WBD239 Audio Transcription

#Unity2020: Ending the Two-Party System with Bret Weinstein

Interview date: Friday 3rd July 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Bret Weisntein from the DarkHorse Podcast. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Bret Weinstein, a biologist and evolutionary theorist, who was at the center of the Evergreen College controversy. We discuss the US protests, bipartisan politics, inequality, and where Bitcoin fits into this and #Unity2020.

“The obvious thing to do, if you want to win elections in the US, is make policy on behalf of the people… but they can’t do it, because the purpose of these parties is corruption.”

— Bret Weinstein

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: What was it, like eight months ago I saw you?

Bret Weinstein: Feels like about a lifetime ago.

Peter McCormack: Well yeah, hell of a lot's happened!

Bret Weinstein: A certain number of things have happened. I mean pretty much everything has happened actually.

Peter McCormack: Everything! The whole world's gone fucking crazy.

Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it's gone crazy.

Peter McCormack: Good to see you.

Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it's good to see you.

Peter McCormack: I wanted to talk to you, we're recording, by the way.

Bret Weinstein: We are recording?

Peter McCormack: We are recording, man. We're in, we started.

Bret Weinstein: Okay, well then let's say smart things, what do you think?

Peter McCormack: Well that's your job, you've got to do the smart stuff, I'm the dumb guy with the dumb questions. You're the smart guy, you're the professor.

Bret Weinstein: All right, I will fake it.

Peter McCormack: But look, a shit loads happened since I saw you last, but the reason I wanted to talk to you is I listened to your Joe Rogan Show with a lot of interest. I also listened to Sam Harris's Can We Pull Back from the Brink, and both of those were, for me, the best things I've heard relating to all the crazy shit going on right now where people actually sat back and thought about things. But specifically with your Dark Horse Duo I had questions and also I've got another thing I want to talk to you about.

Obviously you know I have a Bitcoin show, it's a very popular Bitcoin show and it's not that I want to talk to you about Bitcoin so much, but I want to talk to you about the money side of things which I think is missing as part of the conversation. So there's a lot to get into, just to help you for a setup, to give you an idea of this audience, it is Bitcoiners, it is libertarians, it is anarcho capitalists, not all of them, some of them are typical statist people like me who voted in elections.

But I do have a lot of libertarian followers who are completely anti-state. Whilst I sympathize with a lot of libertarians, my view's slightly different in that I don't think human nature allows that kind of society to exist, I think we naturally organize. So I'm more interested in directionally moving towards less government, I like that idea and I think that it's something you can work towards. So that's the setup.

I think to help the people listening, not everyone would have heard our previous show because it was on my other podcast, Defiance, and I don't spend too much time on this, but I think in the Rogan show it was very, very good when it was explained that everything that's happening right now, is what happened at Evergreen at scale. I thought that was a very well put thing. So do you want to give you a brief version of what happened at Evergreen to help set this up?

Bret Weinstein: Wow, it's the question I like least in the universe! It's impossible to do it well, briefly.

Peter McCormack: I'm sorry!

Bret Weinstein: But let me just say, there was a mini-takeover of a fringe university or college that involved many of the things you're now seeing happen commonly in civilization. Basically there were claims that there was rampant white supremacy and those claims were the basis of a sweeping set of policy changes that began to move through the college. I opposed them because they were very dangerous to the college, they would have crippled it, they would have resulted in it going bankrupt and I said so.

I was portrayed as a racist and in one famous incident I opposed a day of racial segregation in which white people were asked to leave campus. I said that I wouldn't leave campus, and that resulted in a protest that quickly descended into riots. That riot then resulted in the president of the college withdrawing the police, standing them down, instructing them not to intervene. People hunted me, they apparently searched from one car to the next looking for me. They roved the campus with bats and other weapons, students attacked other students, black students who studied science were accused of being race traitors and all sorts of very colourful things happened.

Ultimately my wife and I, my wife also taught there, she was actually their most popular professor, I was probably in the top few, se were forced to resign because the working environment was not safe, and now we live in the outer world where we are seeing these very same phenomena break out into public. We are seeing takeovers of virtually every institution on which we have any information, where there is a discussion happening on the inside and those who refuse to acknowledge that there is rampant white supremacy are accused of racism, forced out, that sort of thing.

Peter McCormack: Sounds like CHAZ.

Bret Weinstein: Well CHAZ happened at Evergreen. We had a week of literal anarchy and I don't mean chaos, though we had that too. We had literal anarchy, and the folks who were roaming with baseball bats said that they were community patrols, protecting people, when in fact they were bully patrols that were intimidating people who disagreed with them. So yes, we saw it all before. It was so close to this, that it is beyond parallel, it was the same phenomenon at a different scale.

Peter McCormack: The same phenomenon that spread across the whole country, pretty much.

Bret Weinstein: Yep, it was.

Peter McCormack: So what's your read on it? How much do you think this actually has to do with the killing of George Floyd? How much do you think this is just an excuse for certain people to push a certain agenda?

Bret Weinstein: I don't think it's either. I don't think it has much to do with George Floyd, I think George Floyd was the spark that set a bunch of tinder aflame. But what it does have to do with is a massive failure of the structures that are supposed to be serving the public interest. Basically, we've had more than a generation of wholesale capture that has inverted government's purpose. So government has effectively become parasitic on the population, and people, especially people too young to remember that functional governance is even a thing, they see government as the enemy, because they only see its malignant form.

They have now rebelled against it, not realizing that even this malignant government is the one thing standing between them and a world of warlords and chaos. So the way I look at it, we do have a race problem in the US, but it isn't the race problem that is being claimed by the protesters here. It is a race problem that is largely built not of modern racism, but of the echoes of past racism which are persistent because one of the things that our corrupt government does, is it takes past patterns of distribution and it amplifies them and broadcast them into the future.

That's the purpose that has evolved. That purpose will take past racism, that is no longer operative in the minds of most Americans, and it will cause the downstream effects of that past racism to continue on, to self-reinforce. So we do have a race problem, but it is incorrect to say that everywhere that we have persistent inequality that racism is the cause of it. Certainly demonizing white people as if they are cryptically all racist, not only is it false but it can't possibly do anything but end in disaster in the US. It is going to cause white people to start seeing the world again in racial terms, which is in and of itself, a catastrophe.

