Bret Weinstein on 3 Biggest Threats, Charlie Kirk, 9/11 & Who (Really) Runs the World

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And you can focus on the things that matter. Today, Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small businesses just getting started. With Shopify, nothing stands. Between your idea and a real business. So go make one. Start your free trial today at shopify.com slash julian. That link is in my description below. Once again, that's shopify.com slash julian. Link in my description below. One of the really cool things about doing this job is every once in a while, someone who, like, I have a lot of friends who are doing this job. I have a lot of friends who are doing this job. for people to put aside not even just stupid disagreements, but you know, human disagreements and come together around a shared humanity. There's something about that. That's really sad to me because we, you know, we're so lucky to live in this country. I feel very fortunate to have been born here. It's such an amazing experiment in so many ways, but I keep seeing ways that we're trying to find new methods to fuck it up. And, you know, then you get the people out here who are like, well, it's going to take a tragedy for us to come together. And I'm like, does it really need to be that? And then you look at the reality and you're like, God damn, when else has something like that happened? You know, I do know. And I think my whole adult life, I've been watching some version of the slowly boiling frog where our, our media environment, our information environment, the academy, everything is, is coming apart and, and becoming captured by something that is hostile to our wellbeing as people, as Americans. And this has created a kind of puzzle for me, which is the circuitry that we need to be human with each other is there. We saw it on 9-11, inorganic as the story we were fed may have been. The reaction of the people was genuine and it was decent. And frankly, it is what I know of people from having traveled all around the world and interacted with people from many different cultures. This is built in. It's not our only mode, but it's definitely there. And if people understood the danger that we are in, in the near term, you know, over the course of the next 15 years, the concern that we have for each other and the willingness to put aside minor differences would be right there at the fore. Mm-hmm. So in some sense, we're being fed entertainment and comfort that keeps us from recognizing that we are in peril. And that is preventing us from having the reaction to each other that we should be having. My, my daily is, I don't really care about your ideology at all. If you're acting in good faith, if you're patriotic, if you believe in just the basics of, you know, the constitution, you and I have almost nothing to disagree about because we're so far off track from that vision of the world. We can march 90% of the way together before we ever get around to anything we disagree over. And yet we're spending all of our time fighting over this minutia that just has no impact, right? The bullshit. The bullshit. We're, we're on a ship at sea that is being actively sunk and we're fighting over what color to repaint it. You know, when something pops up last minute and you need an outfit that just works, that's when I go straight to revolve, man. Think of it as a place where guys who care about how they look shop and do it easily. Revolve man is stacked with elevated essentials and trend forward styles from brands like Ralph Lauren, Solomon, fear of God, essentials, and more. The experience feels curated, not chaotic. You're not drowning in 10,000 results or 50 pages of product. It's edited in a way that makes sense and everything's styled. So you can see how it looks, not just a product on a white background, but the whole outfit, their two day shipping is free and fast. 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And ultra is now trusted by top athletes, entrepreneurs, and engineers around the world. Ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine. New customers can use code Julian to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's takeultra.com, link in my description below, for 15% off with code Julian. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, and I think your career, and there's a lot of people out there who are very familiar with your story and have heard you for a lot of years on some of the biggest shows in the world, including Joe Rogan, to where your career has been a demonstration of the fact that no one can ever really put you in a box. You always have been open to so many different ideologies and thoughts. You've always been open to so many different thoughts. And I kind of considered you, even before the whole COVID thing, when you were blowing the whistle on that stuff early, very bravely, I might add, I always kind of considered you like that, quote unquote, in the good way, not the stereotypical thought leader. You were the kind of guy that people could go to to present evidence and ideas they might want to put forward, and they were going to get a fair hearing from someone like you. And if there's one decent thing to come out of the COVID era, and I do want to talk about those perils that you're referring to in a minute here, but if there's one decent thing to come out of it, I think, you know, while we have seen a lot of people get at each other's throats, there are at least like some more people out there that I can see who have clearly been inspired by guys like