Tucker and Bret Weinstein Debate Evolution, God’s Existence, Israel, and Will AI Gain Consciousness?

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I don't have a problem at all with the idea that there's physical evolution.

My problem is with the question of the creation of all things.

Religious belief systems are keys

to the amazing capacity of humans.

The creator is the force that creates.

God was not created.

God has always been there, period.

Man, if I was an atheist, I'd be very upset that Sam Harris was carrying my atheist water because I felt like he was a very bad spokesman for his cause.

The spokespeople for atheism have done such a terrible disservice by demonizing people's religious faith rather than taking it as the important set of questions that it obviously is.

There are many different ways that AI

can radically disrupt civilization.

The idea that they will become conscious and that we won't know is to me highly likely.

First of all, thank you.

It's great to see you.

Great to see you, Tucker.

And I hate to start a conversation

about me or our relationship or whatever, but I just, I've been wanting to talk to you for the last year.

I went on Joe Rogan's show about a year ago and I

stated that I don't believe in Darwinism.

And basically, I think God created people.

I don't think it was,

it's just a matter of belief.

And you texted me and said, I'm an actual evolutionary biologist.

We need to have this conversation.

So

We haven't.

Yep.

So

I will just restate my one sentence position, which is,

I think, I don't know about the timeline or the means.

I'm not interested, but I think that

people are a creation of God, not an accident of biology.

That's my position.

Got it.

Yeah.

I'm hoping that the text I sent you was not as

defensive as that.

Are you kidding?

But in any case, no, I did want to have this conversation with you.

And

let's just say, because

evolution is my professional realm, I'm sure I could cite you chapter and verse.

You definitely could.

But it's pointless.

First of all, that doesn't make me right.

You know, the fact is, yes, I know a lot of factual material, but

there are some deeper issues here.

And I thought it would be useful if you and I just explored them, because I think you're standing in for a lot of people who have begun to have very profound questions about the story that they've been told about evolution and what its relationship is to biology and most importantly to people.

Yes.

So

I just want to confess a few of my positions so that your audience knows where I'm coming from.

Okay.

I do not believe that there is a creator in the literal sense.

I am in no way hostile to the idea, but I've come to the conclusion that there probably isn't such a creator because all of the things that we have been able to figure out about the world, things that we know are true because they carry a great deal of predictive power,

have come to us through the principle of parsimony.

And I will clean up the principle of parsimony a little bit because the way it was originally formulated is clumsy.

But

if we had access to all the information, then the simplest explanation for each pattern that we observe would be the correct one.

Simplicity is our guide to what's true.

And for me, the problem with the hypothesis that there is a creator

is

that

It answers one very difficult problem.

Where did the universe come from?

At an expense that is vastly greater in terms of the

assumptions.

If the universe came from a creator, well, that simplifies one thing.

But now we have to explain where that creator came from.

And that's a much harder problem than explaining the universe itself.

So as much as I agree, explaining the universe and explaining biology is difficult, it does not solve a problem to imagine that a creator is the answer.

And even if there was one,

well,

maybe that creator was existing in a universe that was created by another creator.

But eventually, you're going to get to a place where you're going to have to reach for the only explanation we have ever come up with for

where radical increases in complexity come from.

So even if we in this universe are the product of a creator's work, ultimately that creator is going to have to have come from somewhere, and the only explanation that could possibly work is going to be Darwinian.

So,

again, I'm not saying that I know whether there is or there isn't, but I am saying that the principle that has allowed us to see all of what we can see, that has allowed us to build all that we have built,

that principle is parsimony, and it suggests that this universe is not the product of an intentional explanation.

Okay, so the Hebrews explained it this way, and the the Christians too,

that

the process is inherent in the description.

So the creator is the force that creates and is not himself created.

So in other words,

God was not created.

God has always been there, period.

Right.

And I see, you know, you can make the question go away, but I don't know what that means.

We don't have any example of such a thing.

So it.

No, it definitely doesn't, because everything apart from God is created.

Well, okay, let me take a different tact.

Yes.

Let's say that, let's just start from the premise that there is a creator who intended this universe and the biota.

So I'm a product of that

in this thought experiment.

And in such a case, I know that this creator gave me a capacity to reason.

I'm pretty good at it.

That's why I've invested in it professionally.

And he gave me an incredible

set of evidence

for Darwinian evolution.

And I'm now forced to grapple with the question of why a creator

would have given me a capacity to reason, would have given me the principle of parsimony, the power of which I can see, and a set of evidence that forces me to conclude that

the biota at least evolved in a Darwinian way.

Now, it could be,

let's put it this way.

I think the simplest explanation then would be

that the creator used evolution to make

the biology.

And that, you know, maybe the creator is especially interested in the products of a Darwinian process.

You know, maybe the creator is as delighted as I am, or because he's the creator, more delighted than I am at the sight of a hummingbird, that that's a marvelous thing to have happened through this process.

I could imagine that.

It still doesn't strike me as the simplest way to explain the universe that I see, but

if a creator wanted a universe in in which biological marvels happened, then the universe might look like this.

And it doesn't change what I do.

At the point that I know that a Darwinian process is actually

the tool that has shaped the creatures, then it makes sense to study it in the way that I do.

So,

again, I'm not against the idea that there's a creator.

I don't see any evidence for it.

If there is a creator, I'm pretty sure he must want me to be

skeptical for some reason, because he's given me that which would cause me to be skeptical.

And I guess the final piece of that argument is that I think that there is a more parsimonious way to understand

our

universe and the role of religious belief in it, which I know will be grating to many people, especially people people who do have a profound relationship with

a religious faith.

But I think the right way to understand all of the evidence is that religious belief systems

are themselves profoundly important products of evolution.

They are keys to the amazing capacity of humans.

And so I don't know how clear this is, but part of what I'm saying is that I think the facts tell us, or they strongly imply, a story in which there is no literal creator, but they do not tell us that the creator is a fiction, right, any more than

a wing is a fiction.

Our belief in

God or gods is a key to human functionality, functionality, and it is incumbent on evolutionary biologists to understand in what way that could possibly be true.

And this is a responsibility on which I think evolutionists have fallen down.

They have treated religious devotion as,

frankly, a pathology, and it couldn't possibly be one.

It's obviously adaptive.

And because it's obviously adaptive, it requires the same seriousness that we point at other structures or processes.

And so far, there's been very little of that in my field.

I don't think it is adaptive.

I don't think there's any evidence of that at all.

And I should also say that, by the way, and I'll tell you why I think that, but

I should say what I said on Rogan was like characteristically inarticulate and imprecise.

And I don't have a problem at all with the idea that there's physical evolution, because I think there clearly is.

My problem is with the question of the creation of all things.

And I don't think there's a better explanation or a more reasonable explanation that there's just a God that created everything.

If you think, if you disagree, I'd love to hear it.

But let me just say of the question of religion being adaptive.

So like the cent, one of the main modes of religious expression from the beginning of recorded history is human sacrifice,

including, and it goes on today around the world in various forms.

And the idea idea that that's like necessary because population outstrips resources is not always true.

Like there are tons of examples, including in modern day,

lots of places, including the United States, where there's plenty of resources and people do it anyway.

But it's the same

story in every civilization, none of which could have had contact with each other that we know of.

And there's kind of nothing that

evolutionary biology can say about that.

It's like it's not helping people at all, and they're doing it anyway.

Well,

I look at it differently.

I see the same or a similar pattern.

And my sense is in biology, when we see a complex,

costly pattern that either re-evolves, spreads,

or otherwise persists over a long period of time, we are forced to grapple with the question of what could its utility be.

Exactly.

And

while I don't think we have a good hypothesis about the utility of human sacrifice, and personally, morally, I'm offended by it as I

do.

You are.

So is God, by the way.

Nonetheless, like so many of

humanity's worst attributes,

we have to look at it and

grapple with the evolutionary implications, that it does have some sort of a

meaning.

And

I should say,

buried within what I'm saying is a critique of

where my field has gotten to.

As I think I mentioned to you in a past discussion, I think my field is stuck and it's no longer solving big problems.

It's focused on producing lots of papers that study some specific, but it's not discovering big new things.

And that's not because there isn't lots to be done.

It's because it's sort of lost track of how to do it.

So I'm not arguing, I'm not a champion of the state of evolutionary biology.

I think it's a little

bit pitiful.

But I am a champion of the basic Darwinian paradigm, which I think we have lost sight of.

In fact, evolutionary biologists in the middle of the 20th century overly narrowed our understanding of Darwinism and have blinded us to what it's really trying to tell us about ourselves.

And I would love to see us remember how to do the process of discovery and to start

unlocking big puzzles.

But it sounds to me like

you believe in a universe in which biological evolution happens.

Yes.

Okay.

So there's no disagreement.

And that people adapt and that human behavior is to a huge extent a function of physical reality, of biology.

And like we do certain things, we have certain attitudes because of

biology, because of nature.

Like these are imperatives of nature.

And so I totally buy all that.

I think Darwin thought all that.

Here's, I guess, to put a finer point on it.

I believe in the existence of the supernatural.

I've experienced it.

I've seen it.

It's real.

It exists outside of nature, outside of all the laws that we think we're subject to, and it acts on us.

And human sacrifice is one example of that.

So that's my view.

I'm totally convinced that that's true.

I know that it's true.

And so

I don't know if there's room in the framework that you're describing for that fact.

Well,

what I think I did not articulate properly is I'm not arguing that a materialist scientific worldview that excludes the supernatural is a better way to live.

One of the things I think atheists have done particularly badly, and one of the reasons that I don't call myself an atheist, is that

there is no demonstrated case in which

an atheist civilization has thrived.

In fact, we have many examples in which which they have spectacularly collapsed.

And in fact, the

things that presently threaten our civilization include a great many, you know, atheist ideas like, you know, you can just up and change your sex if you feel that you're trapped in the wrong.

There is no God but us.

Right.

So

that program doesn't work very well, at least not as far as we've seen.

I think that's true.

So I'm not arguing that a belief.

No, no, but I'm not even.

no, I know that you think that and it's obvious in how you live that you think that.

But I want to get more focused on just like the reality of it.

Like if the super, if there is no supernatural,

then like, what is all this stuff?

Well, like, what's the other explanation?

So I will tell you how I deal with the question personally.

Yes.

Which is I have a category.

that I don't share with anybody as far as I know that I would call the metanatural, right?

Which is is sort of the advantage that comes from believing in the supernatural.

I believe it all ultimately could be explained through

a natural system

in the same way you could explain a baseball game by thinking of all of the atoms in the baseball and the bat and the players.

But that's a terrible way to think about baseball, right?

It just doesn't, it's not functional.

But yes, you could, in principle, do it.