Peter McCormack: What do you see is the race problem? Help me understand it as a British person looking from the outside.

Bret Weinstein: Well we have two populations in the US that have a special history of oppression. That is to say many people have ended up in the US, they have faced some racism and they have ended up doing okay in spite of it. My own people being one of them, I'm Jewish and have I encountered anti-Semitism? Occasionally, it used to be much worse, but the fact is Jews have prospered in the US and so racism is not a bar to success, but in the case of these two populations American-Indians and blacks, there has been a persistent problem with success.

There is debate about what that is caused by, but to me is a biologist, this looks like a natural consequence of the fact that these two populations encountered something different than everybody else who arrived in North America. That different thing involves the active sabotage of the onboard culture. So Europeans disrupted Indian culture, and to the extent that they left it intact, they moved Indians off their historical lands, which meant that the adaptations that they had evolved to live, were no longer applicable to the places that they were.

It was massively disruptive, and that's before you get to the systemic efforts to disrupt culture by breaking up families and forcing Indians into schools that were teaching things that were counterproductive. Then of course the black population that was imported to North America as slaves, those people had their families broken apart. They were grouped together and sometimes didn't share a language with each other.

So again, you have a systemic disruption of the software that allows human beings to function. At the point that the most pernicious of these effects were removed, there was no proper attempt to level the playing field. So that pattern continues to echo through history and we are dealing with the downstream consequences of it.

Peter McCormack: Is this a very similar problem to the Aboriginals in Australia, and I think there's an issue in New Zealand, I'm pretty sure New Zealand as well.

Bret Weinstein: Yes, it's the same problem and it's the same process. It has to do with taking one of the essential features of being human, and disrupting it for narrow purposes, or disrupting it out of sheer ignorance of how a human being functions, and then never figuring out how to restore it. Which isn't to say that we don't have many successful and highly insightful blacks, it's not that you can't acquire the software, but the point is at the population level, the stuff that allow the best software to be acquired, is known to be broken.

If you live in a neighbourhood that has a history of oppression, what are the chances you have an excellent school? Chances are close to zero. So anyway, it's not like this is such a hard problem to solve, but it is one that you have to focus on with a systems approach, rather than leaping to the conclusion that if a population isn't succeeding it's because secretly people believe things about them.

Peter McCormack: So this is a problem of inequality, historical inequality, which predominantly affects these two groups, and the resulting inequality of what you spoke about.

Bret Weinstein: So you know the cybernetic principle? The purpose of a system is what it does.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Bret Weinstein: The purpose of our system is the concentration and amplification of existing systems of distribution of wellbeing. So to the extent that a population has been frozen out of wellbeing, and in the past these two populations were obviously frozen out of wellbeing for well understood reasons. To the extent that you never correct that, then that pattern just simply gets picked up by this status quo reproducing algorithm that is running inside our governance structure, and it will continue on indefinitely until you confront it.

So I think that's where we are. The tragedy here is that people who are frustrated by being frozen out, and all sorts of people are frustrated by being frozen out, it's not primarily even a racial issue, you've got an entire generation of millennials that are discovering that somehow they're going to be saddled with debt and they're not going to be able to afford homes. The idea of supporting a family is becoming preposterous and they're in open revolt.

So I think their anger is understandable, it's just a question of how good the diagnosis is, and how useful the policies that are being advocated would be. The fact is, the diagnosis is terrible, and the prescriptions that are being offered by this protest movement are even worse. They would be the un-invention of America, and they would be a challenge to western civilization.

Peter McCormack: But the certain lack of leadership that you talked about, and sadly actually, the rejection of ideas from people who are on their side. Like for example, you're obviously on the side of a solution, you would like to help fix these historical issues, but you're seen as the enemy because of the narrative you're bringing, which possibly is a little bit too much truth for some people to handle.

Bret Weinstein: Well there's a pattern that was very clear at Evergreen, and has only become more clear in the years since, which is that people who speak the truth in the face of a convenient fiction, are specially penalized and demonized, because what they're saying is particularly destructive. So at Evergreen I had a student, mixed-race, mother of this student was Afro-Caribbean, and she was literally confronted by bullies who told her that she was a race traitor for studying science. Why did they do that?

Well because the fact of a person with brown skin who does not subscribe to the narrative that I'm a racist, that my classes contains racism, that science itself is racist. Any person who can say, "No, actually that hasn't been my experience at all" is a threat to the narrative. If the person is white, you can dismiss them because you can say, "Well they just don't get it. Not only are they racist, but they're also really lacking self-awareness." But if a person who says, "You know, that hasn't been my experience. I don't know what you mean that there's white supremacy everywhere."

If the person who says that has brown skin, it is particularly destructive. So they get especially penalized. So in some sense, I'm being specially penalized because what I'm saying makes sense, it's not that hard to understand, and that means it's particularly dangerous to this false narrative that is animating the protest movement.

Peter McCormack: There is quite a few different factions within this protest movement though. There's obviously a Black Lives Matter group, there seems to be an overlap with a Marxist group and we have Antifa. What do you think is leading the chaos here, because I don't think it's a Black Lives Matter movement that's leading the chaos.

Bret Weinstein: I agree with you about the factions, and I know them well. Frankly, the missing ingredient is leadership. If you had leaders, they could be reasoned with, they could disavow the stuff that makes no sense, the stuff that is dangerous and we would at least know who to negotiate with.

But because the movement has taken the ethos of Occupy because it is basically assembled itself as an emergent phenomenon, its thinking is very low-quality. Its thinking is sort of lowest common denominator for all of the various things that are generating ideas and the result is absolutely incoherent.

Peter McCormack: Why do you think there is a lack of leadership?

Bret Weinstein: I think there are a number of reasons. One, I think the internet has trained us in new ways that the internet functions with us behaving inside of these chambers, in a leaderless fashion. That can actually work very well at small scales and that's one thing. Another thing is that there's awareness on the part of people, especially on the left, who have been in protest movements, that leaders are a vulnerability. This is just simply a fact if one looks back at the history of things like the civil rights movement, the leaders are targeted and things happen.

