregnant if they also have an orgasm um there is actually data on this i'm trying to remember what the conclusion is i you can't hold me to this it's possible i have it wrong but i think if i'm remembering it correctly the result was that orgasm did increase the likelihood of fertilization [Music] if one controls for fertile period right for the place in a woman's cycle that sex is taking place i hope that's correct um that's certainly what i encountered um i am by no means an expert on the subject but that was the one that made me go wow that this is so interesting then why are the two divorced like it just seems so strange to me well but in some sense i think that's reflective of the the answer i gave you initially which is um there's a tremendous amount about courting and other associated rituals which um now become things like marriage and engagement in in humans that is built to ensure that males don't game females in other words fema so females have a tremendous investment in offspring automatically just by virtue of carrying them internally and then feeding them by breast males can have a very high investment in offspring and that's a very frequent way for males to reproduce but they obviously can have an almost no investment version of the strategy which although it's less successful because raising offspring without a father is more difficult it is such a bargain from the point of view of males that males find the prospect of it irresistible right this is why males are obsessed with um sex with women that they don't have any intention of seeing again so in light of that females are built they are both wired and programmed to avoid men who are resistant to commitment and so the point is in some sense the conception of a child with a man who is diligent about delivering sexual pleasure is liable to be that's a more secure bond than sex with a man who's only interested in his own pleasure so you could imagine wow the system would when that makes sense that that is super [ __ ] interesting now that that's 4d chess right there like all right let's let's see how far you're willing to go to make sure that i'm taken care of as well jesus that is [ __ ] interesting man that is really interesting yeah i am well yeah go ahead no no please i want to learn more here well i was just you know say you know that uh that this all raises this issue of how frivolously we are treating sex and how stupid it is because in some sense you know we we could have been given no greater gift than a weirdly yin-yang symmetrical sexual landscape that you spend a lifetime exploring with somebody i mean that's just it'd be hard to make up something that wonderful and we're treating it just so stupidly dude this is where you know going back to the data becomes so interesting because um one like the moment that i just had where you gave me something that i i had a whole sort of belief around like why the taurus is on the outside and i could tell it at cocktail parties and always gets a big reaction and you came along you gave me something that like totally knocks that off and is like even more interesting and it's like man that's i love those moments right but it's an empirical question you know ultimately you can look at the data and find out which one's real and like whoa that's real and then really beginning to understand it like begins to you know peel back the onion as it were and so even looking at sex and monogamy and the different types of pair bonding that we have and how they can change from one environment to the next and why that like once you're able to look at the data and say like i never would have guessed i've heard people say there's like three things you have to do to succeed in america i may get these wrong if you know them please tell me that i'm wrong but i think they are don't get don't have a child out of wedlock get a high school diploma and get a job it's something like that like these really basic three things all but guarantee you entrance into the middle class and it's one of those look at the data and thomas sol is somebody that blew my mind when all of this kicked off and it was like i had some weird unease that black lives matter wasn't about actually helping black people but i didn't know enough about it so i was like uh i didn't want to post black lives matter but i was like i need to go research this and figure out what's going on and so i went on like this binge where i was like i'm only going to seek out um black intellectuals and see where they fall and it introduced me to some of the greatest minds thomas soule to me in a subconscious way when i look at him i see he might as well be wearing a superman outfit like when you hear that guy talk he's so smart in a way that i'm so covetous of and he's so well researched it is crazy and whenever somebody debates him he's always like show me the data like i will follow the data wherever it goes i don't have some agenda that i'm trying to push i'm just telling you you want this thing to to win because it feels so good and he was like but if you look at the data and it doesn't win then don't you want to find the thing that wins and that to me is just so powerful of like data data data man like there is an answer and if you have the discipline of not tying your identity up into an answer and you stay open to um you know new truth it's like and you might know i misquote this person all the time i think it was max planck who said science advances one funeral at a time yeah funeral by funeral and and i just thought oh my god why why how do you not read that quote and go oh i have to change everything about myself because i refuse to to fall for something so predictable yeah i agree and i think the point you were you were headed toward a minute ago where um the black lives matter movement is explicitly anti-nuclear family but this is this is again one of these issues of look if you're going to attack science and you're going to declare it white and you're going to say the nuclear family is white and that therefore we have to uninvent these things you can't you cannot have power if you have power over us you'll destroy us because you're taking things that are actually um part of our birthright and you're declaring them null and void either you know that's insane and you have an ulterior motive or you don't know it's insane and you need to figure out how to think more