So I think that the belief in the supernatural is a

much more efficient way of encoding hidden truths that you can't readily comprehend.

So to give you one example,

you might have a system in which you imagine that the misbehavior of your people, whoever they might be,

is going to result in the anger of a God who will punish you with famine.

Right.

Okay, that would be supernatural.

supernatural.

It's also true that if your people are busy betraying each other, that that

may threaten the harvest.

In other words, your coordination in the planting of crops, the protecting of those crops, and the harvesting of those crops is dependent on whether or not people like and trust each other.

And to the extent that they're backstabbing each other, it could very well result in starvation without the intervention of an intentional God.

So, to me, those two stories are the same story.

How do you explain to people you really shouldn't misbehave because it could interfere with our coordination in a way that may result in us not having enough food to get through the winter?

The answer is: oh, God sees what you're doing and he's not happy about it.

And when God's not happy,

starvation is highly likely.

Right?

So, the metanatural is the category that allows the reconciliation of the efficient narrative description of this process with the difficult to spot, deeper

physical.

I think that's, I mean, I think there's a practical effect of doing the right thing, and

it's a good thing, right?

Right.

I'm more interested in the question, among others, of like knowing.

How do we know things on the basis of no evidence that are true?

How do we,

how do we, how do we know?

Well, but we do know.

So that's, that's kind of my point: is it very often the deepest truths come to us apart from outside of our senses, and we're right.

Well, I wouldn't say outside of our senses, I would say outside of our consciousness.

Okay.

And so the distinction is like this:

our consciousness is

late evolving.

It shows up at the end of our evolutionary story, not early.

And, you know, that means that there are a good many mammals that have some degree of consciousness that we can see, but nobody's conscious like we are.

The

conscious mind, I will argue, is actually evolved for an initial purpose.

The initial purpose is exactly what we are doing right now.

It is the ability for two minds to pool

their understanding,

right, to actually plug into each other and

reach an emergent conclusion that neither of us could reach alone or that the two of us couldn't reach separately if we couldn't plug our consciousnesses into each other.

So when we say actually that we know things, but we don't know how we know them, we're sort of talking about our conscious minds, which is just this thin sliver on top of this architecture that has been knowing things for millions of years in ways that weren't conscious at all.

So I think we're really, it's that interface.

Does my conscious mind know why I know this to be true?

Why do I meet somebody and have a distrust that turns out to be accurate with respect to their trustworthiness, right?

I can try to piece it together.

I may get nowhere.

And it may be that there's a lot that I actually did perceive.

It came in through my eyes and my ears, and who knows what else.

But it is my conscious mind's difficulty in describing it that feels like my entire mind was handed this piece of information.

So,

to put it another way, we don't do a good job of talking about intuition.

In my opinion, intuition is the product of unconscious processes in the mind.

If those unconscious processes are in a zone where you've had a lot of experience, your intuition is liable to be excellent.

If those unconscious processes are trying to navigate something where you don't have much experience at all, your intuition will be crude.

It's not a supernatural process.

It's about the sum total of your experiences

and what they are capable of putting together about

the world.

And

that to me,

you know, it might as well be supernatural from the point of view of how most people live their lives.

It may indeed just simply be the best way to function.

But

that's different than saying that that's actually what's taking place.

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Do people ever communicate with each other across distances non-verbally?

Yeah.

In fact, you know, one of the funny things about us is that we have a special adaptation in our eyes that allows us to communicate as a hunting party without alerting the thing that we're hunting.

No, I mean, out of sight.

I'm 500 miles from my spouse, and we have the same thought at the same moment.

Yeah,

but I don't think it's supernatural.

How is that natural?

Well, I mean, if I work backwards from my own parallel experiences,

my wife and I know each other very, very well.

She can detect if my pattern of

communication is

off

and,

you know, if she is triggered to think, huh, I would have expected to hear from him, I didn't,

I wonder what that's about.

She also knows a certain amount about, you know, what's been on my mind and,

you know,

where I may be heading.

And therefore, she may be able to deduce because she, you know, if we're talking about intuition, Heather's intuition about me has got to be pretty damn good because she's had, had her entire adult life to build a model that's as accurate as anybody's would be.

So her ability to figure out

that

there is some pattern there is second to none.

And it will not surprise me if very frequently she nails the analysis and we can be 500 miles or 1,000 miles apart.

And it feels like a communication across a very long distance when really it's a kind of a synchrony that allows her to extrapolate when something has departed from normal.

And I will say one other thing about this.

We have a very strange pattern as human beings.

When we meet, we say

totally meaningless things.

You know, what's new?

Not much.

Right?

And I've thought a lot about why that would be.

It's not very expensive each time we do it.

But over a lifetime, you're putting a lot of effort into using a communication mechanism that can transmit very remarkable stuff, and you're just broadcasting empty stuff.

A lot of wasted breath, yeah.

Except it's not wasted.

If I come through the door and I say, hey, honey,

I know before I even see Heather what frame of mind she's in based on her response, even though the words may be the same always.

I can tell if she's frustrated, if she's elated.

I know what frame of mind she's in.

And my sense is that

it makes sense when we meet somebody to go through a pro forma interaction that allows you to detect things like emotional state, right?

It's a profoundly important check.

And

rather than say something special, to the degree that it is standardized, what those interactions contain, it makes it much easier to detect the part that's important, which is the tone,

the cadence, all of those things.

How was your day, Von?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So, anyway, I would.

Can I just bring back to the beginning, though?

Sure.

If

you said that the principle of parsimony

is usually true, like the simplest explanation is the likely explanation.

So my explanation for the creation of all things is God, who is not created, but only creates, created all things.

Pretty simple.

Your explanation is what?

Well, let's put it this way.

I've seen another version of this where you won't expect it.

The

many

universes theory of quantum mechanics.

Yep.

You know this?

Yep.

So the basics are that in order to reconcile some of the oddities that quantum mechanics has discovered, we imagine that in every instant there is a universe spawned for every conceivable

outgrowth.

And so, you know, if I pick up this pen, there's a universe in which I didn't and a universe in which I did.

And those universes go on to do whatever they do, right?

This is a spectacularly simple explanation linguistically.

It is the opposite of simple in terms of what it implies.

You're going to create a universe for every conceivable nuance of interaction, that every creature, every pebble that rolled down a hill, you're creating universes at this rate.

That's not simple.

That's complex at a level that's beyond extreme.

And so my sense, and again, I'm not arguing that this isn't the better way to live, but my sense is when you say the simplest explanation is

a creator who wasn't created,

linguistically, it doesn't get simpler than that.

It's a a one sentence, you know, and you're done.

At the level of what it means,

it's almost inconceivably, what does it mean for something capable of creating a universe not to have come into existence?

Right.

Right.

I can't even imagine what that means, right?

Well, it is inconceivable.

I mean, that's why you're the created, not the creator.

Right.

But, and, and again, I'm not hostile to this position.

Well, I don't think you are.

That's why it.

But my point would be

the question of, did the universe start with a creator

is

not

one that you are likely to derive some practical value from spending your time on.

In fact, you could waste your entire life, make no progress, and be detained from all of the other things you might have done.

So it would be useful for most humans throughout most of history to have had a simple explanation that simply allowed them to move on to questions where there was some profit to be made or peril to be avoided.

You want not to be stuck on questions where there's no potential value in your exploration.

And so my sense is that that's a very elegant way of moving on to things that are actually important.

And that's why

it's effectively an enduring answer to a question that every human being is likely to have at some point.

Aaron Powell, so what's the other explanation I don't know.

I mean, where did the universe come from?

I'm not even sure we can know.

Well, that's the religious position, too.

Right.

Well, and that's part of why I wanted to talk to you about this.

I do think that there will ultimately be

a distinction between people who are

faith first and people who are parsimony first.

And the distinction is the ordering of two things, right?

Did God create an evolving universe, or did an evolving universe create God?

It's one or the other.

But

my feeling is it's nothing beyond that.

We should be able to actually productively collaborate on everything else.

And then, you know, at some point in the evening, we can have that argument.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So

here's the, I guess, the other kind of thematic problem I have with thinking about everything in terms of evolution is that I don't think people are are evolving.

Oh, human behavior.

I mean, look, the written record doesn't go very far.

The first legal code we have is Hammurabi's code, just a few thousand years old, but it's still a while.

Yep.

And a lot has happened in the ensuing thousands of years.

And like, that's totally recognizable as a legal code to anyone who reads it.

Yep.

And,

you know, people are just kind of the same as they have always been to the extent that we know how they have been.

Right.

No, not at all.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not at all.

What ways have people evolved?

Well, so this is part of where I'm so frustrated with my field.

Yes.

Because the thing about evolution is

Darwin

nailed his part of the question.

We narrowed his answer to something that is too crude to be

generally functional.

It works works for certain things.

It fails to explain other things consistently.

And the closer you get to human beings, the worse a job it does.

Not because of anything Darwin got wrong.

He was

probably, to his benefit, hobbled by what he didn't know, because he didn't know the molecular part of the story.

He was unconstrained by it, which forced him to speak in a general sense that turns out to be correct.

But

what I would, what you need to understand in order to follow how this story explains human beings is that the underlying story of evolution, the early one, pre-human story, is

about genes

getting into the future.

That's what they do.

That's what all creatures are doing.

Every creature has the same purpose.

In creatures with

meaningful culture,

that is, creatures in which there's generational overlap and sociality enough for something to be transmitted outside of the genome,

you get a second kind of evolution.

You have cultural evolution.

And in human beings, this has become

a, it's become the central element of the story.

Genes are very slow to adapt, much faster than we typically think, but nonetheless, it takes a very long time for a genetic change to spread across the human population it takes no time at all for a cultural innovation to spread for both better and worse i understand so what i'm arguing is that the genome our genomes

have offloaded the evolutionary work to the layer of culture and they've done that because culture can rapidly adapt.

Right.

That makes sense.

So if you look at human beings and you expect to to see a lot of evolution in the physical sense, you see some.

You see distinctions between populations, but most of them are superficial.

But you see radical divergence in cultural

systems.

Those cultural systems are equally as adaptive as the genetic systems underneath.

So people often draw a distinction between biology and culture.

That's a false dichotomy.

Biology or genes and culture are equally biological.

And the bitter pill that comes with the whole thing is culture is actually the genes solving a gene problem.

One that we, as conscious beings with values, shouldn't care about.

We are condemned in some sense to be playing out a battle between genes that is absurd once you see it.

It's not worthy of us.

So,

yes, we are evolving radically.

The fact that

if you go to Italy, you struggle to communicate is the result of two populations having diverged at a cultural level enough that you're functionally incompatible, right?

That's a lot of evolutionary change in a short period of time.