But that is not the same thing, the recognition that leaders are a vulnerability, is not the same thing as the discovery that leaderlessness is a good thing. It's just a different failure mode. So really if we want the right thing to emerge here, the movement needs leaders and we have to figure out how to protect them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but then who are the leaders? Ultimately like if you're trying to rationalize with a leader, and you've previously been rejected, and villainized for your thoughts and opinions, don't you fear that every kind of solution that you're going to come to these people with is going to ultimately be rejected? Well because the kind of arguments they're having, aren't really rational.

Bret Weinstein: I'm not exactly expecting them to talk to me. I would love it if they did, I think they'd be better off if they did, but I'm not expecting that. But we have so many top-flight black intellectuals in the US at the moment, it's really an impressive list. The fact that these people are not central to the conversation that is taking place with respect to this movement, that they are somehow sidelined from that conversation, is alarming to me.

Why would you reject the wisdom of people who actually put the lie to what racism does exist. They make the very clear case that, given the right sort of environments, blacks thrive in the US, and that's what we should be cultivating. But somehow that conversation isn't happening. I hope it will start.

Peter McCormack: So how do you think this is going to play out? Actually, another point or question I have for you, because you said this is about control and when we last spoke and we talked about Evergreen, you said this was all about control. I've heard you say this is about control as well and I do see that as well, but I also see that there's a group of people here, I think they're young and naïve, who actually believe fundamentally that they're right.

They're so lost in their ideas they think that they're going to create a better world by enforcing their opinions and their views of the world on people. They're just naive and stupid ideas, but I don't believe every one of these people is just trying to control people, I think they in their view, they're trying to create a better world. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Bret Weinstein: Yeah, so let's put it this way, it is very easy for a decent person to sign up for a belief system that results in them doing ghastly things. History tells us that story repeatedly, and we're seeing that here. Most of the people in this movement are not hell-bent on acquiring control, but they become absorbed by a movement whose mechanism results in a kind of horizontal spreading of this accumulation of control. So they end up as agents of it, but no, that's not their objective and many of them think that they're going to create a better world.

Unfortunately, the folks who end up in such movements are not people who know how to build things. Now that's a shame and it's not their fault. We have mis-educated them by allowing schooling to descend into the absurd state that it is, they have been denied the experiences that would let them know how you actually build something, and what a functional system is made of.

But instead, these folks have they've grown up online and by growing up online, you get a very wrong idea because inside of a social media platform, there are no conservation laws, it's just a social environment, which means that the social rules are the physics of the place. But there's no awareness that that whole social universe is actually fuelled by something.

It's fuelled by code and it is driven by a power plant, a nuclear power plant, a coal plant, some other kind of plant, a hydro-electric dam, that actually is pumping the electrons that allow us to have our screens show what other people are saying. So until you understand that that underlying layer is the thing that makes all of the social stuff possible, you kind of get the idea that the social world is the world.

People who think that the social world is the world become very animated by the idea that well we know what you should say and what you shouldn't say so let's just make that a rule. It's nonsense, and they will find out very quickly as they did in the CHAZ. But it is understandable that they would have this misunderstanding because they weren't exposed to the kinds of things that would tell them otherwise.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so CHAZ, as I'm aware, has been closed down. A lot of the movement seems to be kind of fizzling out, but I'm not I'm not sure if it's the same in the US. We had a very small uprising here following what happened in the US, but it's kind of fizzling out. I feel like in the US it's fizzling out a bit, but to the extent that is a... Is it a missed opportunity?

Bret Weinstein: Of course it's a missed opportunity, that's the tragedy of it. I don't know that I see it as fizzling out but I think it may be in a phase transition. I think what happened is the movement discovered just how much power it has, and it has started moving horizontally through institutions.

So we are seeing things occur that obviously have an explanation related to this ideology, but that we can't trace what took place because it's not visible in the same way that a protest or a riot in the street is. So for example, the simultaneous purge of people from Facebook and Reddit and Twitter, this was clearly a very forceful demonstration that people of certain beliefs would not be tolerated. Frankly, some of the beliefs of the people who were tossed were abhorrent to me. But nonetheless...

Peter McCormack: Do you believe in the freedom to have those beliefs?

Bret Weinstein: Of course I believe in the freedom to have those beliefs, and I believe in the freedom to voice those beliefs, and I believe in the freedom of the rest of us to say that those beliefs are crappy and dangerous. I don't see any solution that involves us getting to a better world through censorship, book-burning, it's preposterous. We know that doesn't work, and yet somehow we're here again.

Peter McCormack: So where is the breakdown here? Do you put it back to the college system, the school system?

Bret Weinstein: No, I put it back to political corruption. That basically civilization is an evolutionary environment and unfortunately the system that we have was not good enough to shut down attempts at capture. Those attempts at capture succeeded, and then they became more sophisticated, and they eventually took over the whole system.

So we have now in the US a two-party system in which both parties are involved, essentially, in full-time influence-peddling, which makes policy completely fail and which results in people being kept from the majority of the productivity that they generate through their labour, which of course makes them angry and results in them eventually showing up with torches and pitchforks, which is where we are.

Now in general, if you go to the people with the torches and the pitchforks they don't have a highly nuanced critique of what happened, but the fact that they will show up as the result of processes that frees them out of well-being, that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

Peter McCormack: It's not a unique problem to the States, especially right now. I was in Santiago in Chile I think at the start of the year, I don't know how much you know about the protests there, but it's daily protests. Whilst the ingredients of the protests aren't the same, the fundamental argument is. The fundamental reason people protesting is there's a rising inequality, people are working, they're getting taxed more, there's rampant corruption within the government, they can't access education and they can't access healthcare.

Bret Weinstein: Am I right that the protest was triggered by issues surrounding public transport?

Peter McCormack: Yes, it was a very tiny increase in the charge for the using the Metro service, the underground service. But there was actually two issues. So that was one issue and the second issue was related to the pensions. So they moved from a state to a private pension, but they did it on a firm cut-off date. So if you were 55, 60 years old, you instantly lost the state pension but you didn't have the time to build up enough equity in your private pension. So a lot of people started retiring or had to stay in work.

So there were two actual issues there, but what triggered the protest was there was a rise in the Metro prices, which fundamentally affects the poorest the most, it's like another tax on the poor, who are having to take the longest journeys to come into the city to do the jobs that nobody else will do. But the protests were fundamentally led by ... I would say it was a youth movement. There's a daily protest, and then a big protest on the Friday.