clearly because this is just nuts absolutely nuts yeah when people don't look at the data i get super super super uneasy that one really feels like a recipe for disaster so really fast um just i'm super curious how do you think this plays out like your predictions on where we were going back when this was just evergreen were spot on your testimony in front of congress spot on what what comes next where where are we headed in very specific terms well i think uh it's very hard to be specific because you have a kind of fork that we can't tell which branch we're going to end up on it's possible that events cause the election to go towards trump which i think is far more likely than people imagine based on current polling one we should have learned our lesson in 2016 about polls and trump that they don't tell the full story and two this is 2020 and events even if you uh take the power of the presidency out of the question events could turn things around inside of a week so that could happen but in light of the powers of the presidency i don't see trump allowing himself to go to a stunning defeat without dramatic moves on his part to reverse that and i fear what he might do to avoid it on the other hand let's say nothing happens in 2020 and the president resists the urge to to do something dramatic biden somehow wins then we haven't even more frightening prospect potentially which is not more of the same but something brand new which is the democratic party having partnered with the uh the black lives matter movement where it actually takes some of the insanity that they've been saying and turns it into policy which i think is quite plausible because the uh the purpose of the democratic party has become the protection of those rent-seeking elites that it that it represents and this is the moment at which rent-seeking elites are facing something like the french revolution and so directing uh the people at each other so that they ignore the folks who have hoarded the opportunity is a natural move this is a new twist on it but it's a familiar pattern of history so anyway i guess what i would say is there's a reason that um that i really think we have to be looking at something like unity 2020 which is both prospects are absolutely dire and the fact that we have a system that not only delivers you unacceptable possibilities but delivers them in pairs in which there's no escape that that uh it's completely unacceptable and i think we have to take up arms against it metaphorically speaking as somebody who doesn't want to hoard opportunity but has literally no um idea like i don't feel like i'm hoarding opportunity i feel like i am desperately trying to get more people too but when i hear you say that i always feel like he knows something i don't he's talking about something that i don't quite understand how are people hoarding opportunity and how can somebody like myself not hoard opportunity well first of all you don't sound to me like you're hoarding opportunity to the extent that you might be it's it's buried in your portfolio somewhere um but i don't think you're actively doing it um but what does the active hoarding look like well let's put it this way um there is a reason that our public schools suck right it never gets stated which is that a large number of people do not want other people's children equipped to compete with their own children right are people really that sort of weak-minded is that is that conscious i think oh god this is terrible but i do worry that there are a lot of well-meaning people that just aren't they don't they don't cross a certain threshold of being able to think through the problem um i think the problem is that that's the real answer to why the schools are so bad but it is not the answer to how it is recorded in the mind in other words we create a phony ideological difference about how to fix the schools that prevents them from being fixed which results effectively in people with means opting out of public schools which increases the problem because it means that sabotage of the public schools basically externalizes the problem of educational malpractice onto some populations and not others and so anyway a lot of things look like this where there's a solution to a problem we could find it if we agreed that the problem was to be solved but there's a kind of cryptic sabotage that takes hold because of the kind of competition we are in with each other you know we could make the same argument about why there's so much homelessness right why do we not solve the homelessness problem well in part the homelessness problem is the bottom of a ladder where depressing wages all the way along is a feature not a bug right you depress wages by having people below you whatever rung you're on there always people below you who would be more than happy to take your job which reduces your bargaining power and trying to negotiate for for more and so in essence the uh the homelessness problem is the symptom we can't avoid seeing it's it's an outgrowth of a system that is designed to do something it never states and you know there are a lot of these things and as you know my sense is if you put good people in power and you give them the opportunity not to have to pander to corrupting influences these problems aren't so difficult to solve but if you leave the corrupting influences in a position to veto everything you'll never get anywhere all right so let's just take one thing and see if we agree on what the problem is i'll state what i think the solution is and you punch me in the throat uh if if i um if i'm missing something because i what i'm about to say i mean very very sincerely um but it is also possible that i'm delusional in a way that i'm i just don't see um so my mom works for a school and she'll occasionally tell me stories about like and she's not even saying it like she doesn't have a problem with it but i hear it and i think this is madness like the fact that there are teachers in some school districts that are they're accused of some pretty um insane [ __ ] whether it's just like gross incompetence or potentially doing you know things with students that cross a potential sexual line and they're just shuttled off to a room somewhere where they continue to get paid and receive their benefits because the um unions are so strong that you can't it is so hard to get rid of even a horrendous teacher that you