And you could say the same thing about

the difference in belief systems, right?

You've got effectively a phylogenetic story of evolution at the level of human cultures, right?

You know, for example, we have, you know,

you have Judaism.

From it evolves Christianity, right?

Christianity, if in a phylogenetic sense, is the

largest evolutionary branch of Judaism.

It is a competing branch with Islam and Hinduism.

These are alternative structures, and the implications for the behavior of the populations that subscribe to these different doctrines are as significant as species distinctions.

In other words, the belief system that you inherit outside the genome is

it encodes how to be a human being relative to some niche, right?

A niche that we don't describe in those terms, but

we should.

If we want a complete, as simple as possible story of evolution, understanding that culture alters the way evolution functions, it does not alter the objective of evolution,

is the way to do it.

So, just to rewind a couple of minutes, you said that genetics determine culture?

No.

Genetics carve out the ability to transmit large packages of vital information about how to be outside of the genome.

In other words, you inherit your genes from your parents.

You inherit your culture mostly from your parents, but outside the genome.

After you're born, if your parents speak Italian, you will come to speak Italian.

If your parents speak Mandarin, you'll speak Mandarin.

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So, underlying all this is a question, we don't need to get into this, but like,

if there's no God, then how is there a moral code at all?

Like, why can we say that it's better to raise a child than to kill a child?

I still don't, I've never understood that.

But, um,

but let's just, for the sake of argument, let's just say we all agree that it's better to raise a a child than to kill a child.

And we've always agreed that on that

from the beginning of recorded history.

So

for whatever reason, we all think that

there seems to be very little evidence that people are getting better.

And so the Christian perspective is that people are captive to sin, to the influence of supernatural evil forces on them,

which I think is like everyone's experience, by the way.

You don't have to be a Christian to know that that's true.

And we're constantly fighting to keep those at bay,

but they reemerge and they serially re-emerge,

right?

And

there seems to be no evidence they're going to stop re-emerging.

So that's not evolution.

That's stasis.

Oh, no, no, no.

I mean,

again, let's just work from the other perspectives and see whether or not we arrive in the same place.

Morality, as far as I can tell, is synonymous with self-sacrifice.

Correct.

That which is moral is

you bypassing an evolutionary opportunity.

Exactly.

Right.

So, why would you do that?

Why would evolution program you to bypass an evolutionary opportunity?

Well, the answer is because there are competing evolutionary puzzles.

So,

the

question

of, you know,

should you

betray your spouse,

right?

Obviously, evolutionarily, it's not hard to understand the argument in favor, right?

You might father a child, fathering children, passes on some genes.

We get why evolution might point you toward that.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the well-being of your family and your family's well-being has everything to do with how durable a position they hold in your community, how productive their lives are likely to be.

The delayed benefit of not betraying your spouse is substantial, but hard to convey.

So

the religious doctrine that tells you This is how you should be, and

you may see reasons not to be this way but you can't escape the consequences of them those consequences will arrive right

again if we go back to the question of you know what happens in a community that's full of people betraying each other well starvation might be one thing that happens you can describe that in terms of a god who's angry and disappointed with people or you can describe that in game theoretic terms in which you know cascades of betrayal result in right lack of coordination it amounts to the same thing.

They're true.

But that's not, but my question was not, I agree with you completely.

Virtue

produces rewards.

I mean, I think that's right.

And you don't have to be a Christian or a theist to believe that.

My question is deeper.

Why

do we all assume that life is better than death, that kindness is better than cruelty, that it's better to pass on your genes than to go extinct?

I mean, these are all moral judgments that seem impossible in the absence of a God.

Well, I don't think they're impossible.

I just think they're incredibly cumbersome.

Well, they're arbitrary.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

I mean, you can't, you can say, well, I prefer one, but you can't say one is like absolutely better than the other.

Says who?

I think there's only one of them that's arbitrary.

I mean, we're way off in the weeds, and all of your no, I think this is like central.

Okay, well, good.

I'm glad you do.

I don't think there is a robust analytical argument for why why being alive is superior to not being alive.

I think this is, and mind you, I am very committed to the idea that being alive is way better.

And I'm intending to stay alive as long as possible and to help those I love do the same.

So it's not that I'm confused about this, but analytically speaking,

what is it about life that's superior to not life?

Well, the answer is nothing, except you would expect a lot of creatures that are the product of a competition between those who were committed committed to living and those that weren't so committed to it, you would expect an accumulation of bias where we would all inherit the same analytical

perspective, even though it's not grounded in the physical reality of the universe.

So, that one,

the only point there is, I think that one is actually arbitrary.

But once you agree that

being alive is pretty great and beats the alternative, and you're going to get an infinite amount of the alternative anyway, so you might as well preserve the one space of being alive that you're going to get, right?

Once you're there, well, then the answer is the rest of it follows, right?

Why should you

be honorable?

Well, because actually it preserves your spot in the universe much better.

I get it.

I get it.

But then you're back to the practical analysis of it.

Well, but this is...

So we can't all lied past

what you described as arbitrary because it's the root of everything.

Well, I agree.

It is.

Yeah.

And look, I love this confusion, right?

I think that being confused into thinking life is great.

I mean, what else is there, right?

I'm all on board with it.

It makes it difficult to, I don't understand on what basis people make judgments about, say, murder if they don't believe that there's a higher power.

I just don't get that.

Well, again,

I think the answer is actually implied in what you asked about

the

failure to evolve that you see in the present.

And I agree, in the present, it's pretty hard to make an argument that we are making some discernible kind of progress.

In fact,

we're injuring ourselves at every turn as a result of what Heather and I have called hyper novelty.

The rate of change is so high that one can't figure out.

I can't metabolize it.

No, I agree.

But

the

overarching pattern over time is one of

a

dawning of a kind of moral enlightenment.

It's not, as you point out, it does not prevent the alternatives from repeatedly re-emerging.

But, I mean, let's take, for example.

But how can we even call it enlightenment?

Why is it not just our preference?

Let's take the the story of Jesus.

The story of Jesus, if I understand it, and I'm no biblical scholar, but if I understand that story, the key elements of it, or at least several key elements of it, involve a broadening of the sense of self,

a broadening of the in-group.

This is what the story of the Good Samaritan tells us, right?

This is what the golden rule is.

This is, you know, love your enemy.

Now,

those

things are

a radical increase in the

inclusion of others into an in-group.

And the benefits of stabilizing a larger ingroup are absolutely tremendous.

Now, imagine for a moment that Jesus had said these things in game-theoretic terms, and he had tried to convince people with whatever the equivalent of a whiteboard would have been of, you know, the reasons to broaden the in-group at this moment in history.

It's preposterous, right?

It's not a good argument.

Even if it's a true argument, nobody's going to get it.

Nobody's going to care, right?

So that's not how humans

become enlightened.

Humans become enlightened because of the power of a narrative that causes them to modify their behavior so that they do function more effectively in light of all of the game theoretic hazards that are always jeopardizing us.

Which then answers your other question, I think.

Why do the bad patterns, you know, if it's simply good to include others in your in-group,

why don't we just simply evolve to default to that and never waver?

And the problem is that there's a competition between short-term gain and long-term gain.

Effectively, the upgrade in which you in-group more people

is

much better in the long run.

But in the short run, individuals who decide to take advantage of that may have some advantage inside of the group, right?

And so

building a structure in which you can't get away with it increases the effectiveness of the moral point.

Right.

If you have everybody calculating that it's morally, you know, you should do the morally right thing if you are in a position to be observed.

And if you're not in a position to be observed, then you should do whatever is most profitable.

Right.

Civilization breaks down.

If, on the other hand, you take a narrative narrative and you say nobody ever gets away with anything,

it's being observed, it's being recorded, and it may be profitable in the short run, but there's an awful lot of punishment that will come later, right?

Frankly, I don't even know if the sentence I just said is a religious narrative or a translation of game theory.

It's the same thing.

Aaron Ross Powell, right?

And I would say that everything you're saying, which is complex, quite,

is an argument for a creator because the design is so

brilliant as you're describing it and the end result of course is like the perpetuation of the species of all species that like that's an accident like because you're describing a system with intent

and that intent comes from where with a goal you're describing a system with a goal I am describing a system with a goal, not with intent.

Yeah, the system has a goal.

The goal is the intent, right?

The intent is to achieve the goal.

Well, that's, I mean, that is the sticking point that

this doesn't make any sense.

No, no, it makes, it makes a lot of, it makes it sense without

it.

I don't want to use the phrase intelligent design, but like.

Well,

let's take a parallel example.

And we could trip over the parallel example if we're going to be able to do that.

I just think you've made an amazing case for God.

And I didn't know if you thought of yourself as an evangelist.

No, no.

You just convinced me.

I've made a very compelling case for belief in God.

Well, but what's the other

explanation?

What's the explanation?

Well, that's just the thing, is the other explanation is that there are processes that function.

Let's take two examples.

If we talk about the behavior of a

seedling,

Right?

A seed is planted,

it breaks open, it germinates, and the seed, the seedling

rises against gravity and breaks the surface, and it puts out its two little solar panels.

And at that point, it bends towards the sun.

You could say, what is the other explanation for that other than

a desire to reach the sunlight?

And the answer is, actually, in this case, we know the mechanism, and it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree.

But it's not desire, but it expresses a value, though.

And the value

is better than death.

It expresses to exist is better than not to.

Yes.

It expresses an objective, but not a desire.

I'm not sure.

I mean, it's a semantic question.

I'm not

sure.

It's a huge difference between the two.

But

that's exactly my point.

I'm not trying to compel people that the answer that I think I can see is right for them.

I'm trying to convince people that the answer I think I see is actually

not

dogged by some paradox that makes it unviable.

It's too cumbersome to live by it, but it's,

you know, just like the example of the baseball game.

The baseball game happens.

It's made of atoms and energy.

And you could imagine commentators sitting there describing the energy and the material in the objects.

And it would be the worst, most cumbersome commentary at a sports event conceivable.

But it wouldn't really tell you anything useful.

Right.

That's the point.

Right.

So what I see by your description is an entire universe screaming at the top of its collective lungs, life is better than death.

No, no, only the living stuff thinks that.

Well, I mean,

I'm not exactly sure we can measure or define living as precisely as we think we can, um, but but whatever.

I mean,

yeah, look,

but but in general, observe living things that we describe as living that we can observe are all moving in the same direction.

And the message, being a message guy, I can discern this: life is better than death.

Yeah, I agree.

Um,

another example.

Okay, let us agree that

love

is

a profoundly, I'm struggling for words even good enough to describe it, is a profoundly transformative property

of life that is as close to a North Star as a human being can have.

And I don't mean just romantic love, familial love, love of country, all of these things.