A lot of similarities to the US, there was certainly a, I would say, a similar kind of ideas around kind of Marxism, the people I was speaking to and similar ideas a lot of messages supporting for outside of the money issues, but also supporting trans rights, gay rights, like they all kind of merged into one. So when I was seeing what was happening the US, I was like, this is exactly what I just saw in Santiago Chile. It's exactly the same, it is a rise in inequality leading to a revolution, but the leaders are bit young, they're a bit naïve, and they don't know actually what they want.

Bret Weinstein: Yeah, that's interesting, and there is something about this that is revealing the sort of awkward state in which nations now find themselves. The protest in the US about police brutality that may or may not be connected to racism spreads to Britain, and the protests there are somehow incoherent, if not viewed in the context of what's taking place in the US. In other words, there's a very different relationship with the police, there's very different relationship between races in Britain, so a protest that simply duplicates the complaints of what's going on in North America is simply out of context.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I haven't actually had time to fully investigate the numbers with regards to police brutality in the UK, but I have a feeling similar to the US, the systemic race problems aren't as bad as people think they are. I've also got a feeling, just from looking at some of the footage, a lot of the protests were co-opted by people who just wanted to go out and cause problems. They wanted to riot.

Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: We also had a lot of these very strange kind of attacks on the statues, and these very difficult debates around the statues, which we won't talk about today because that's a whole other topic. But okay, just to bring it back, so where do you think we're headed with this? Then let's talk about the ideas that you've got. But where do you think this is headed if nobody intervenes intellectually and makes a change?

Bret Weinstein: Well in the US we have a powder keg, and we're standing on it smoking, wondering what's going to happen next. It looks like this, we have this young leftist movement making claims about what has gone wrong and those claims are focused very directly on a racial issue which it misunderstands, but nonetheless the idea has become that at least as far as the leadership, in as much as it exists, is advancing an ideology, it is essentially the attempt, to instead of opposing and ending oppression, to turn the tables of perceived oppression.

Of course, turning the tables of perceived oppression is going to back white people against the wall, and cause them to start thinking of themselves as separate, which in the US is of course very dangerous, because the population is very well-armed, especially the white rural population who has been very nearly silent so far in this. But they are certainly feeling threatened and they are discussing it, which is understandable. So the question is, at what point does that movement threaten the population of whites sufficiently that they react?

Now worse, that would be bad enough, but worse is the fact that the Democratic Party in the US has begun toying with the idea of teaming up with the protests, and is humouring the protests in terms of the claims underlying its ideology. Now that seems strange probably, because of course the Democratic Party would be expected to defend working people, a large fraction of whom are white. But what's really going on is this the Democratic Party has taken up influence peddling, the same racket the Republicans have been at for many, many decades. This has roots that go way back, but this became particularly acute starting in the Bill Clinton administration.

Peter McCormack: What do you mean by influence peddling?

Bret Weinstein: I mean that they accumulate power by winning votes. So they have a lot of goodies to sell because they inhabit large fraction of the seats in Congress, they sometimes have the presidency and what they can do is they can trade favours for money and positions, basically. If you're inside of the Democratic elite, you are hooked up to a great many economic interests that are arrayed against the public interest. So for example, things like fiat currency that are obviously fuelling the well-being that flows through the major banks.

There would obviously be opposition to things like alternative monetary systems, crypto being a prominent example. So how is it that you can get the government to stand in the way of the evolution of a system that would be superior for the public? Well you can create roadblocks and obstacles, and that's what we see. So in any case, everything looks like this. Would the public be better served if we had excellent public transportation? If we switched over to electric cars, and the government were to facilitate that by installing infrastructure, or favouring its installation by other people.

There are lots of things that would be clearly in the public interest. A healthcare system that worked, and that everybody had access to, obviously would be very popular, better schools, obviously very popular. So all of these things have to be opposed by these special interests that do not necessarily want these problems solved, because these problems are a source of income for them. So how do they prevent a democracy from solving problems that the solutions to which would be very popular? Well you have to get in between the people and the law.

You get in between it through the two major parties and that game has now reached a point at which people are getting wise to the fact that policy is simply not being made in their interest and that they do not have the power through elections to change it. They've tried and they have failed because the parties have too much power. So the answer obviously involves dislodging the parties so that they can no longer sell influence. The proposal that I have advanced is to recapture the White House on behalf of the people.

Peter McCormack: It's a bold plan.

Bret Weinstein: Thank you!

Peter McCormack: It's a very bold plan. I want to get into this with you actually quite a bit, because when I heard it I was like, "Okay, I've got more questions." It's not that I'm for against it but I've definitely got more questions. Just before we get into that, we're basically in this area where we're talking about the system's rigged right?

Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: The government is no longer representing the people. A good example of this is, I watched the interview with Steve Bannon, who I'm not a huge fan of for many reasons. But he talked about... Did you see the interview with him where he was talking about finding Trump and getting Trump into power? He talked about how the Democratic Party had deserted the working man. So with Trump they had an opportunity through kind of populism to get the Republicans back into power, to support the working man.

But what actually ended up happening under the Republicans is actually, quite the opposite. So the trade terrorists worked against the working man, and a lot of the economic policies by Mnuchin actually diverted more money into, I think it was the rich 1%. So the actual policies of the Republican Party were vastly different from what they actually promised the voters.

Bret Weinstein: That's the symptom that you would expect. I did not see this Bannon interview, but that is exactly what you would expect.

Peter McCormack: I wonder whether it's both parties right? This just happens under both parties.

Bret Weinstein: Of course, that's the thing is if it didn't happen under both parties, then whichever party didn't do this would be wildly popular. So if you think that the parties are interested primarily in winning elections, then you've got a head scratcher because of course, the obvious thing to do if you want to win elections in the US, is make policy on behalf of the people.

Done, you'll be the most popular party and you'll be unbeatable. But they can't do it because the purpose of these parties is corruption, they have to give people something else to get the votes. Now mind you, you would expect policy not to serve people, because both parties are corrupt and you would expect people to stop voting because they would detect that their votes don't actually result in positive change. So they would become disaffected and all these things we see.

But the parties don't actually need people to vote for them in large numbers. A tiny number of people still results in the same amount of power being distributed. So the parties can afford to antagonize large fractions of the population so long as nothing disrupts the racket.

Peter McCormack: So let's go on to your solution, the Dark Horse Duo. Not everyone's going to have heard what I heard so you're going to have to explain it.