can't um it's just better to put them in a room and keep paying them and then slot somebody else into that now as a business person i can just tell you that is a recipe for disaster you will have so much money being spent on the dumbest [ __ ] ever and you don't have a way of encouraging like this is an area where you want there to be a hierarchy you want people like if i could and some universities actually do this if i could create a hierarchy a leader board so people could see who are the teachers killing it the teachers i don't know what the criteria would be fair enough that's going to be for somebody more invested but like student ratings test scores like outside audit something where it's like yo here are the people that are actually killing the game and then here are the people that rank lower um for instance ray dalio largest hedge fund manager in the world um does these things where he has his employees do a force ranking of say managers and the whole company will rate the managers and and they put it up for everyone to see and you see who's at the top and who's at the bottom ouch that [ __ ] hurts but like it inspires you to get better because you don't want to be at the bottom rung or you say i want to go work for a company that doesn't do this but either way you're getting rid of the people at the bottom and you bring fresh blood in so my thing is look you cannot be in a situation where either and i don't know if it's school vouchers is what it's going to be but if a school is underperforming either the people teaching administrators whatever they've got to go or the union's got to go something's got to give so that like real talent can rise um why am i wrong um you're not wrong except that you're trying to save a system that's probably beyond help right go on so look the incentives have to line up that's the thing if you're going to pay people to sit in a room because they've misbehaved or because they're terrible at their job then obviously you're going to accumulate some you know just parasitic class of people in the system who are just going to draw a paycheck for nothing that's not a viable plan on the other hand there's a reason that schools are terrible that has a lot to do with the fact that somehow we have allowed the market to set the wages of the teachers when in fact we ought to be subsidizing this so that great people want to do it and maybe not permanently so if i was to try to fix the system i would probably try to encourage people to spend a period of time teaching to discover a if they were really good at it but also to attract people who were really good at something else in other words being really good um as a teacher is partially about knowing something if you've set your sights on being a teacher rather than knowing something worth teaching then you're probably off track so we we should want to attract people who are really good at you know math physics art whatever it is so that they have a passion coming in and the problem is the way the system is structured we don't attract very many people who have a passion and frankly those few who come in there do so doing themselves massive economic harm right their passion drives them to just effectively uh sideline themselves from the market in order to do this passion and then what do we do is we hobble them with curriculum that's just absolutely you know authoritarian and draconian which leaves them almost no freedom to engage this passion so we drive out the good ones this is not a stable system and it misunderstands the purpose of education right the purpose of education should be to upgrade the mind so it's maximally capable and the way to do that is to figure out who knows something has a passion for conveying it and how do we bring them on board and give them the freedom to figure out how to convey it one of the things that was true about evergreen which um it's just killing heather and me that we can't manage to convey the importance of this to people is that we had total freedom to teach however we wanted teach whatever material we wanted now lots of people abuse that freedom you don't want those people you want to figure out how to eliminate them quickly but for anybody who actually has a passion to figure out what can be conveyed having a blank canvas is magic so you want the freedom to use it and you want a system that gets rid of people who will abuse it and if you can do those two things then you'll end up having a marvelous educational system far better than what you would get if you just simply tried to rescue this one by getting rid of the worst teachers all right one problem solved man and that is probably the place to wrap this up dude the way that you're moving in the world i am beyond grateful i can only imagine how difficult um evergreen was but the fact that it freed you up uh to do something like this and to reach the number of people that you're reaching man it is incredible i can only imagine where you're gonna be in five years as more and more people glom on to the way that you think i even love your dad jokes by the way so keep them coming uh the the my wife in fact this is something we didn't record but my wife when she heard you were coming on had to come say hello to you she is so into you and your wife and and just shares my feeling as well which you guys are really extraordinary so thanks for coming on sharing with us for doing what you do i'm way way way grateful thanks tom uh i must say i feel like i've just spent two hours with the kindred spirit and uh glad to have met you dude definitely where can people find you and uh get a similar chance to hang out well there's the dark horse podcast which is uh twice a week um there's twitter you can find me at brett weinstein brett has one t unity2020 you can look us up at articles of unity on twitter and uh that's probably the best places for the moment perfect all right guys dive into his world you will be richly rewarded and if you haven't be sure to subscribe here and until next time my friends be legendary take care once you become convinced that you're not actually in the real world the stories that are being fed to you are manifestly untrue that the entire social construction is not what it appears to be that there are hidden passages trapdoors panic rooms everywhere it becomes pretty addictive because you can't imagine that you never noticed this before