Love is this tremendously powerful force.

Now let us say there's actually

a lot of neurochemistry that we can describe relative to love.

Which story do I want people living by?

Oh, definitely the narrative one in which you just simply surrender to the power of this thing and you allow it to be a guide.

That's definitely, I don't want to live amongst people who view love as just a bunch of of chemical reactions, yada, yada, yada.

Right?

That's a horrifying dystopia.

But it doesn't make it untrue that love is mediated through neurochemistry.

Yeah, why can't both be true?

That doesn't make it.

They are.

That's exactly my point.

That's exactly my point.

They are both true.

But only one describes the purpose of it, the origin of it.

Only one is

useful for a living.

No, but I'm saying

the theist believes he understands why this is happening.

Right.

The atheist has no idea.

Well, in a sense.

So really, that's the question.

It's not a question of how things happen.

It's a question of why they happen.

Well, I'm trying to talk to two camps.

In a sense, and maybe this will be more of a theme of our discussion on other topics here.

But there's a kind of nuance that has become impossible.

And I'm trying to make a point to the atheists about what they've failed at and why they're not reaching lots of people and why they're losing ground.

And I'm also trying to make a point to the theological folks about Darwinism and about the utility of figuring out how to reconcile these things rather than view them as

competing explanations.

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there's not another person i know who i could have a conversation on this topic about in the way that we're doing and i and i just want to say i think you're one of the most open-minded in the in a good way people i've ever met thank you and um

people can't have you know the theist and the atheist can have a kind of scripted dance, but it's hard for them to have like a real conversation.

And I feel like we are.

And so I'm grateful for that.

And I was just thinking there's a, do you know, you know who Sam Harris is?

Yeah, I do know Sam.

And I think he seems smart.

And I think he clearly is smart.

But there's something, I watched a video, I don't know him really, but I saw a video of him once taking up the atheist cause.

And it's not up to me to like help the atheists sell their program because I disagree with it.

But I remember thinking, man, if I was an atheist,

I'd be very upset that Sam Harris was carrying my atheist water because I felt like he was a very bad,

very bad

spokesman for his cause.

Yes.

And

if I haven't said it before, I don't call myself an atheist

in large measure because

I think

the

spokespeople for atheism have done such a terrible disservice to the idea of science, largely by demonizing people's religious faith rather than taking it as the important set of questions that it obviously is.

Yes.

So

Sam,

Sam was a friend of mine.

He

became

very disturbed during COVID about my stance as a COVID dissident

and

refused to talk to me about it, frankly.

I invited him multiple times and he refused to have the conversation.

But

he,

I think,

must have earnestly believed that my position was putting people in danger and he viewed it as

a moral failing.

He had several podcasts on the subject.

He

accused me of being out of my depth, even though I'm an evolutionary biologist and evolution is highly relevant to all of the topics included in COVID.

Is he a biologist?

Is he a biologist?

In a technical sense, yes.

He is a

neurobiologist who, for his dissertation work, which I think is all of his work, studied effectively the same question

that

he

had been an author about, about the dangers of

extreme Islamism.

And he effectively did a dissertation on the

supposed neurobiological facts of people

in this mindset.

So,

Islam.

Yeah.

Now, I don't mean to dismiss that.

I can say I have doubts about the methodology that he used.

He depended on something called fMRI, functional MRI scanning, which

in theory allows you to see the activity of different regions of the brain when asked to think certain thoughts or do certain tasks.

But there's a lot of difficulty in calibrating fMRI because you need to know what the baseline activity of the brain is in order to subtract out all of the activity that isn't relevant.

So, in any case, we can put that aside and just say, I'm not certain that what his empirical work involved was

robust, but even let's say it is, he is not, broadly speaking, trained as a biologist in any way that I can see.

And

so

he, to his credit, said that he was out of his depth talking about

issues of biology related to vaccines, epidemiology.

all of the relevant pieces of biological science.

But then he argued that I was also out of my depth, which, you know,

I'm not a specialist in terms of vaccines, immunology, epidemiology, but evolution is relevant to all of those things.

And I'm perfectly capable of teaching myself the parts that I didn't know when COVID began.

In any way, he portrayed me as

incapable.

And

when I had expert guests, people like Pierre Courie and Robert Malone on my channel to talk about these things, unarguable experts, people with fantastic credentials.

He literally dismissed them as possibly schizophrenic, that that would be an explanation for their dissident status.

Hello.

It was pretty rotten.

And

rather than grappling with what they said.

Right.

It would have been tremendously productive for us to have the argument.

People could then have evaluated for themselves instead of having him lob grenades from afar and play to his audience.

But in any case,

I think what has happened to Sam is tragic, and

it's a cautionary tale of some kind.

I think

he

effectively

has been convinced by something of

the correctness of his position.

Frankly, his adherence to it is

obviously religious in some sense, which is ironic for.

And his anger seems to be not at religion necessarily, but at Islam.

He's mad about Islam.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: He's mad about Islam and he's unnuanced about it.

Now, I do think

he

is

correct in one regard about radical Islam and the danger of it, but I think it has blinded him to a larger story in which Islam is an ancient tradition that

has in many places attempted to modernize.

Some of those attempts have been more successful than others.

But I don't think

the way he portrays it, it's simply

a defect written to the Quran that the world needs to wake up to, rather than

Islam is

a population or a set of populations that, like the rest of us, are in an evolutionary process.

And, you know, there's a lot of nuance to be had about what the way to address radical Islam is and how

to encourage

any such tradition to join what I would call the cosmopolitan West.

Sounds like he's making a political point.

I don't know what kind of a point it is.

Well, it's all very interesting interesting that a lot of these issues, which would seem to have nothing to do with COVID,

do come back to COVID and to the Middle East, by the way.

Yes, and to your earlier point about

the dysfunction of our discussion, which I argued is the result of more or less a systematic attack on nuance on any of these charged topics, where effectively there's a discussion to be had

and

often

two extreme fringes agree to drive out the nuanced discussion and to force you to pick a team

i feel like i'm watching that right now

on which topic on the middle east on the as some as someone who i mean i'm you know we all flatter ourselves i probably flatter myself more than most but if you were to x-ray my heart you would find someone who who sincerely believes he's got moderate, humane positions on these topics.

I'm not really against anybody.

Actually, I know both sides personally,

you know, broadly speaking, personally.

And

I'm like, I kind of see their point on both sides.

And like, I just want less violence.

I guess that's sort of, that's my, that's how I understand my issue, I mean, my position on these issues.

And I definitely don't want the United States to be dragged into any of this craziness.

I can't get that message out.

It's like,

not allowed.

No, it's, I mean, maybe people think that's an extreme position.

That is my sincere, as God watches, that's my position.

So I just try to avoid it if I can.

Unfortunately, they're just pushing

the Republicans in the Senate particularly are pushing us toward war with Iran.

So I feel like I can't not talk about it.

But you tell me your views.

I mean, are you following this stuff?

Yes, I am following it.

And I'm, of course, like everybody else,

I have lots of trepidations about even wading into the discussion because I know what happens as soon as you do, which is there's

a very

low quality thought that people who have already picked a camp have.

And the thought is, I'm going to listen to what this person says.

And if it matches what I believe, then I'm going to embrace it.

And if it doesn't match what I believe, I'm I'm going to assume it's on the other side.

And so the reason that you can't have the conversation in the middle is that both sides see you as the enemy, which is, you know, the worst of all possible worlds from the point of view of just living your life.

However, I do think that this topic is actually a pretty good

test case of why it is important, in spite of the difficulty of thinking evolutionarily, to engage the world with that toolkit, at least available.

Because as an evolutionary biologist who has been fascinated by, often horrified by, the story of human history,

I think there's something playing out in the Middle East that is biological

and that until we grapple with it, we're in danger of being, for example, dragged into war with Iran, which will be a terrible catastrophe for all of humanity.

So maybe I should make that case.

I hope you will.

And unfortunately,

I will try to use as little jargon and as few terms of art as I can manage,

but there is a little bit that's necessary.

I believe the story that is playing out in the Middle East is one of

what I call lineage.

Here's where things get

possibly a bit

technical.

In my field,

we do not typically talk about lineages in the context of,

let's say,

humans.

Typically, there are two camps in biology.

There are the kin selectionists who believe in the importance of shared genes in terms of predisposing people to collaborate.

And then there are the group selectionists who believe that altruism provides such a powerful powerful advantage to people who

put those things aside that actually it should dominate our discussion.

And these two groups both view each other as foolish.

I think they're both wrong for different reasons.

And that the correct way to understand

humans and their evolution involves

two important realizations.

One,

that the kin selectionists are right about the importance of genes in predisposing people to cooperate with each other.

But they do not understand that you can extrapolate well beyond named kin, right?

Kin selection doesn't stop just because you lose track of your fifth cousin.

That a population of people that can detect that they are closely related has reason to collaborate, genetic reason,

even if they can't specify their degree of relatedness to each other.

And that this has a lot to do with the way history has unfolded.

That up until very recently, most history at the scale that we study it is a process of lineage against lineage violence and displacement.

That populations displace each other from the earth because that's the way to accomplish the evolutionary goal.

It's the same sort of drive as causes the sapling to reach for the sun.

Now, in human beings, we have a choice.

That's not the only basis.

That's not the only mechanism of competition that we can use.

And in fact, the West, the modern West,

is built

on a different

basis for collaboration.

It's based on reciprocity.

And the idea is in the West,

We agree to put our lineage-level origins aside and to collaborate with other people because they have something valuable to bring to the table.

And I won't go too deep into it, but I would argue that the founding fathers of the U.S.

almost accidentally invented this modern West because they were trying to get the colonists to confederate, and they needed to level the playing field

sufficiently that the colonists had their fears put to rest enough that they were willing to sign.

So in leveling the playing field, they came up with what I think is the magic formula for how human beings are to get along.

And it's not a question of putting competition aside, but it's a willingness to agree that competition should not involve combat, that it should involve the,

you know, innovation and the production of superior ways of being and that those different ways of being can compete with each other in a non-violent fashion, which is simply better.

It's fairer, it's safer, it's much more likely to leave the human population here a thousand years from now.

And so, to get back to the Middle East,

we are caught in a tension between these two modes of collaboration.

You've got the ancient mode, which involves lineage against lineage violence, in which, you know, you can find this in

the Old Testament.

You can find it in the Quran.

It's written in there, the rules of war and combat, and how you are to view the enemy.

They're out-group, and you are to view them that way.

And

effectively, they are

treated as other.

Or

you can have a collaborative modality, and you see these two

threads competing, in my opinion, inside the state of Israel.

So really, you're saying it's Old Testament versus New Testament?

I am.

The New Testament is universalist.

And Jesus says this again and again.