Bret Weinstein: Sure! So the plan which the working title was Dark Horse Duo, as you alluded to it, we have rebranded it to give it just some distance from the Dark Horse podcast, which is actually not why it was called the Dark Horse Duo. Dark Horse is actually a Benjamin Disraeli term that has been applied to long shot political candidates for more than a hundred years. So in any case, the plan which is now called Unity2020, is to recapture the White House in the following way. We draft two candidates, one of them from the left and one of them from the right, and they are drafted into a team.

The team agrees to govern by consensus, that every decision will be discussed and they will consult the proper experts together, they will reach a consensus about what the right policy for the American people is. This team will run as president and vice president with the person at the top of the ticket chosen by a coin flip. After four years, the team will reverse positions. That is to say the person who was president will run as vice president, and vice versa. This continues until somebody has inhabited the presidency twice, and then they will be replaced, and the ticket will continue on as long as the American people prefer this.

The American people of course can vote for a different administration, if they like, but the hope is to create a pattern in which we can begin to disentangle the corruption, and we can re-establish the process of making policy on behalf of the people, which I heard your intro up front, I am not a libertarian, I do believe in government, but I believe that good government is very light touch and it's very elegant.

So I do want to see an absolutely minimal governmental structure necessary, and the entire purpose is to create maximal realized liberty. So I don't care about abstract liberty, I want people actually liberated in order that they can pursue what matters to them. I think that's the world we're shooting for, and this process of getting policy, again to focus on the interests and well-being of the people, would result in that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I can get on board with that because with this podcast I've spent a lot of time around libertarians. Prior to learning anything about libertarianism I was a conservative voter in the UK. I had political Stockholm Syndrome, I believed in the two parties ... Essentially, we've got a three-party option in the UK, but it's two primary parties. But I just believed you voted, and you waited four years, five years, and you voted again.

I discussed libertarianism, and I've always struggled with the idea of getting there. So rather than just talking about absolute liberty I'm much more interested in directional liberty, like how do we actually make dents into corruption in government? Into the rigged system? Because to me, that feels like progress, okay? So in terms of your idea, are you talking about essentially establishing a new party?

Bret Weinstein: No, we don't want it to be a new party. Now that's not to say it couldn't end up with some of the elements of a party, but the parties are the problem in our system, and they are nowhere mentioned in our constitution. So they are sort of a necessary evil that has evolved in the context of the constitution, and has now inverted the functioning of the whole apparatus. So no, we don't want to start a party. What we want to do is effectively neutralize the influence of parties. Whether that is actually a party is a semantic argument, maybe. But the objective is not to create a party.

Peter McCormack: Logistically, how does this work in terms of you know taking over the White House? Like logistically in terms of the electoral system, is that how you refer to in the US?

Bret Weinstein: Electoral College?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how does it actually logistically work?

Bret Weinstein: Well it kind of depends what you mean. There are a number of different things and the nitty-gritty logistics actually do work in a standard way. The two big obstacles are one, people's perception that any effort outside of the parties necessarily empowers the greater evil. We should talk about why this plan will not play the spoiler, and will not do the things that people usually imagine.

Then the other issue is ballot access, which is fine, people support the idea, which they do, but does that actually mean that at the point that they get to the voting booth that the names that we advance will be available to them and that they can actually check the box and make this happen. So anyway, those are the those are the important questions.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay. So in terms of getting to the point where you can actually get people to vote, and also you talked about actually does it empower the greater evil, but who is the greater evil? I think Trump's a moron, but I'm not sure I like the idea of a very left president coming into the US either, with what's happening right now. My position is in the last previous election in the UK, we had a choice between a Conservative Party I could not stand and then a very socialist Labour Party under Corbyn, so I just refused to vote. I was like I cannot vote, I don't want either party.

Bret Weinstein: That's a mistake, but I get why it happens.

Peter McCormack: I just could not choose, I physically could not choose. If I had to, I probably would have gone conservative because I'm so scared of Corbyn's socialist view of where the UK should be. But who is the greater evil in this position?

Bret Weinstein: Well, I think you've laid it out properly. I think the thing is it's even wrongheaded to think in those terms. The question really is how on earth do we have a system that gives us a choose your own catastrophe adventure election after election?

That is a conspicuous failure. In this case, the failure is all the more dramatic because not only are these people not going to serve the interests of the public, they're also not capable or inclined towards leadership, which means that even in the middle of a crisis, not only one crisis, but a multi-crisis, we do not see them stepping up and stepping out of their political modality, and even interested in what might actually be going on, they're still playing games.

So this really leaves us no choice and even if this were going to risk spoiling the election, I believe we have no choice. But the plan was constructed very deliberately to eliminate that objection, because that objection dogs those of us who think in these terms every election cycle.

Peter McCormack: No, of course. I think it takes more votes from Biden than it takes from Trump.

Bret Weinstein: Nope.

Peter McCormack: You don't believe that?

Bret Weinstein: Well, let's put it this way, the plan was engineered not to do that, and our first round of data says that one of the two protections clearly works, and the other one it's not even possible for it to fail. So let me run through why it doesn't spoil the election. The plan, first of all, by selecting somebody from the left and somebody from the right and pairing them in a team, draws from both parties. Our data of volunteers who showed up in a 24 hour period, we got something like a thousand people volunteering for this plan.

We polled them as to what party they belong to and we polled them with respect to who they were planning to vote for. What we got back was an almost dead even split between people who would have voted for Trump, people who would have voted for Biden, and 25% of the people who volunteered weren't planning to vote at all.

So this activates people who are dormant in our system, and from the point of view of activating people who weren't dormant, it draws equally. But more importantly, built into the plan is the following thing. As the election approaches, if the ticket does not have a viable path to victory, we pull the plug on it. The election goes back to what it was.

Peter McCormack: Okay, well I think the timing is perfect in some ways because a lot of the conversation, especially being on Twitter, is like how is it our choice right now is between... I say "our", I'm not from the US, but how is our choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? How have we got to this point? It's like Trump... Don't get me started. I've actually made a bet, I've bet $5,000 he's going to lose in the election. But how is it we've got to that point? I think one of the reasons your time is perfect is you're actually offering a viable third option here.