you, and the way that you look at things so that we can create, you know, the third frontiers, if you will, instead of the binary system. I don't mean that literally, I mean that like figuratively in a way. And, you know, I think I hope you know that because it does. I know it's got to get really frustrating with some of the things you've been through, but like you being brave and at the forefront of stuff has definitely inspired people to come after you. Well, I appreciate you saying that. I do. My life has played out strangely where I keep finding myself in the right place at the right time to do some kind of work that I think is important. And I have a characteristic that I think almost nobody has, which makes me right for the job. It's the characteristic that if I could push a button and distribute it across the population, I would do so. And the characteristic is not being persuaded by social cues. All right. If you're trying to figure out what's true, then the fact that a whole bunch of people tell you you're stupid for thinking X is not actually evidence. It doesn't show up in the matrix of things that you should be processing. And there are lots of reasons that people might try to convince you that you're being foolish that aren't about evidence at all. So it's not that I don't feel the pushback. I do. And I dislike it intensely. But it doesn't persuade me of anything because I know from basically from the analytics and from developmental experience, I know that the way I usually say it is every great idea starts as a minority of one. That means that there's a moment at which you know the thing, everybody disagrees with you, and they are wrong. All right. So the fact that everybody disagrees with you can't possibly be evidence, because if you accepted that, then there's no possibility of progress of discovering the new thing that was hard to see at first. So the developmental experience that allows you to remember that at the right moment is very rare. And I guess my history had enough of it that when I stood my ground early on, stories actually that go back before Evergreen, when I stood my ground, it took time. I went through hell and then, there was a vindication later. Do you have moments along there where you question yourself every day. That's the thing that people don't get is that the courage of your convictions is not a magic property. It comes from doing a kind of work where you check in with why do I think this? Okay, there are a ton of people telling me that I'm nuts for even contemplating this. Why do I think they are actually making an error and that I'm on the right track? And you go back and you go through, you know, here, I'll give you an example. Building seven is the smoking gun of the 9-11 story. Something did not go according to plan with respect to building seven. And so we have the anomaly of a building that was not hit by an airplane that collapses due to a fire that should not have been capable of bringing it down. There is an explanation that would solve that problem. That's one I've hypothesized for a long time. Well, that building had a tremendous amount of important stuff in it, including secret stuff, CIA stuff. Maybe the building was wired so that it didn't fall into enemy hands the way, you know, a Black Hawk helicopter is wired so that if it is lost on the battlefield, it can be destroyed and not fall into enemy hands. That would explain building seven. But then the problem is, you know, the building is not in a state of emergency. So, okay, A, why didn't they own up to that? But B, now you've got the physics of Towers 1 and 2. The physics of Towers 1 and 2, those aren't standard controlled demolitions. Controlled demolitions start at the bottom, not the top. So something is not a controlled demolition in the sense that we're familiar with it there. On the other hand, why do these buildings fall the way they do? If they were truly compromised, by some combination of the airliners, which should not have significantly compromised them, and the fires, which should not have significantly compromised them, but let's say some calculation was off in both towers and, you know, the dice came up, snake eyes or whatever, you would not expect them to collapse completely. You would not expect them to collapse anywhere near free fall speed. They're falling into this incredibly robust structure that is designed to resist exactly this. So the point is, okay, I can see an explanation for Building 7 that doesn't involve the entire story being a lie. That makes me question the entire story. But then I go back to the entire story and it's like, okay, how many things do I know about the rest of the story that's simply never added up? That's right. The foreknowledge, the physics of Buildings 1 and 2, you know, the thermite in the dust, the recycling of the steel, all of the things that the anomalies that we talk about reinforce my sense. So, you know, how often do I go through that? Every time I think about 9-11. Yeah. And I think it's with any idea too. Like, obviously that's, I want to come back to that because it's a pretty important one at the moment right now, of course, and has been for the last 25 years. But, you know, I always look at the world as best I can in like the extremes, right? So if a pendulum swings way too hard one way, the law of physics says it has to swing really hard the other way. And the farther apart those pendulums are, the more violence there is to create equilibrium. And the way you put it was really cool, which is you're like every, you said it better and I'm going to