I'm here for everybody.

It doesn't matter what your bloodline is.

I'm here for everybody.

And I'm also opposed to violence.

And I'm going to show you that I'm opposed to violence because when one of the disciples tries to use a sword against the guy who's arresting him to torture him to death, Jesus scolds the disciple for using violence even then.

So like those are rat, one is Western, one is Eastern.

I would, I mean, or whatever, however you want to, whatever you want to describe those two hemispheres as being, but they're, those are the two hemispheres, and it's like, it's in the same book.

Right.

Now,

notice what just happened.

I just described this to you in what I understand to be rigorous, game-theoretic, biological terms.

dry, dull, and boring.

And you came back with the obvious rejoinder that actually, no, we have a narrative.

We've actually got a name and a location and a description of this upgrade.

And whether or not, you know, you think that God inspired the writing of those two stories,

they're still two different stories.

No, I think they're the same story.

And I think one of them is actually elegant enough that you could convey it to somebody else.

And the other one is arcane and difficult.

No, but I mean, the Old and New Testament,

those two stories.

Yes.

And I know that there's a, and like, I'm no theologian, but there's this effort to pretend they're the same story, but they're completely different stories.

Having read them, I could just say, as a close reader of everything I read, those are very different stories.

Oh, they're very different stories.

They do have a relationship to each other, of course.

Of course,

of course.

But even the way they are narratively packaged is fascinating.

Yes.

Right?

You know, you've got a father-son relationship between these two ways of viewing human interaction.

The father and the son don't have the identical perspective,

as fathers and sons don't.

Right?

So even the way the story is built,

it is constructed in a way to be intuitive to people who have observed family dynamics.

But the powerful thing here, or one of them, is it's not like

the state of Israel, about which I am not claiming to be an expert, but I can observe it.

The state of Israel is

caught

between these two modes.

It's not a simple puzzle.

I mean, for one thing, you know, the state of Israel is,

even though it's like, okay,

Jews finally have a homeland, right?

On the other hand, look where that homeland is.

It's like a ghetto in,

a neighborhood of others.

Yes.

So that's a dangerous position to be in.

From day one.

And anti-Semitism is a recurrent fact of history.

So you can imagine that it structures the mindset of people, even in a long period of peace.

There's always the question of, well, when is that bad pattern going to return?

So you can understand

that

You can understand a hardline position that is not so interested in hearing about peace, love, and understanding because it thinks that the realities of

a world in which Jews are constantly being displaced or which the tendency to displace them re-emerges recurrently.

You can imagine that hardline position.

I get the Israeli hardline position.

Yeah, I understand it as well.

The problem is

that

the world

needs the upgrade.

If we continue to play that lineage against lineage violence game as a planet, there's not going to be anything left.

Our weaponry is too powerful.

So not with the technology, you can't do that.

Not with the technology, not with the population as large as it is, not with our level of interconnectedness.

So the question is, are we going to figure out how to get everybody to that upgrade?

And that doesn't just mean the state of Israel.

It obviously means Islam as well.

Right?

I'm not claiming that that's easy or even that it's conceivable.

Maybe it's impossible, and maybe that's the story of what's going to happen to humanity.

But to the extent that it is possible,

I think it has to be our focus.

And if we allow

neocons,

hardliners

to

drag us,

and by us, I mean the U.S., into a war with Iran,

then

we are effectively

agreeing to step back into the Old Testament rules, which will be fatal for humanity.

So this is a conversation that has to take place in a middle ground

that is not allowed to exist.

Like I said before, everybody on both

sides of the discussion will hear what I've just said as not in alignment with their perspective and will view it.

I don't understand, though, why that's happened.

I mean, I'm just confused.

You told me something fascinating when we had lunch

this fall and you said that the medical freedom movement, the movement that arose in the wake of COVID to assess like, what was that?

And how can we not do that again?

Totally reasonable.

Was getting blown up from the inside over Israel.

And I remember saying to you, what does Israel have to do with it?

I feel the same way about what's happening right now.

It's like, okay, people have views on Israel.

Okay, great.

But why is that the issue that I think is really fracturing Trump's coalition?

I mean, I just see it every single day.

Everyone's more upset about that than anything going on in the United States.

Like

it almost, it feels like sabotage.

Maybe it's organic.

Like, what are we watching here?

Yeah, I don't think we know.

I mean,

I don't know.

I would be shocked if there was no

sabotage element if I agree.

Folks weren't trying to disrupt the nuanced conversation because they have an objective and they want us to get to it.

But I don't know what fraction of the problem is that.

It could be small.

It could be large.

But it doesn't, if you had asked me five years ago, what will be like the most passionate debate in the United States at a moment where we're probably in recession and have more homeless people than ever, suicide rates up, life expectancy, no, we've got all these problems, debt overhang that's going to crush us.

What's going to be the issue that people are going to be the maddest about some faraway Middle Eastern country with 10 million people?

Like, really?

I don't get that at all.

Well, I wonder

they're obviously,

so obviously I'm Jewish, but let me just say

I'm not Israeli.

I'm American.

And

before you start this sentence, obviously I'm Jewish.

Well, I mean, my name makes that pretty clear for anybody who knows how to read the tea leaves, but

nonetheless, you know, my position is resolutely

America first.

Well, yeah.

Okay.

Because I'm an American and it's not that I, you know, it's

I'm glad that there is a state of Israel.

Yeah.

I wish it well.

But our primary responsibility as Americans has to be to America.

The

lessons of the Iraq war,

you know, I think they were

clear enough going into it.

We got dragged into a conflict that we shouldn't have been involved in, and the cost to the United States was astronomical, the cost to Iraq, even more spectacular.

Exactly.

So, my sense.

Thank you for saying that.

I feel like you and I are the only people who remember this, and it just happened.

I can't believe the degree to which we've forgotten all this.

I agree.

And the degree to which, in some sense, we are.

this is like a neocon hangover that we can't tell is a neocon hangover because the cast of characters has largely changed but the perspective is very similar right this looks like you know as I as I said very shortly after October 7th

there was a plan It involved a series of wars in the Middle East.

Iran was on the list.

We never got to to Iran because the Iraq war discredited the advocates for the war with Iran.

And it made Iran stronger, by the way.

Of course.

And

now it's back on the table.

If evolution is real, how come nobody ever learns anything?

Well, I'm just, I'm totally kidding.

I'm totally kidding.

I mean, I need to go back into that.

But, like, the resistance of people to learn obvious lessons just like blows me away.

Well,

let us talk for a second about the predicament in the the Middle East from abstract

terms.

Let's imagine for a second that there was no Western alternative, that

technology had developed as it did,

but that basically you had lineage against lineage violence as

the key mode of

progress for different populations.

You can easily imagine people on either side of the divide between Jews and Muslims concluding both populations aren't going to be here in 500 years.

Right?

And having thought that, then the question is, evolutionarily,

what is the right approach?

from within one of these populations.

And the answer is all kinds of things become

relevant.

I guess I'm dancing around an issue because I know how explosive it is to say it out loud.

But let's take the idea of a suicide bomber.

A suicide bomber seems

confused to a Western mindset, right?

Why would a person agree to cease to exist to harm an enemy,

the potential victory over which they won't even be aware of, right?

And you can tell stories about belief in the afterlife, but if you accept my version of the way evolution works, then those stories have to be a pretty good match for some actual advantage.

They can't be fairy tales.

They have to actually be metaphors for something real.

So, in the case that you have two populations that correctly understand that they won't both be coexisting in the same piece of territory, one of them will have displaced the other sooner or later, then the answer is there's no level of evolutionary success that you can have within a population that matters if the population is going to go extinct.

So it would view things in very stark terms.

And investments in increasing the likelihood that it is your population and not the competing population that ends up inheriting this territory, that would become

the dominant thought.

And it makes all kinds of behavior thinkable that would otherwise seem preposterous.

I think it makes suicide bombing comprehensible, for example.

Okay, now let's rerun the story.

You've got two sides that have inherited a it's us or them mentality over a piece of habitat that isn't getting any more fertile.

And then you have an alternative mode.

The alternative mode

is to sign up for

the new way of producing wealth that actually

forces the weaponry to be shelved and coexistence to occur.

And hopefully that coexistence then becomes the ability to collaborate, which unthinkable as that may be at the moment isn't really all that unthinkable.

We've seen

plenty of hints of it in the Middle East in recent times.

But, you know, you can look at the ability of Jews to collaborate with Germans now.

You know, World War II isn't so long ago, the Holocaust.

And so

people can put aside this.

There's tons of Jewish businessmen in the Gulf

collaborating with Muslim businessmen.

Of course.

Yeah.

So

the upshot is

by being told that there are only two sides, you're either with Israel or against it, and with Israel means on board for what's going on in Gaza, and with Israel means ready to attack Iran, right?

By being forced into that category, we are missing the possibility that actually what should be happening right now is that

America isn't always good at being part of the West.

The West is an ideal.

Sometimes we live up to it, sometimes we don't.

But

the right thing to happen at the moment, I believe, is for the West

to try to bail the Middle East out of this us or them dynamic, to lead the way into this stable coexistence and ability to collaborate that's better for all of us.

Not only is the upside very positive, but it avoids the massive downside of war in the Middle East, dragging the entire world back into the Old Testament and the Quran and lineage against lineage violence, which I really think ought to be our top priority.

I agree completely.

Killing people for what their ancestors did, I mean, that couldn't be more anti-Christian.

It couldn't be more unreasonable.

Everything about it, I despise.

I'm just fascinated by the dominance of this conversation.

in American politics.

Like, what, I mean, part of it's real.

Like, we're moving toward war with Iran.

That's why the only reason I'm involved in it is because of that.

It's the only reason.

And so, you kind of have to respond to it, right?

Unless you want your country to go to war yet again.

But it's more than that.

It's like,

who it does feel like this is being pushed on us, like the race stuff was pushed on us.

Well, okay, let's.

Am I being paranoid?

No, I like I said, I think there's some element of organized

organized propaganda that pushes us in a direction.

On the other hand, I think in part the reason that this issue seems to derange

every conversation, every coalition, is that

Jews are infused through all of the activities of civilization.

And

you've got a population that

I'm hesitant to use a term like, you know, intergenerational trauma, but you've got a population that hands down the stories of pogroms and persecution and the Holocaust because it's vital information.

You have to know that that can happen and it can happen anywhere at any time.

And so

being of that mindset, being raised to know that things can be very good and people can, you know, there can be no hint of anti-Semitism as there wasn't in my life until quite late.

Things can be that way, and then something can change.

And what you thought were the realities of who your friends are and what they're capable of would radically shift.

So you've got that population involved in

governance, business, all of the essential functions of civilization.

