#2101 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Very funny text you sent me the other day. You said, I hope we have something to talk about.

Bret Weinstein (0:18)

Well, you know, the fact is, the world's gotten kind of calm, so. I was hoping, I looked out the window of the hotel this morning, thinking the weather might help us. No, boring as can be.

Joe Rogan (0:29)

It's beautiful, birds chirping. Well, who knows what lies in the horizon.

I did not watch the Super Bowl, but I got a ton of messages from people that watch it. They're like, what the fuck is going on? The Super Bowl was a gigantic propaganda campaign, and there's Pfizer ads and weird woke commercials.

Bret Weinstein (0:49)

It was bizarre.

I did watch it. I had nothing else to do, and I probably wouldn't have watched it otherwise, but I did watch it, and it was like some running inside joke. You had to know who these people were in order to even just be with the flow. I mean, obviously, the game is what it is, but all of the stuff surrounding it was like, you're either embedded in this culture or it's kind of a head-scratcher.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

I did not see any of it, so I wasn't watching the Super Bowl last night. I was busy, so I don't know what happened.

Bret Weinstein (1:22)

Well, let's put it this way. I'm not a football aficionado by any stretch, but it was a pretty exciting game. I mean, it came down to the last seconds of overtime, and, you know, it was a hell of a comeback, so.

Joe Rogan (1:36)

There are a ton of conspiracies about the way it was officiated and that the fix was in, with Travis Kelsey being sponsored by Pfizer and Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift's music catalog being owned by some mega corporation that has shady ties.

Bret Weinstein (1:54)

Well, I have to say, I was watching it and I didn't have a dog in the fight. I wasn't really rooting for either team. I was just trying to get the sense of, you know, what the game was like.

But I did find myself in the end rooting against Taylor Swift.

Joe Rogan (2:10)

This is the Biden thing that they posted.

Bret Weinstein (2:14)

After his bedtime.

Joe Rogan (2:15)

Just like we drew it up and it's Biden with these, you know, red robot eyes. Why would they do that?

Why would they make that, like that, just that alone? Like, what are you saying? Like, what are you doing? Like, imagine that's the President of the United States. Just, I want you to imagine Ronald Reagan, if social media was alive, posting a photograph like that, or Bill Clinton.

Bret Weinstein (2:39)

Well, I mean, I do know what they're doing, right? This is, they have a very weak meme game, but they do have moments when they show some kind of spark in this regard.

And I detest it. I think they have an obligation to be above this stuff and to not troll. But in a world where Trump is a political force, they're trying to build a game in the same arena and they're gonna get crushed, but that's why they did it. Obviously, it's the machine that did it.

Joe Rogan (3:14)

It's kind of amazing that the left can't meme.

Because they're really bad at it. Because they're denying so many truths. Like in order to adhere to the ideology, you have to be so rigid in what you accept as truth. And there's so many things that just don't jive with that that you can't really meme well when you're doing that. Like what memes are is pointing things out and exaggerating them in a way where people kind of know that this is the case and then you make a preposterous image and everybody laughs. But the left can't really do that because a lot of those memes are very offensive and funny.

Bret Weinstein (3:57)

Well, I think it's actually a window into not really the left. I mean, as you know, I feel myself of the left, but I don't relate to these people at all.

Joe Rogan (4:11)

Nor do I. It's something weird happened and we got kicked out.

Bret Weinstein (4:14)

Yeah, it got taken over by something diabolical.

And what you're pointing to, it's the same thing. It has no sense of humor, right? They laugh, but they have no sense of humor. They have no ability to juxtapose things so that you suddenly see something in the way something, a funny joke works. They can't meme because they're not really, this is some corrupt cabal behind the scenes that arranges a set of, you know, policies that aren't coherent together because they're about something that's never been discussed with us. And so it's not a natural for, you know, you can't really build a culture around it because it's incoherent to begin with.