Bret Weinstein: Oh it's viable and we in the US are so used to dysfunctional governance that we've just accepted it. But four months from now we could begin to turn the corner. That's not a long period of time. If people can just imagine that something beyond what they have been told is possible, is possible, this can be done, readily.

Peter McCormack: Have you drafted your guys yet?

Bret Weinstein: Nope, we can't draft them yet. We need more support. The fact is, we have had back-channel communications, I can't say with whom, but I can say nobody has told us to shut this down. Nobody.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so can you do this by the election?

Bret Weinstein: Can we win? There's one thing that is...

Peter McCormack: Well you wouldn't do it if couldn't win, if you didn't believe it.

Bret Weinstein: Well, there are reasons you might, but I wouldn't. No, I would absolutely avoid that. But no, we could win. The thing that we need is we have lots of support, people tell us this, we get lots of correspondence. We get something like 85%, 86% people in support of our plan, which is amazing. But what people don't want to do is they don't want to sign up because they worry about being confronted over issues of being a spoiler. They worry about looking foolish for signing up for a quixotic effort to gain the presidency, and looking like they have low quality discernment, who knows.

What we really need in order to get this to work, is we need people to broadcast it. We need them to sign up in a way that we can see them and count them, and we need them to broadcast it to people who haven't heard it. I'm really hoping actually that the crypto community will understand that we are mission aligned. We are mission aligned because if you think about what it is that the crypto community is attempting to accomplish, that thing is in the public interest. It is a liberating technology, and it is opposed, of course, by things like investment banks.

How would it not be? So when you have the investment banks owning the apparatus that decides whether or not crypto is viable, well of course crypto faces a bigger set of obstacles. So if you want if you want crypto to work because you think it will function better, you can be sure that the vested interests that are getting rich from the system that doesn't work will oppose it, and that they will have too much power on the basis that corruption is the name of the game in Washington. It just seems to me that... Go ahead.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is why wanted to talk to you. We'll narrow it from crypto, we'll say Bitcoin only because, I don't have any interest in any other cryptocurrencies outside of Bitcoin. I don't know how deep you've ever gone into it, but a lot of people within Bitcoin have just got this fundamental belief in Bitcoin can solve bigger issues, and all these other cryptocurrencies they're just like a distraction. Ultimately, they're just smaller currencies that are going to fail. But when I was listening to the interview with Joe, the whole time I was thinking there's a bit missing here.

There's a bit missing here, it's the problems with the money and it's fixing the broken money system. So the question I wanted to really ask you, because I think it's really useful for me to hear an answer to this, but if you've gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and you've looked to the politics, the economics, the technology and you've suddenly got your head around the idea of a fixed supply of money that cannot be manipulated, that cannot be corrupted by government, you get rid of the money printer, a lot of other things start to fall into place with regards to how you view the structure of society.

I'm on the inside, I've been in this for years and I don't understand why perhaps it isn't part of the wider conversation externally. So for me, it'd be really good to know, I mean there's no wrong answer here, but Bret, what is your understanding of Bitcoin? How far down that rabbit hole have you gone?

Bret Weinstein: Well, you've boxed me in a little bit by saying Bitcoin, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Bret Weinstein: So I don't really want to take a position. I don't know enough to take a position on whether it's Bitcoin all the way, or it's a wider conversation. But what I do know is that cryptocurrency is a very key piece of the puzzle with respect to the monetary system. Beyond that, I know that blockchain is a key piece of the solution to many problems that involve authentication. So what I think some of your listeners will know that I was involved in an effort called Game B. Game B is really about figuring out what the clever solutions are to all of the problems that are pernicious and persistent.

Now, there may be an overarching Game B solution to the world's problems, but even if there isn't, many communities have identified a set of problems and a set of solutions. I have the sense, looking at the crypto community, that there are the bare bones of the solution to many of society's greatest problems. But what there isn't yet is the Steve Jobs moment, or the Steve Jobs character. So the way I see this, there was a thing, there was a personal computer and that personal computer, to many of us, including me, was a fantastic liberating device. But what it wasn't was intuitive, the command-line was too daunting for too many people.

Then Steve Jobs and friends figured out the problem was in the metaphor level and that if you had a desktop and it had a trashcan and you had folders, that those things, the mind already knew how to handle them. It didn't matter that the underlying layer didn't look anything like a trashcan, and that your folder was distributed all over your hard disk in fragments that some index knew how to realign when you decided to open the file. That doesn't matter to anybody. What matters is can I sit down with the thing and use it?

So when I approach cryptocurrency I run into the same problems that anybody else who's not dyed-in-the-wool inside the crypto community runs into, which is, it's not simple and it's not intuitive. So what I'm hoping is that the solutions that the crypto community has solved, and the solutions that it can advance, that those things can begin to partner with other efforts that can bring it to a mass audience, so that we can all begin to get why this is the future. I mean if you even look back at things that Bill Gates said about computers, they're preposterous!

Even the people who were deeply in that world didn't know where it was going to go and what the future was going to look like, they couldn't see it. So what we need is basically some teaming up. We need people who understand this deep tech and what it's capable of, teaming up with artists and storytellers and people who make solutions at other levels, so that we can actually begin to leverage this technology before it's too late.

Peter McCormack: It's funny I've been arguing with Bitcoiners this week about UX and saying it's too difficult we've got to make it easier and that people don't care about nodes. It's become a bit of an argument. The defence argument from some of them is that look with Bitcoin you become self-sovereign, you are taking ownership of your money.

There is no bank, there is no middleman, and if you don't take personal responsibility... You kind of have to go through the hoops of learning about personal responsibility and managing your keys, blah, blah, blah. I get some of that, but I'm with you it needs to be a lot easier. There's also this guy, Tom Woods, do you know Tom Woods the libertarian podcast guy?

Bret Weinstein: No.

Peter McCormack: He said in an interview recently, he said the problem with Bitcoin is it doesn't have good promoters yet, people out there evangelizing about it. We've got this guy Pomp who's pretty good, but he's not popular with everyone. So just back to the crypto point, so look, I believe Bitcoin should definitely be part of everything you're doing. I'm not going to debate you crypto versus Bitcoin on this show, there's no need to do that right now, but what I can do and where I can help you is that I can introduce you to the right people who will come to you, and they'll sit down, and they will explain to you why Bitcoin is important, what other cryptocurrencies can and can't do.

