Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2101 - Bret Weinstein
Uploaded: 2024-02-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2101 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2101 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2101 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Very funny text just happened the other day.
He said, I hope we have something to talk about.
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.
Nope, boring as can be.
It's beautiful, birds chirping, while who knows what lies on the horizon.
I did not watch the Super Bowl, but I got a ton of messages from people that
watched it
that like, what the fuck is going on?
Like the Super Bowl was a gigantic propaganda campaign, and there's Pfizer ads,
and weird
woke commercials, and...
It was bizarre.
I did watch it, you know, 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.
I did not see any of it, so I don't, I wasn't watching the Super Bowl last
night, I was busy.
So I don't know what happened.
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...
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.
Well, I have to say, I was watching it, and I, you know, 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.
This is the Biden thing that they posted?
After his bedtime.
Just like we drew it up, and it's Biden with these, you know, red robot eyes.
Why would they do that?
Just 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.
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,
you know,
in a world where Trump is a political force, they're trying to, you know, they're
trying
to build a game in the same arena, and they're going to get crushed, but that's
why they did
it.
You know, and obviously it's the machine that did it.
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.
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.
Nor do I.
Something weird happened, and we got kicked out.
Yeah, it got taken over by something diabolical, and, you know, what you're
pointing to, it's
the same thing.
It has no sense of humor, right?
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, you know, a funny joke works.
They can't meme because they're not really, you know, 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.
Right.
They just, they have no, they're bad at humor.
Memes is a special kind of humor that has, you know, arisen online, and the
rules of it,
actually, I wanted to talk to you about this.
The rules of it are different from normal humor.
I was trying to phrase something on Twitter today to make it funny, and I was
realizing the
difference between a tweet and, you know, what I've seen you do in your club,
right?
Where in your club, you can actually structure a joke that isn't funny until
four lines in.
Right.
Because your audience isn't going anywhere.
Right.
On Twitter, you need to keep them on board with the tweet so they don't scroll
to the next
one, right?
So there has to be some juice in the beginning in order to get to the punchline.
But the, you know, anyway, I'd be curious what you think about what the
different rules
are for humor in the different contexts, but even just the structural
differences is profound
online.
Well, one of the best examples of how the tide has changed is the Babylon Bee
out onions the
onion.
The onion is essentially dormant.
The onion was like the dominant force of satire forever, and they were so good.
They were so good.
And then something happened where there's like places they can't go.
It's like a runner being limited to like a certain amount of miles per hour
when that
the speed that you're limited to cannot compete with the best runners.
I think it's actually a manifestation of a larger pattern that you can see very
clearly when
it's about humor and satire, and you don't see it as clearly elsewhere.
But when the onion was funny, it was a political force.
And so it had to be targeted by things that it would have opposed, right?
By things that it would have mocked and revealed.
And so the fact that it's been neutered makes perfect sense if you imagine
whoever it is
that was galled by being revealed by the onion.
It doesn't make sense if you imagine that the onion is in some competitive
environment where
it's trying to win market share by being hilarious, right?
Why would you take a hot property like the onion and ruin it?
Well, the question is, are you trying to accomplish something political by
getting rid of a powerful
force, a force of ridicule?
Or are you trying to compete economically?
And we see this in lots of places.
Why would social media platforms embrace censorship, right?
Everybody wants to be in a social media environment that's lively.
It doesn't want one that's heavily constrained.
And yet, these would-be competitors are behaving, they're colluding effectively
to shut out messages
that lots of people want to hear.
Do you think that that's because they're worried about government intervention
and some
sort of repercussions for not adhering to whatever guidelines the government
wants you to do?
I mean, this clearly seems to be the case when you look at, like, the Twitter
files.
The Twitter files, which has gotten almost no press in the mainstream media, or
I should say
the corporate-controlled media, but has been extensively covered by independent
journalists
because it's so shocking.
Because you're seeing the government actively campaign to get factual
information,
removed from Twitter because it's inconvenient.
And most of the social media campaigns, most of the social media programs,
whether it's
the companies, whether it's Facebook or Instagram, or most of them have complied
to a certain
extent.
You know, at least limited the reach of certain things.
Like, there was one that Tucker did famously on COVID.
And whatever government organization that was contacting them, I think it was
the FBI, was
trying to get them to take it down.
And they wouldn't take it down, but they limited the reach substantially by,
like, 50%.
But they had ruled that they cannot take it down because it's factual.
And so there was no, it's not like this was misinformation.
So then it falls into this weird category that we've just recently heard, has
recently entered
the zeitgeist, which is malinformation.
Malinformation is factual information that could be used in a damaging way.
I know.
Heather and I have been screaming about this one since the day that memo
emerged.
It's wild.
Like, what the hell?
You're actually going to put that on paper?
Yeah.
It's wild.
But I think the answer to your question is, we in the public are under the misapprehension
that the game is about money.
And the reason that we're under that misapprehension is that traditionally,
money has been a pretty
good proxy for power.
And what's happened is the game is still very much about power and control, but
money doesn't
mean what we thought it did.
In what way?
Well, A, I think we're being set up that, you know, your ability to store
wealth in money
is dependent on rational policy, right?
If somebody is going to print money in order to get themselves out of a crisis,
then they're
robbing you without ever gaining access to your bank account.
So the value of what you've stored is under somebody else's control.
Now, if you imagine that the power players understand this game, that they know
that, the way I would
put it is this.
Money has two values.
One is as a means of exchange.
Can you buy stuff with it?
And money still works the way it always did from that perspective.
The other is, can you store your wealth there?
And at least with respect to dollars, it used to be the case that you could
store your wealth
in dollars.
But the power players are aware that dollars aren't going to continue to mean
what they
have traditionally meant.
And presumably, they have other strategies for storing wealth in ways that they're
going
to be able to recover it after whatever happens.
I would recommend people, I hope I have the title right.
There's a book called The Great Taking written by an elite Wall Street insider
who reveals certain
changes that have been introduced into the law that most of us are unaware of.
So for example, there's a change in which you think you own a stock in the way
that people
used to own stocks.
But stocks used to actually have a physical manifestation.
You had a sheet of paper that you would put in your safe.
And what has happened is you now own a stock and you can cash out anytime you
like the way
you always could.
But if the entity, the underlying entity, goes bankrupt, then you don't
actually own the
stock.
You actually own an IOU, which can be valueless.
And we don't know this.
In the public, we think we're trading stocks the way we always did.
But what has happened is something that had a physical manifestation in which
you could have
a battle in a court about who owns this piece of paper is now not about a piece
of paper.
It's about a right.
And that right has an arcane structure that most of us are unaware of.
So the question is, at some point, do things that you think you own, do rules
get revealed
to you that tells you that you don't actually own those things anymore and that,
you know,
your financial position is therefore not the one that you thought you were in.
Hmm.
So what do you think this strategy is about?
Like, what do you think?
Power and control.
But do you think that this is the devaluation of money?
What is, what's the end purpose of the devaluation of money?
Well, I, so.
Is it central bank digital currency?
That is a mechanism for the ultimate purpose, which is power and control.
And I should point out that in the way I think about things, I take that as an
assumption.
I'm not arguing that as a conclusion, although I do think you can discover that
that is the
pattern by loo