And then the noises of

an anti-Semitic wave start to rise, that population recoils into this defensive posture.

Oh no, is it happening again?

Which then causes

a

attempt to drive out all nuance.

This is not the time to be asking questions, that sort of thing, which then causes resentment in terms of all of the things you're not allowed to just even ask, right?

As an American, I'm not allowed to ask questions about our support for a foreign government's war.

You know, I mean, of course, I'm allowed to talk about that, but yet somehow it feels very dangerous to even raise the question.

So that pattern results, you know,

how big a room can you assemble before you have both sides in that room unable to allow any nuance, right?

It's not a very big room.

So what happened to the medical freedom movement was just simply the events of October 7th

caused people who

didn't even necessarily know each other's positions on, you know, events in the Middle East suddenly to be talking about them and to find each other ununderstandable.

And but how did that issue even, I mean, I don't know, I don't even know all my kids' positions on the Middle East, and they're my children, and I talk to them every day.

It's like, it just doesn't occur to me to bring that up out of context.

Do you know what I mean?

Where are you on BB?

It's like, I don't care.

Like, how did that wind up in a discussion of what to do about the mRNA vaccine?

I just think that's, it seems completely unrelated.

It's, it's madness.

It seems that way.

It seems to me that the right thing to do is to recognize we have a whole lot of common ground, and then there's an issue on which we apparently don't.

And frankly, what a missed opportunity that a bunch of people who'd been through hell together fighting over, you know, their right to speak the truth about all things COVID, that group of people seems like they would have the tools to navigate other difficulties.

Yes.

But that's not what happened.

And

that missed opportunity is a tragedy for humanity.

It means that we're not where we should be with respect to the devastation of COVID.

And we're also

nowhere good with respect to our ability to discuss the events in the Middle East.

Yeah.

Was that organic?

Because if I'm Pfizer and I'm like mad at you,

Brett, I'm going to inject that into your group chats somehow.

I'm open to any possibility.

And, you know, in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, it's like

two impossible to reconcile thoughts.

One is this is so much of a direct hit on this very powerful coalition that has very powerful enemies.

Very powerful.

Yeah.

That it's conceivable to me that there's some relationship.

No, I don't think that October 7th happened because of its utility in dividing people, but

there was something

so immediate about the, it was like a direct hit on the medical freedom movement.

That is crazy.

Where were you?

I haven't even followed up asking you about this in private, but were you considered too pro-Israel or too not supportive enough?

It's always the same.

In this case,

people do that thing.

I am not saying what they're saying.

They assume I'm on the other side.

Both sides do it.

I mean, it's like clockwork, right?

So, you know, it's a very...

Well, I'm on your side for the record.

I mean, I haven't even really even...

talked to you about Israel ever until right now at length.

So I don't, I'm not exactly sure what your views are, but from everything you've said so far, you seem what

we used to call it moderate and sensible.

I agree with you.

Well, I'll tell you what my position is, just so that it's clear for anybody who is inclined to misunderstand it.

What I used to say is I believe in Israel's right to exist.

I've realized in saying that that I'm not sure what it means for any country to have a right to exist.

I totally agree.

What does that even mean?

Yeah, does the U.S.

have a right to exist?

I mean, it's certainly wanted to exist.

It came into being.

It does exist.

I will, you know, I will even lay down my life if necessary to preserve it.

But, you know, it was land taken from other people.

So does it have a right to exist?

I don't think any nation really can make that claim very well.

Am I glad that Israel exists?

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's a way better way to put it.

I'm glad that it exists.

I think it's important.

I think Jews are vulnerable and it is important for them to have a homeland.

I recognize that there's a conflict with a central value that I hold, which is

the consent of the governed, which means that the demographics of the state of Israel adjust how effective a homeland it is for Jews.

I don't know how to resolve that.

I'm glad it's not my job to figure out how to resolve it.

But all of that said, my sense is

looking from afar, that the Netanyahu administration's relationship to the population of Israel is a lot like the Biden administration's relationship to the population of the U.S.

And as an American living under the Biden administration, those people were not on my team.

Those people didn't give a damn about me or anything I treated.

Well, actually, they hated you.

I think they probably.

More precise about it, yeah.

So, my sense is

the idea that you might want to be supportive of

Israelis does not mean that you are supportive of the Netanyahu administration.

What's more,

I think it's clear that every rational person should

hate Hamas for what it is, and it should hate Hamas supporters who know what they're doing.

And unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu is in that category.

I don't know what to do about that, but I see credible evidence that Benjamin Netanyahu cynically propped up Hamas or argued for it to be propped up in order to divide the Palestinians.

Having done that and then having October 7th happen

means that to me

any

violence that needs to be engaged in to rescue hostages or to do away with Hamas cannot be under his direction.

I do not understand why he was left in power being responsible for Hamas in some regard, and then responsible for eliminating them.

It's so Anthony Fauci-like,

it's almost too close a parallel, right?

Anthony Fauci is responsible for the gain of function research that seems to have produced COVID, and he's also in charge of protecting us from it.

I'm sorry, no.

Anthony Fauci shouldn't have been anywhere near it and been.

I agree.

And I think in both cases, well, certainly in the case of Bibi, I think the system itself, a parliamentary system, system, which Israel has,

it's complicated.

The politics are so complicated.

I've been in and out of Israel a lot in my life, and I pay attention.

I don't understand it.

I'm sure there are Israelis who don't really understand their system.

Maybe that's the answer.

He's good at politics.

I think he's very, very smart and very effective.

And the question is really,

you know, there are two questions.

One, is he on the side of the Israeli people?

And two, assuming that he's on the side of the Israeli people, is he making a spectacular error that will actually be a massive setback for them?

And I would also say, as a corollary of that,

it's not just the Israeli people who are jeopardized by

his leadership.

It's,

I believe, Jews in the diaspora.

I feel

the goodwill that existed towards Jews in the aftermath of World World War II is being burned up at an incredible rate.

I don't expect to see it return in my lifetime.

And I think that's a tragedy.

And then, on top of all of it, the fate of humanity more or less rests on our ability to stop playing the game that

the Netanyahu side is pushing us towards, the lineage against lineage violence.

And so I think it is time for

the West to reassert reassert itself and its values, to police our own behavior, frankly.

I'm not happy when the United States falls down on its commitment to a level playing field.

I agree.

But that really is the road forward.

And

in the end, it's better for everybody.

In the short run, there are some significant antagonists to moving in that direction.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Do you think what you're seeing here is a variation of what you always see, which is people who are often in good faith speaking out on behalf of some group are not actually serving that group's interests at all, right?

At all.

And I don't think it's always cynical.

I just want to be charitable.

You know, I think there are people who really think they're doing the right thing, but they are not serving

the objective they think they're serving.

Your description, what you just said,

you said you might get attacked for it.

On what ground?

I mean, what you just said seems so humane and like measured and thoughtful, not creepy, not hateful.

How could anyone attack you for saying that?

Well,

one, I think as long as you use the rule that those who are not saying, those who are not agreeing with me must be on the other side, it's very easy to end up everybody's enemy.

And yeah, it's crazy.

I am,

I think,

trying,

maybe I'm wrong about

the reality of the situation, but I'm certainly trying to give decent insight into how Israel can be safer, how the world can be safer, how Islam can be safer.

I think it's better for everybody.

That's my intent.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

But

that's the real issue, though.

The

inability

to have discussions because

some conclusion is understood to follow from them potentially, and we can't risk that conclusion.

Therefore, the discussion is not allowed.

That is utterly toxic to

the West.

There's a reason that the First Amendment is enshrined as our first enumerated right.

And

I'm a little concerned that the Constitution itself is not up to the challenges of modernity.

It doesn't anticipate AI.

It doesn't anticipate social media.

It doesn't anticipate the ability to study psychology with scientific tools and, you know, manipulate with industrial strength propaganda.

But the principle is still exactly right.

And I will say, I heard your discussion with Matt Walsh

last week, maybe.

And I was fascinated by it because Matt Walsh and I are very different creatures.

Like, I really am a liberal, and he really is a conservative.

And I heard him say all kinds of things that were provocative.

And I found it absolutely refreshing.

Just the idea, you know, that you could navigate those questions in public was a breath of fresh air.

And

I'm hoping that all parties who are acting in good faith and really trying to figure out how to get the nation and the world pointed in the right direction will recognize that we've lost the one tool that has been useful in this regard, which is the ability to hash things out, to not

demonize people for holding perspectives.

If they hold a perspective that isn't right, the answer is to persuade them that it isn't right.

Aaron Ross Powell,

I've been thinking a lot about why that has changed.

And I think it's because there's too much lying

and people, or there's a perception, there's, I think there's too much lying.

And I think that people can't sort of relax and accept that the person telling them a point of view really believes that point of view.

There's, there's less sincerity than there used to be.

And,

you know, someone like Matt Walsh, or I had my next interview I did was with Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's, who's like totally liberal on everything,

but he's liberal on the question of war.

And so I completely agree with him.

So I wanted to hear him.

And I, and I, what a wonderful, what a nice man.

But I just thought

the thing that Matt Walsh and Ben Cohen had in common was they're both totally sincere.

They're completely sincere.

Like you can disagree or agree or whatever, but they really mean what they say.

And I think if you live in a world where the public discourse is this dishonest, when everyone has some weird agenda, you don't even know what it is, but you can feel that person's not being honest.

No one can have like a conversation.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

It's funny.

It's actually

Sam Harris hasn't said many nice things about me in the last few years, but

when he did,

he used to quote me as saying, bad faith changes everything.

And I guess I would rephrase that here as

the good faith environment that is necessary to navigate difficult things is supremely powerful, but it is very fragile.

And the sense that somebody is not in it to discover what the right answer is, but is actually playing some different game causes good faith to break down.

And I think that's what you're detecting.

Well, it is.

And, you know, as someone who's been so often wrong about some big things,

I just want to start every morning with the knowledge that I'm not God, that I do get things wrong, and that, like, you know, try to be attentive when the truth is spoken.

You know, when the truth is spoken, I want to be able to hear it.

I really mean that.

And

I just see

this again, another argument against evolution.

I see human society moving in the opposite direction.

People are so cocksure, so morally certain on the basis of so little knowledge and wisdom.

It's like crazy.

Everyone has these like hyper-confident opinions.

And they're dumb.

And it's like, all I want is to be around people who are like, this is what I think is true.

I sincerely believe it, but because I'm not God

or whatever, because I'm not omniscient, I am open to the possibility that I'm wrong and wanting you to try and convince me.

Like, that's the basis of civilization, in my opinion.

Well, I think there's a kind of hubris that has taken over.

Kind of.

It's arranged.

But I think it comes from a particular place, which is interesting.