They could do that over the right amount of time to give you the right understanding for it to empower what you're doing. My real interest in pushing the Bitcoin narrative is that I've been doing a lot of research into especially this Mnuchin guy, but also looking at the way the government can just print money as they want, and there's no actual consequences to it. There's no consequence to the Fed this year or last year printing $1 trillion this year $3.7 trillion, so far.

All they're doing is they're pushing the problem onto a later generation to solve what's happening now. There is no consequence! You've essentially got the government lined with Wall Street bankers, ex-Goldman Sachs people, you've got at least two or three people from One West where Mnuchin was involved in, following the housing crisis, of essentially foreclosing and forcing Americans out of their homes.

So it is a very corrupt system, but the thing I really like about Bitcoin is that if you move to a Bitcoin based system, is that there is a fixed supply. I don't know how much you know, but there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins and every four years, the daily issuance rate drops in half. That's your monetary policy.

Bret Weinstein: Yep.

Peter McCormack: I think by evangelizing Bitcoin and fixing the monetary system you can also fix the governance system, because the government can no longer be corrupted by money.

Bret Weinstein: No, I agree, this is absolutely central. The fact is what you've described, and what's described in Satoshi's whitepaper is a real physics, a conservation law. A monetary conservation law that then causes whatever is built on top of it, to have to abide by that, which means that you enforce a kind of rationality. So our monetary policy, the fiat currency monetary policy, is completely incoherent.

It is easily utilized by those who are in a position to capture the apparatus, and we're all suffering the consequences of it. So obviously a system in which the conservation laws are built in at the bottom is desirable and the solution to many of the problems we face, even if most people can't see the connection.

Peter McCormack: So let me ask you another thing then, why do you think Bitcoin isn't making it into some of these higher-level conversations? I listen to a lot of different podcasts, and every time I'm like, Bitcoin can be a solution there, why are they not talking about Bitcoin? Do you think it has a reputation problem? Do you think people don't understand it well enough?

Bret Weinstein: I think it has several problems. So let me point to an analogous conversation. It used to be that we had encryption through PGP. Now, PGP was something that a person who cared to encrypt their correspondence could utilize. It wasn't outside of the skill set of many of us, but it never worked because the chances that somebody on the other side of the conversation was not going to be thrown by you're saying, "Can we do this with PGP", was so low that you just kept harming yourself to even engage in it.

Now at the moment, ProtonMail solves this problem. It doesn't solve it completely, but it solves it to an extreme extent by making the ability to use encryption invisible to the user between any two people who have an account, as an account can be free. So the bar to getting people on board has been reduced to, "Hey, can we have this conversation on ProtonMail?" "What's ProtonMail?" "Ah, ProtonMail is a self-encrypting email service housed in Switzerland that you can simply sign up for, and if all you do is email me from your ProtonMail account to my ProtonMail account, we're done."

That's a much lower bar. Now it's still too high, in my opinion, but it's much lower. The number of people that I am now regularly in contact with through ProtonMail is, I don't know, it's many orders of magnitude than I was ever able to get to with PGP. So crypto is looking for that kind of jump, it's looking for some mechanism that takes the underlying system, beautiful as it may be, out of the realm where normal folks have to think about the details.

They just need to know this has been looked at by people who know what they're talking about, it works, it's safe, and it's not very hard for me to engage in. If you can get there, you will jump orders of magnitude in the number of people who are willing to contemplate this. That said, the team of people I'm working with on Unity2020, knows that crypto is the solution to many of the problems that we want to address.

Now we don't have the detailed understanding of exactly how, we are partnering with people who do, but the main team of people who are focused on the political question is not deeply steeped in the tech of crypto. But nonetheless, there is an awareness amongst people who are solution oriented and open-minded, and heterodox that of course this is the way these problems are going to get addressed, and ultimately the hope is to leave a structure that is very elegant that interferes with individuals very little. It won't be zero, but it will be very little, and that's the point. The whole point of governance should be liberate people.

Peter McCormack: I've got a couple of people that you need to talk to on the Bitcoin side of things. After this I'm going to message you and try and get you into seeing them. Okay, so what's next on this Unity2020? I know you talked about this earlier, but like if people really want to help and get behind this, how can they?

Bret Weinstein: Amplify the signal, it's really simple. I think people don't quite understand, maybe I didn't even understand until I had been inside this. The real problem is that the massive level of support that we are experiencing, people hear this idea and again, something like 86% of them thinks, "Oh my god, could that actually work? That's great, we could be there and we could you win the election four months from now. January we could see people that we like, we could see courageous capable patriots in the White House, and know that they were working on our behalf. That just sounds too good to be true."

But it's not too good to be true. The obstacle is we will be dead inside of a month as an idea if the thing doesn't catch on in a way that is visible. It's catching on in people's minds, but we need to be able to see it, which means you have to take a tiny little risk with your reputation of saying, "Yeah, I see that well enough, I'm willing to amplify the signal, I'll retweet it, I'll send people the link to the white paper, I will talk about it."

So if your viewers want this to happen, and my guess is your viewers probably want this to happen at an even higher rate than people chosen at random, if they want it to happen the thing you can do for us right now is amplify what we are saying. Get people into the conversation, and let them know that this is actually possible. Yes, it's a long shot, but this is 2020 and if you were going to pick a year for long shots, this would be the one.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, in some ways it's the perfect timing. It might be a missed opportunity in four years’ time when life may have got relatively back to normal. There's something that resonates with Bitcoin people, they're like "This is our one shot to change the monetary system and if we don't get it right this time, you know if Bitcoin misses this opportunity, we might never get it again." That resonates.

Some people that I know are going to be like, "Oh, you're just trying to make politics better with more politics", but I think if it was focused on changing the monetary system, if it was directionally moving towards liberty, I definitely think there's a bunch of people who could get behind it. I certainly am interested in it, even though I'm not in the States and I don't get a vote, I am certainly interested.

Bret Weinstein: I mean first of all, on your last point, the world has an interest in America not going insane.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Bret Weinstein: America going insane is not good for the planet. So we are in the strange situation, those of us who believe in democracy at a deep level recognize that we hold the interests of the world in our hand. Those of us who actually get in a vote in the election, we are privileged to be able to cast that vote.