say it, but every new idea starts with one person believing in it. Every great idea starts as a minority of one. Okay. Yeah. Smarter way than I put it. But everyone hears that and it's like, yeah, that clicks. The danger of that can be like if you just get really convinced of something and not to pick on him, but like Terrence Howard was really, really convinced that one times one does not equal one. And then he might have made some really smart leaps after that with other things. But if the bottom floor is already wrong, the next leaps you make are compromised. So when I ask you that question, it's like you think about everything, obviously, like you were thinking about a lot of things. You've touched a lot of different ideas in your life. You know, have you had moments though where you start to play with an idea saying, hey, this might actually be the total opposite of the narrative and you start to build evidence on that. And then after a while, you're like, you know what? You actually might have this one right. Have you had examples like that before? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to remember what they are because the point is you have some moment where you think you're onto something and then you realize, oh, I'm not onto something and it doesn't loom large in your thinking going forward. Maybe given time, I'll come up with some examples. But yeah, happens all the time. But I would also point out something else. I don't mean to be, you know, super self-focused on my story, but I know my story better than I know anybody. And so I know what came from it that contributes to the weird places I end up. One of them is that what I train to do is to study complexity, literally the most complex phenomena in the known universe, including things like tropical forests. The table stakes for studying complexity is a kind of extreme analytical humility. When you walk into a tropical forest, you need to know there isn't anybody on earth who knows how it works. We're not even close. We know some things about it for sure, but it's a tiny fraction of what you would want to know. And so you can either walk into that forest and you can say, well, it's hopeless. Where would I even begin? Right? We don't have the basics here. Or you could say, I wonder if I can figure out this piece, in spite of the noise that dominates the system. It's the exact opposite of what you have in a physics or chemistry lab, right? In the laboratory, you purge all the noise so that the only phenomenon on that lab bench is the one you're interested in to the extent you can purge everything else. And if you do it right, it's elegant. That's off the table. You're not going to do that in a tropical forest. You're not going to do that trying to understand the behavior of some creature. So the toolkit, that comes from doing high-quality analytical work under rotten conditions, is where I come from. I feel at home doing science in rubber boots with a machete. I like it. Right? So when I get to something like a polluted narrative environment around important historic events, and I'm dealing with some sort of claims that may be deceptive, it's not identical to walking into a tropical forest. But, you know, you walk into a tropical forest, there are lots of creatures there trying to deceive you, so you can't find them and eat them, that sort of thing. Or, you know, you've got plants that are putting chemicals into the environment in order to distort the physiology of herbivores so that the herbivore will move on to some other plant. You've got all kinds of mechanisms that are not straightforward. And becoming at home with those things so that you can see past them and identify the pattern, it's a skill that I prize, and I'm glad to have taken it from a realm as marvelous as biology into a realm as unpleasant and poisoned as our discourse over important events. Yeah. But it is an important time to have voices like that, to where you can take, you know, the expertise you built in something else your whole life and put it to use to wear everyone from an intellectually curious 15-year-old to someone who has watched things really fall off from where they were, maybe, who's 65. That kind of band can hear you and listen to you and hash out their ideas with the things you're bringing up. That's a pretty cool thing. And you've also been a part of so many, a range of conversations. We're sitting here talking about 9-11, but, like, you're part of the COVID conversation. You were part of the, like, conversation on campuses really at the forefront of that and stuff. It's like you've really had quite a diverse repertoire here of things that you've had to get really deeply involved in for sure. Well, it's strange. You know, I'm not a believer in the supernatural. I don't think fate exists. You don't think fate exists? Yeah. I don't think fate exists, but I've also noticed that if you play the game as if fate exists, you end up punching about above your weight class. That's an interesting, I would call it a fact. It's at least been a fact in my life. And so, yeah, I keep finding myself, you know, COVID, perfect example, right? I went, you know, I became known publicly. I developed a voice in public over the woke revolution, which I was very well positioned to talk about because I was a college professor at the most university in the country. I was also a biologist teaching students, a wonderful community of students that I knew very, very well. So I was just in the right spot to discuss that. You're teaching them gender didn't exist though, right? Quite to the