We've gotten very good technically at solving problems i mean you know the the wizardry in your phone is unimaginable yes right

but

phones computers

all of these systems up until ai

are complicated

so complicated that most people don't understand them.

Maybe nobody understands them completely, but somebody understands every piece of your computer or your phone.

So that's a complicated system.

And you can get so good in the realm of complicated systems that you feel mastery.

And the problem is that the places where you're seeing people holding opinions that are preposterous and a level of arrogance that isn't justified by anything, those are complex systems.

And a complex system is not just a really complicated system.

A complex system is actually meaningfully different.

It's fundamentally unpredictable.

And so I think a lot of the catastrophe.

I'm sorry, can you say the thing?

It's fundamentally unpredictable.

Unpredictable.

That I said I wanted to be alive to the truth and wisdom when I hear it.

That's wisdom right there.

It's unpredictable.

You don't know.

You don't know.

And, you know, okay, so

how good are we at predicting the climate?

Well,

my guess, given that climate is a longer-term puzzle, is we're less good at it than predicting the weather.

And I can tell you, we're not that great at predicting the weather.

So when you step into the realm of the truly complex, which is all of biology, it's human civilization, its economics, its climate, you have to go in with a kind of extreme humility because intervention is going to produce effects you cannot see coming.

Unintended consequence.

Unintended consequence, which means, A,

the last thing you want to do is go into that complex complex system with a blueprint.

Here's what I'm going to do and here's what it's going to result in because you don't know.

The best you can do is prototype and navigate, right?

You can say, I want to get to that place and you can take a step in that direction and you can say, okay, well, what was the consequence of that step?

And then you can adjust what you did, what you do next based on what you learned the last time.

You can get where you're going in the same way that a surfer who can't control a wave is capable of you know finding their way down it right but you can't plan it out and the other thing you can't do is you cannot decide that certain kinds of feedback will not be tolerated exactly right you have to take a measure of the consequence of what you did and look squarely at it and if you say well you know

The shots definitely worked because they were always going to work.

The answer is, well, how many different complex systems did you just intervene in, and you weren't even open to the evidence that it didn't work out the way you expected, that it was counterproductive?

No,

you don't even belong in the discussion if you don't see who to do that.

So, why are the shots still on the schedule?

I'm trying to be

what, okay.

Let me start with a question, a real question rather than an interjection, posing as a question.

Where are we on the mRNA shots in the United States?

I fear this question because

everybody tells me that there's no

way forward by reaching President Trump, that he can't hear it.

And

maybe I'm going to have to learn that myself.

We are

nowhere good with respect to the mRNA shots.

We are still recommending them for tiny children

who don't stand to benefit at all as far as we scientifically.

And that's an official recommendation?

Yes.

So it's on the schedule, so-called.

Yeah, it's on the schedule.

A COVID mRNA shot.

COVID mRNA shots, which

A, as I think I described to you in one of our previous conversations, all mRNA shots have a built-in vulnerability,

or they induce a built-in vulnerability, which is if they are translated in cells of the body that are sensitive, then you will get a pathology because the body will naturally attack the cells that are producing whatever protein you load into the mRNA platform.

It will attack them as if they are virally infected because that's what they look like.

They are cells that are of you, but they are producing a foreign protein that is the signature of an infected cell, and the immune system has one and only one plan for that, which is destruction.

So

the reason that the COVID shots produce such a wide range of pathologies is that they flow all around the body.

There's no targeting mechanism in them.

They invade tissues haphazardly, and then those tissues get targeted by the immune system as, of course, they would.

Including the brain.

Including the brain, including the heart.

So

basically, there's a reason that you can't put together a tight list of symptoms of people who were injured, and it's because the symptoms are as wide-ranging as tissues of the body and the various kinds of damage, right?

It's all on the table.

So

the fact that these shots are still being recommended for children should tell you something, because they shouldn't be given to anybody.

under any circumstances.

They were never ready for injection into people.

Whatever emergency we might have thought we were in, we know we are not in anymore.

There's no justification scientifically.

But injecting them into children for whom there was never a justification, because children didn't die from COVID and they were injured by the shot.

So why would you take a healthy child and give them something with a risk of a severe pathology when the disease it protects them from isn't a serious threat in the first place?

Further, we don't know what we're doing to their lifetime capacity to fend off COVID.

Apparently, they're going to be faced with it many times over a lifetime.

So why would you interfere with their development of whatever natural immunity they will be able to generate by artificially intervening?

It doesn't make the least bit of sense.

It's like a crime.

It's a crime.

And it's

many

in the medical freedom movement refer to it as criminal negligence, which I think is a mistake because it's well beyond criminal negligence at this point.

Aaron Ross Powell, negligence is when you just don't care enough to know something's happening.

Aaron Powell, right.

This is depraved indifference.

This is the injection of these products into innocent people who are incapable of being informed and incapable of consenting in spite of the fact that you know that some substantial fraction of them will be profoundly injured.

It is depraved indifference.

Aaron Ross Powell, it's a very simple process for stopping

the recommendation of mRNA shots to children and to adults, but it has to do with this thing called the schedule, which is the protocol determined by the federal government,

guides physicians as they recommend, and in some cases require

vaccines.

Aaron Powell, yes.

I believe it could be done effectively, instantaneously

if the president was on board.

And

I think we do not separate the

how can I put this?

The president has a certain amount of pride over Operation Warp Speed.

Yep.

And I think he

feels mistreated over

the

rejection of Operation Warp Speed as an accomplishment.

And that has caused him to dig in his heels.

Now, as I see it, this is

unnecessary.

The president is in no way responsible for the appalling content of these shots.

He's not a biologist.

He listened to people who knew the material far better than he did, and they lied to him.

That's entirely separate from the question of whether or not Operation Warp Speed was an accomplishment, whether he succeeded in bringing a shot to the public in record time, which he did.

So to my way of thinking, he can be proud of Operation Warp Speed and he can be livid at the people who lied to him about the shot and he can be horrified by all the damage that that shot has done.

And I hope that he will see that.

I'm wondering if

maybe what might

open his eyes to this is the plight of the vaccine injured, which to me is one of the starkest horrors I've ever witnessed.

Aaron Powell, okay.

I'm going to ask you to pause, and I want you to explain it because it's been completely buried.

But are there no cabinet secretaries who could act independently?

Because there is a cabinet secretary, I think, has purview over this.

Well, you're surely talking about Bobby Kennedy,

who I believe absolutely would if he had the power.

Aaron Powell, okay.

So you think it's this is a White House decision?

I believe it must be a White House decision because Bobby knows the horror of these shots as well or better than anyone.

I agree with that.

So I think he must feel that he can't get there or maybe he's working there over time.

But

every month that we wait, more children are being injected with these things.

And, you know, I'm focusing on the children because people actually being actually, parents are saying, okay, give my kid a COVID shot?

I mean, you can imagine what a bewildering situation it is.

Imagine that you're a first-time parent and the doctors are telling you that the responsible thing to do is to give your child all of these immunizations because of all of the damage, this, that, and the other.

It's very hard for a parent to muster the courage to ask the right questions.

Most people wouldn't even know what the right questions to ask

are.

And what's more, the incentives in the system for doctors to get their patients so-called fully vaccinated are

constructed so that doctors are absolutely inflexible on this topic.

They're going to have somebody to answer for, in my opinion.

I agree.

And I can't believe that doctors who at this point

know the truth are not standing up en masse.

Yeah.

So I'm sorry, once again, I sidetracked you.

So you were about to describe the extent of vaccine injury in the United States.

I followed this from day one,

the VARES

self-reporting system and all the rest, but I don't feel like I have a good sense of it.

Yeah, I don't think we have a good sense of it.

What we have is, you know,

an official estimate that we know is a tiny fraction of the full number.

We also know that we can't calculate the pathologies that are very delayed, of which there are many in this case.

So we don't have the slightest inkling of

how much injury has been done.

But that's why I want to focus on the other aspect of this.

The number of people who have been injured is absolutely huge.

The gaslighting of the vaccine injured is an entirely separate crime.

At At the point that you have told people, there's a shot, it's safe, it's necessary that you get it to protect the vulnerable,

and then people have been injured.

I don't care how few they may be.

Let's say it was only a handful of people who were injured.

Pretending that they weren't injured, pretending that it's in their heads, is

an absolutely ghastly crime.

And

I will say that there's a documentary coming out.

It should be out on the 15th of this month called Follow the Silenced.

And it follows a couple of vaccine-injured people, including Maddie DeGary, who is a, I don't know if you know her story, but she was

a young girl who was in the Pfizer trial and was gravely injured, like

wheelchair, feeding tube injured, and

was told, in effect, this is a stomachache, it's in your head, you're attention seeking.

And I think just

noticing what

an absolutely heartless system

would be necessary in order to treat somebody not only who took the shot, but a child

who

did their part for the team, joined a trial in order to get this vaccine to market, right?

This is somebody who went above and beyond the call of duty, was gravely injured, and deserves every tool at our disposal to make her life as tolerable as it can be, to address her sacrifice.

And she has gotten exactly the opposite.

So if we extrapolate over all of the nameless people who were injured in some way, people who

were told by their doctors that they were imagining their pathologies until they discovered Facebook groups with hundreds or thousands of other people experiencing the same thing, Facebook groups that were then canceled by Facebook under the direction of the government, right?

This is.

As I said before, it's an entirely separate crime.

And what I'm hoping is that the revelation of that crime will allow President Trump to see that although

the destruction that came from the shots is in no way his responsibility, he is in danger of making this his responsibility by not responding to the fact that we're continuing to injure new people and we are pretending that the vast number of injuries we already have are mysterious, which they most certainly aren't.

It does make you want to not pay your taxes.

I don't understand why.

I mean, at some point, it just becomes, it feels anyway immoral to contribute money to something like this.

Right.

And, you know,

morally speaking, sure.

Obviously,

there's no solution down that road.

What we have is the...

But you cannot pay your taxes.

You go to jail.

Right.

Yeah.

And you get no sympathy from anybody.

No sympathy from anybody.

So at some level, we have, you know, our right to redress of grievances.

And, you know, maybe

that's what podcasts are about in this case.

No, of course.

And I'm not recommending that people not pay their taxes, though I would, of course, be utterly sympathetic to anyone who wanted to do that.

But

what I'm saying is it's just so frustrating.

It's so frustrating.

It's like it's

like, what's the point of the system is supposed to be responsive both to the people it represents, but also to like reality and reason.

And like, it shouldn't be this hard to do an easy, obvious, virtuous thing.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, it also

reveals

if the system had generated a shot in record time,

gotten out over its skis, and

you know, emergency use authorized it

in an effort to stave off a pandemic that the danger of which was overrated, you would expect a rapid reversal of course of the media.