But in some sense, our responsibility is to keep America functional, because destabilizing the world is going to be a catastrophe. But I want people to consider what happens if a plan like this does not work. I'm concerned that 2024, I can't even formulate what 2024 means, because the danger to us over the next year is so great. We're talking about Joe Biden, who very probably is going to put Kamala Harris on the ticket...

Peter McCormack: She's a crook.

Bret Weinstein: She's a crook, she's basically... Well let's put it this way, Joe Biden puts Kamala Harris on the ticket, let's say they win. Okay, does Joe Biden last a year or two in office? Or does he predictably step down, making Kamala, who was not elected, who was elected on the ticket, but was not elected as the presidential candidate, putting her in the office of the president. Isn't that effectively like electing the DNC?

Have we not seen the transition of the United States into party rule? That to me is such an upsetting possibility. The idea that the DNC is going to be in charge in the era of COVID-19, this is incredibly foolish. You think the DNC is well-positioned to get us out of the depression that we're headed towards? I can't imagine a worse choice. You got that, and then the alternative we've got...

Peter McCormack: Four more years.

Bret Weinstein: Four more years of Trump, who has completely botched the COVID-19 response. I don't know which is worse! They're both going to be a disaster and do we even get to that disaster in light of the fact that we have a race war that seems to be brewing in the streets, and in every institution. This is just a catastrophe! To me, this is the moment that things are...

If the pilot's dead, you storm the cockpit. I understand that storming the cockpit may be unlikely to work and I understand that storming the cockpit is arguably a very radical thing to do, but if the pilots dead, what else do you do? You storm the cockpit, you figure out if you can fly the thing. So how is it that anybody thinks we're not there, in light of what the two major parties have delivered us?

Peter McCormack: Well look, it's a brave and bold plan. You've got people behind you, right? Rogan's keen, I'm assuming you've talked about this with your brother.

Bret Weinstein: Sure, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So you've got you've got two of the biggest podcasts there behind you. Certainly, I think it's interesting. I guess now it's like logistically seeing how quickly this can move, because it's got to move quick, right?

Bret Weinstein: Well that's the part that we can't do. Literally I'm burning the candle at both ends, I am sleeping very little, my team is sleeping very little, we've got very good people, and there's one thing that we can't do. The one thing is we can't get the groundswell, which exists, to show up in a way that we can count it and point to it, and say, "This is plausible." So please... Go ahead.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I think your catch-22 problem is? It's a similar problem that we were talking about earlier with these kind of these crazy protests, is that you kind of need the leadership now. It's that catch-22. But if you had your two people out there now saying, "Okay, we're ready to do this", you would have those people to get behind, and say, "Okay, I believe in you." That might create the groundswell. I'm assuming that's gone through your mind?

Bret Weinstein: Of course. The problem is, I cannot in good conscience, try to draft people at this stage and it's dishonourable to try. I need to deliver them a plausible path that then explains to the public why it is that they've come on board. In other words, as soon as this is plausible, everybody will understand why they came on board. Until it's plausible, there's just too much danger that these people will experience a backlash that people who don't understand that this plan is built to defeat the spoiler problem will accuse them of attempting to spoil the election.

So you want to see it happen, make it happen, it's on you. We're doing as much as we can, we're right there, we know the pathway there if we can get the groundswell to show up in a place we can count it. So whatever is holding you back, suspend your disbelief and boost the signal, and get this to people who need to hear it.

Peter McCormack: All right, where can they go and read more about this, Bret?

Bret Weinstein: They can go to ArticlesofLiberty.org, that will take you to our whitepaper. Give us your email address, but you can also follow us at Articles of Liberty on Twitter, we will put out interesting stuff every day. You can amplify that signal, point to it, discuss it, challenge it, whatever you do that people understand that this is not a joke. We are very serious about doing this. We would not have come out publicly if we did not know that it was possible.

Peter McCormack: All right, well I wish you the best of luck with it. I will put it out there, I think it's very interesting. Yeah, I'm going to end up... I know I'm going to have more questions after this, but I think is very interesting, I'll put it out there, it feels like a kind of libertarian, it's got a libertarian edge to it, which is very interesting to me, and it will be to a lot of people.

Bret Weinstein: Can I address that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Bret Weinstein: Let's just have an adult conversation for a moment.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I struggle with that.

Bret Weinstein: I don't believe the libertarians have it right, but I do believe they have the key piece of the puzzle right, that liberty is a special value. The reason that it is a special value is that in order to have liberty, you have to have solved the other problems. So while I'm not going to embrace a zero governance solution, because I don't think it will work, the whole purpose of governance should be to liberate people maximally.

So I would say I am aligned with the libertarians in seeking the world that they would like, but mechanistically were somewhere different. But I don't think that that should be a critical disagreement, because I believe we are both headed very much in the same direction.

Peter McCormack: It's the same argument I have, because like I say, I've never gone for libertarian, because I don't believe human nature and the way humans organize themselves, to the point I'm actually reading about, I'm actually learning about kind of human nature and decision-making. I'm trying to understand why we organize ourselves in structures and hierarchies.

I'm not a clever guy like you Bret, but I'm trying to work my way through that because I think if you had that big... I talk about the big red button, because I read it in an article by Scott Horton, if you had the big red button to go back to a stateless situation, firstly it would be very dangerous, we would have chaos and then secondly, I think we would ultimately end up building structures again.

Bret Weinstein: We would.

Peter McCormack: I think it's in human nature.

Bret Weinstein: If we survived.

Peter McCormack: If you survived, yeah. But I think theoretically, I find it very hard to argue against most libertarian arguments because mostly they're talking about like we're going to increase freedom and reduce coercion. It's a very difficult argument to argue against morally, I just think you have to argue against it practically.

So I like the idea of moving directionally towards liberty, breaking down the structures, less government, less tax, less interference, freer markets, I can get on board with that. I think there are other people who feel similar. Well I know there are, because they email me. All right, cool, well look, this is brilliant, I'm going to get this out there. I am going to email you after this, because I think there's a couple of Bitcoin guys you need to talk to. I think they could help you out with this.

Bret Weinstein: Great!

Peter McCormack: I think they'll be interested in supporting this.

Bret Weinstein: Looking forward to it!

Peter McCormack: I wish you the best. It's always good to talk to you Bret, and take care, I'll see you soon.

Bret Weinstein: Likewise Peter, thanks so much!