contrary. Yeah, no. And so, you know, people who only casually understood that story may not realize that there was a revolt of students with me at the center of it. None of those were my students, not a single student that I had ever met was leading that revolt. my students defended me and they defended heather and it was yeah heather uh co-host of the podcast but the point is okay they literally came for me right they were chanting my name trying to get me fired for a reason that put me dead center which caused me to have a public voice but then covet happens well covet's a very different beast but who better than an evolutionary biologist or even better than that a pair of married evolution evolutionary biologists to talk about this issue because you know you could be better trained in virology but if you're better trained in virology then you're not going to be well versed in epidemiology or the you know phylogenetics or any of their you know i studied bats in my graduate work where you have bats on the you know the front page of the newspaper so the point is you were born for it apparently i was i was steered right into the center of that one too and you know okay presumably that's just luck but um but at some point i think you just have to accept the most fundamental obligation that each of us are hand did and frankly i don't even think this is a human thing for every creature that has ever existed the only question is what is the best way to play the cards you have been dealt at every instant of every day of your life what is the best way and that works perfectly well as a guiding principle for a living human being you have cards they may not be fair but you're supposed to play them as best as you can play them every instant of your life and as long as i keep getting steered into the center of really important questions i'm going to keep i'm going to keep playing my cards um so far they've turned out to be the right ones i'd say so where did you have any idea when you went to do that podcast in june 2020 with joe rogan which is where i mean it aged incredibly well where you kind of laid out the origins of covet as best you could see it as a literal evolutionary biologist like kind of kind of your lane right here you know that was one of the most shared podcasts i ever saw on all my group texts of people like you gotta listen to this and it resonated with many people because you laid out a brilliant case it also brought you unbelievable blowback did you have any idea the volume that that blowback was going to be when you went to record that yes and no um i would say one of the most underrated processes is development we are the product of our developmental experiences and because i had been through several developmental experiences that were relevant before that it didn't catch me completely off guard because you know i'd been at the tip of the spear before on the other hand the pay grade of those who wanted this story shut down was a good deal higher than i'd ever dealt with before and so the nature of the pushback and the close quarters from which it came and it was every time it uh it teaches you what you need to know about the way the world actually works but i would i would actually use it to surface a a principle that i think everybody needs to be aware of and i i'm struggling to figure out what the name of it should be but in each of the battles that i've been involved in there is a period of time in which the questions at least are visible to anybody with the courage to look for them but the asking of those questions creates a disproportionate punishment and i really do think of it as an a punishment something wants you to suffer for having given voice to these things because it doesn't want them voiced right the whole channel got demonetized got demonetized and was demonetized for many years um so the what is what is that period where the questions are obvious if you want to look but something is delivering punishments to keep as few people looking as possible to make examples of anybody who dares speak these things out loud so it's kind of like the overton window but in time so i think of it as maybe you know the overton gap something like that the period of time where you cannot speak the obvious because of what will come back at you if you do now i would say just coincidentally this seems to have broken for the october 7th attacks yesterday news oh right news emerged that benjamin netanyahu had been personally warned i think by the uae that something major was coming and he did nothing about it you and i have known that for a long time though right exactly it's like okay i get it that it's the particular detail who warned him his news but he was warned by many people right including the egyptians this has been long known so the point is well what you know okay now we can publicly talk about it now we're talking about what sort of a terrible human being benjamin netanyahu is where you know if you tried this two years ago you know they'd call you an anti-semite and if you were jewish they'd call you self-hating you know so okay learn the lesson there's a period of time in which totally reasonable questions are totally unforgivable and you will be punished for asking them and then at some point it breaks and everybody will be asking them okay we are in that phase with respect to charlie kirk's murder charlie kirk's murder is not a slam dunk case for the prosecution of tyler robinson maybe tyler robinson did it but it's anything but slam dunk from where the public sits yet we are in the place i can tell