The Professor Banned From Speaking Out: "We Need To Start Preparing! The Terrifying Lessons Of Covid We’re Ignoring!" - Bret Weinstein

Bret Weinstein (0:00)

I painted a scenario that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take. The problem is that it's already underway. On a time scale of decades, and we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift. People, should they be preparing? Absolutely.

Steven Bartlett (0:18)

That's quite scary.

SPEAKER_3 (0:19)

Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former professor, uncovering the world's most pressing and controversial issues, and offering his solutions to save humanity from a destructive future.

Bret Weinstein (0:30)

Humanity is in terrible danger, and the number of existential threats is growing. For example, I am profoundly concerned we are going to squander the lesson of COVID. You can see the complete collapse of journalism, our political institutions, our courts. They all failed. The tragedy is most people don't know that we are still not being honest about the origin of COVID. And the truth is that our political institutions don't want to talk about it, which is going to mean that the failures are going to come back.

Steven Bartlett (1:01)

Is there anything else on your list of concerns?

Bret Weinstein (1:02)

So I have five different existential threats that AI poses and we will go through them. But we have no evolutionary preparedness for living in a world where a computer can out-compete a human being. That's a dangerous world to live in.

Steven Bartlett (1:17)

Is there anything we can do to prepare or to avert this crisis?

Bret Weinstein (1:21)

Yes, here's what I suggest.

Steven Bartlett (1:24)

Bret, of all these existential threats, is there one that's at the very top of your list?

Bret Weinstein (1:28)

Yes, there's nothing more dangerous than this. And that is...

Steven Bartlett (1:40)

Who are you and what mission are you on? And when I asked that second question, I'm looking at the full body of your work and I'm trying to encapsulate it maybe in just a couple of sentences.

Bret Weinstein (1:52)

Sure. I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm a former college professor who has been cast into the role of a public intellectual by bizarre events at my college.

I am on a mission and I'm afraid it's going to sound weird to people. I think humanity is in terrible danger. I think we worry about the wrong things. And I do not have any reason to believe that anything I could do is going to change the fate of humanity. But I feel obligated to try. That is to say, if we're going to be doomed by our errors, and I know something about what those errors are, then it falls to me to try to make that clear to people and processes that might have the power to redirect us. So I'm making that effort, even though, frankly, I think it's unlikely to work.

Steven Bartlett (2:56)

That's quite scary, Bret.

Bret Weinstein (2:58)

Yep, I've gotten over that part.

Steven Bartlett (3:01)

What exactly are you referring to when you say that you think humanity might be doomed?

Bret Weinstein (3:06)

There's a basic set of premises that just comes out of biology. No species is forever, and that includes our species, no matter what I or anyone else does. But the objective of the exercise is really to stave off extinction as long as possible, and I believe that that is a valid thing to do. It is a vital thing to do, even if in the end we know that no matter how successful we were, we're not going to escape the destruction of the solar system, we're not going to escape the collision of our galaxy into another, and even if we did, ultimately the universe has a fate, and it will take us out with it if we beat every odd. But why are we in trouble? Well, we're in trouble because all creatures are well-built for the environments in which we evolved. And human beings suffer from something that my wife Heather and I in our book call hyper-novelty.

So novelty is the state of something being not what you are evolutionarily prepared for. And human beings are very good at dealing with novelty. But what we're doing in the present is we're creating a rate of change that is so rapid that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up. We cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with the novel influences that we are forcing upon ourselves. And what that means is that with each passing year, we end up ever more poorly adapted to the life that we have to lead. And it's gotten so bad that the environments that we live in as adults don't even resemble the environments that existed for adults when we were kids. The reason that human beings have a longer developmental period than any other creature that has ever existed on this planet is that you need a long developmental period for us to acquire the insight and the nuance in order to be a functional adult. That program doesn't work if the environment in which you are picking up those lessons is unrelated to the environment in which you have to do the adult stuff. It's a non sequitur. So that's why we're in trouble. We have technologies that are powerful enough to destroy us. We have processes that we have unleashed the consequences of which we can scarcely imagine. And as these things proliferate, the number of existential threats to humanity is just simply growing. We have to rein in that problem. The proliferation of existential threats means that the moment at which we blink out as a species is getting closer. If it isn't this that takes us out, it'll be that. We have to arrest that process.