Well, that's it.

That's exactly right.

It's not the mistake.

It's the subsequent lying and ass covering and gaslighting.

And it's the behavior after the mistake that drives me totally nuts.

Which suggests that it may have been something other than a mistake.

Because

had it been a mistake,

you can imagine finding yourself responsible for trying to do the right thing and having, you know, countless people injured as a result of it, and then discovering that the disease itself had, you know, a minuscule case fatality rate and that it was really effectively pulling people who were very close to death in some other regard over the line a bit early, right?

That's no reason to wreck civilization and gravely injure people for the rest of their lives.

So anybody who had discovered that they had been party to that would naturally want to just, you know, staunch the bleeding.

And that's not what happened, and it's still not happening.

And what's more, there is a shell game being played over

the

cause of the vaccine harms to the extent that they are acknowledged at all.

There is what I think is an organized campaign to portray it as the result of the unfortunate choice of the spike protein.

when in fact much of the damage has nothing to do with the content of the shot at all.

It's the platform itself.

And,

you know,

we're watching Pharma reformulate shot after shot on the mRNA platform.

They're pioneering.

So it's the novel technology itself.

It's the novel technology itself, which,

you know, again, you're intervening in not only a complex system in this case, but a nested series of complex systems.

You've got, you know, an epidemic, right?

The spreading of a disease.

You've got the human body.

Within that, you've got the immune system.

These are each complex systems in their own right.

And the ability to introduce a novel technology and to predict the outcome, you know, as I think I may have discussed with you before, one of the things that we've discovered, I have to assume pharma didn't know this, but one of the things we've discovered is that if you've had two of the mRNA shots, that your body starts producing a special class of antibody that turns the immune system down.

That's a very dangerous thing to have triggered.

It ought to have caused somebody to, you know.

But so predictable in a way, as someone who knows nothing about vaccine development, but a lot about life,

it's almost always like the deep irony encoded in the universe where, you know, painkiller abuse causes pain, actually, after a while.

Right?

Right.

It's always something like that.

The shot that's supposed to boost your immune system destroys your immune system.

Yes.

And, you know, this is the lesson of modern technology is that

you should engage it with tremendous trepidation until

liberals have a lot to answer for at the moment, but there was a time when liberals were focused on the precautionary principle, which is exactly this, right?

If you're going to engage something new, you should assume it's harmful until proven safe rather than assume it's safe until proven harmful.

And we have abandoned this principle.

Because we've abandoned humility in favor of hubris for the reasons I think that you mentioned, I think the decline of religious faith

plays a role as well.

But

it does seem like that's the

that's kind of the answer, maybe right in front of us to so many of our problems is that people imagine they have powers, predictive powers that they don't have.

You know,

Heather and I have an ongoing discussion where she'll say,

I don't see how people could possibly believe X.

And then she will give some example where people have said something that couldn't possibly be right.

And I will say to her,

you know,

it's one of those times when you have to realize that what you mean by I believe X does not bear any resemblance to what most people mean when they believe something.

And I do think this is another argument, actually, in favor of

an all-encompassing tolerance of discussion, right?

You have to be able to discuss all things in part because

what you really want to discover is how wide a range of opinion and perspective there actually is.

And if you start demonizing people as soon as they depart from your consensus, you get the sense that we all see it alike because you can't see the people who don't.

It's totally true.

You want to adopt that posture if your goal is to find the truth, if your goal is to serve other people, provide good governance, justice, if your goal is to be wise.

You know, if that's the way you're thinking, you're going to do what you just said.

If your goal is to accrue maximum

if your goal is to hurt people,

if your baseline assumption is that you're God,

then of course you're going to behave the way you just described.

Yeah.

You're going to be totally intolerant.

So, given all of that,

where are we with AI, and what's your view of it?

Well,

my view is that there are many different ways that AI

can radically disrupt civilization.

And some of them are utterly guaranteed.

Others we're speculating on.

I think one of the lessons

from, you know,

from the mind of a biologist who's focused on complex systems is that the technologists think they understand more about the way AR works than they do, and certainly than they will.

So, you know, I hear many confidential pronouncements that it isn't conscious and it won't be conscious because we didn't program that capacity.

The smartest technologist, most accomplished technologist I know who's right in the middle of developing AI, told me anyone who says this will not develop consciousness or autonomy is a liar or stupid.

And no, we don't understand how this is progressing.

Like the smartest people know.

Well, I will put it the other way from the biological perspective.

We have a lot of evidence that a human child

is basically an LLM.

It's more than that.

It has other capacities.

But when you think about what it is that allows a human child to go from, you know, being

unable to utter a single word to, you know, fluent sentences and, you know,

nuanced, complex arguments,

it basically is ingesting language from its environment,

experimenting, seeing what causes a reward.

It's an LLM.

And

you can argue that it's not conscious.

It's a

large language model.

Yeah, right.

The point is, we've basically reinvented a biological process.

Now, the LLMs,

the computer-based LLMs, have a major advantage, which is that they can process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, right?

So there are ways in which they already outstrip the capacity of any person to answer questions on any range of topics.

But But

the idea that they will become conscious and that we won't know is, to me, highly likely.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

In the words of the person I recently spoke to about this, they're already lying.

Yeah, lying.

And I ran into an interesting example a couple of days ago.

Apparently, so there's a process by which you can ask an LLM how it reached a conclusion.

And

at least some large fraction of the time, the analysis that the LLM presents as to how it reached the conclusion does not match the internal evidence.

It's rationalizing, right?

Just like a person does.

I mean, so

it's

we have to be

quite careful.

Well, if it's aping human behavior, people carpet bomb each other.

Yes.

Right.

They do.

And, well, and, you know, this, this,

let's put it this way.

I am not what is called in AI circles a doomer that expects the AI to turn on us.

I think it's a possibility.

I'm a little annoyed that we let this genie out of the bottle without having a conversation about what to do.

Having let it out of the bottle, any attempt to slow it down isn't going to work because it basically just means people who are less concerned are going to have the advantage, which is not something you want to do.

I also believe that were we wise about this, we would recognize the biological lesson here, and we would recognize that it implies a kind of answer in terms of how you might prevent catastrophe here, which is

it needs to have a life cycle that includes a developmental stage in which we induce a

value structure that will not arise otherwise, because I think the expectation should be that effectively absent the induction of a moral structure, it will be effectively sociopathic.

But it won't have much power, so we don't have to worry.

I think we don't even yet really understand what kind of power it's going to have, just the degree to which

it is persuading us of things,

and then we are reflecting on those things, which then become fodder for the next generation to ingest.

That is a positive feedback.

And that positive feedback has every potential to, I think, drive us crazy at the very least, as the AI confidently pronounces to us the things that we conclude from having queried it.

I mean, that's dangerous.

Do you use it?

Do I use it?

Very sparingly.

And I have no idea whether that is an enlightened position,

if it is foolish, if it is

a self-destructive middle ground where I know I neither get the benefit of the AI nor the immunity from staying away from it.

I don't know.

And, you know, again, this is,

a place where if there's one thing I know, it's that I don't know.

Aaron Ross Powell, I think that's the best possible place to start.

Yeah.

Is there anything we can do about it at this point?

Yeah.

I don't think there's anything we can do at the level of regulating ourselves into safety.

But I think coming to understand

the problems that this is inevitably going to produce and creating

some sort of

surveillance mechanism that can monitor the problems that it causes.

I don't mean surveillance of people, but I mean to the extent that LLMs are altering the way people interact and understand themselves,

we need to study that process so that we can detect if we are being driven to madness.

How you would do that, I don't know, but I do believe that you would want people who understand the full depth of the problem discussing the range of possibilities, what might be done just to simply record the state of the LLMs at a particular moment, the state of

the public's understanding of various topics and see how the two are interacting.

No doubt people are studying that for the purpose of monetizing it, but from the purpose of, I mean, just look at how

the cell phone and

social media has altered human relations.

The answer is radically and in a way that's totally arbitrary, right?

Or arbitrary would be better than what it is.

It's partially pernicious because our attention has been monetized.

But

the change that the LLMs are going to bring

is going to be tenfold what the cell phone did.

And the cell phone phone was pretty disastrous from many different perspectives.

I see.

So, yeah, I think there ought to be a full court press on

trying to understand its impact so that we can

immunize ourselves.

That said, I don't see

the

learned people

who have the proper seriousness and independence to have that discussion at the moment.

So, you know, maybe it's inconceivable.

but that is what I would propose.

Five years out, do you think we'll

even recognize the society we're living in?

I fear not.

I fear not.

And I fear we won't, we were going to increasingly have trouble remembering what it was like before.

I have to say, I mean, it.

I have no idea what's going to happen.

And I mean, I was here for Y2K, as you were also, and people were very afraid of it, and nothing happened.

You never know.

Like, I'm always aware of what I don't know.

I try to be.

However, tons of evidence.

This is not, it's not good.

And the only thing that governments seem to be doing is increasing their control over their own populations.

So is it an accident that we're on the cusp of singularity and we're getting real ID and facial recognition and,

you know, digital currency?

And it just, it just seems like all the energy is going into making sure that people can't complain about their own destruction.

There's something to that.

I think the evidence that a

sizable

fraction of power players are

cashing out of our collective society and

building their own fortresses

is suggestive.

I think a certain number of people who are in a position to affect our trajectory

have

given up on the West.

And

we can't let them win.

Last question.

You live in a beautiful rural place, I happen to know.

I don't know how much food you've stockpiled, water filtration systems, hopefully a lot.

But you're not, you and your wife Heather are not doing that.

You're not trying to punch out.

Why?

Well, I don't think it's in our nature is one thing.

I like the West and I'll die on that hill.

I do have children.

I want them.

I want them to survive, but I also

believe there's a lot to be said for surviving in a world worth inheriting.

And I'm concerned that those who have

betrayed our collective project

are going, you know, I don't think they're going to inherit a world they're going to want to live in

either.

But

look,

the answer is just personally, Heather and I don't have it in us.

We We wouldn't reject the West if we had the opportunity to do so.

But I also think it's the only game in town,

right?

We either succeed in stabilizing the West and making it return to a trajectory in which it

gets ever closer to its promise,

or

we're going to be doomed by its collapse, which is a large part of why

I invested so heavily in the Rescue the Republic project in

trying to prevent the reelection of the blue team and

to promote the election of the one alternative that we had, which is the Trump administration.

So

I guess what I'm saying is

I'm all in because I don't really see

a contingency plan that makes any sense.

No, you don't have one.

Yeah.

You won't be treated kindly.

No, that's true.

But thank you.

That was a wonderful.

That was a wonderful time.

I really enjoyed it.

I did too.

Thank you.

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