you because i am now being raked over the coals about my unforgivable beliefs about this but we are in the place where we cannot yet talk about it right it's taken 25 years to get through that gap for 9 11 where people can talk about this openly i remember the pushback that people used to get for voicing any sort of concern that the story didn't add up or it didn't account for certain things so it's time that we got wise and we started realizing that yes it is true if you say dumb things people will push back sure but it will 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you know there's direct control over the media there's uh nudging and everything in between i don't know what how it's done but when powerful forces engage in uh behavior that is hostile to the public's interest and wishes not to be known for doing so it arranges pushback that affects that period of time we have to get wise to the existence of it and so when you see a dozen powerful people come after somebody for saying something that they claim is simply stupid you have to ask you know is it worth it like really all that firepower over saying something dumb yeah that doesn't that doesn't seem reasonable and i think if i'm remembering correctly einstein i hope this isn't apocryphal i think this is something einstein actually said uh same pronunciation i got that down oh yeah weinstein and einstein oh that's good i'll have to use that um but i think what he said is some there there was like a publication something like 50 physicists against einstein or something like that and uh when was this uh i don't know sorry to put you on the default find it yeah 50 something or others against einstein i'm not even sure it was about physics but we'll find out here in a second but einstein's response was if i'd been wrong one would have been enough right and it's kind of like that you needed an army yeah right you needed an army that that tells me i might not be wrong about something yeah yeah yeah it's like you're over the target now you actually just did oh thief got it albert einstein famously responded to the 1931 critical book 100 authors against einstein by saying why 100 it was 150. wow if i were wrong one of them would have been enough published in germany as hundert autoren gegen einstein it featured essays by various critics attempting to discredit his theory of relativity partly driven by scientific disagreements and rising ideological hostility einstein meant that scientific truth is determined by empirical evidence and logical proof not by a polar majority vote a single valid counter example or correct refutation is all it takes to disprove a wrong theory so that is a lesson i was imprecise but not inaccurate yeah no you were you were actually conservative on it but yeah yeah there's even more but you know the the charlie kirk thing you and i were talking about this quickly right before camera and i wanted to save it for camera like it is one of the most toxic online environments i have ever seen and i've i mean i don't need to tell you i've seen some pre-toxic ones over the past six seven years especially and you know at the end of the day it was someone who was killed and they were killed in some way for their political beliefs referring to charlie kirk which in america just goes against everything we're we're based on and now it feels like the people who at least want answers for him and answers for the future so that things like this maybe don't happen which seems like a really low bar but you know they're being shut down in many ways and then it turns into this kind of throwing tomatoes at both sides and i know you just did a sit down i haven't seen this yet but you had viva lefrey and jimmy doron talking about this i i don't know you know i had a couple people in here as well but it was a very friendly nice back and forth i don't know how you took that afterwards if it's just kind of like we're going to be in an endless loop here or you feel like someone's actually going to win this argument and change the trajectory of the case like what do you think's happening with the public discourse here um i think we're battling through the period where we can't yet speak the obvious about charlie i mean you can say it but the pushback is incredible um and i would just point something out let's say you've got the tyler robinson obviously did it and you're stupid and don't understand dna evidence if you think anything else you've got that group and then you've got the various conspiracy theorist is probably a fair term what they should be offering is hypotheses that's what a theorist does the distinction is incredibly important and most people don't get it so we come back to that in a second but you've got those two camps let us say there is vital importance in figuring out who killed charlie kirk and why it's much less important if it was tyler robinson acting alone if tyler robinson was acting alone based on some malformed leftist value system then he altered history and robbed us of a potential president certainly a very powerful and influential voice somebody who opposed our entry into war in iran somebody in a position to change the trajectory of the country like few people are but it's kind of a senseless killing right it doesn't mean anything it's sad but it robbed us in the same way that if charlie had died of a heart attack it would have robbed us on the other hand if powerful forces killed charlie kirk because they thought they would advance their cause then we have an obligation to figure out who those forces are and in what way they want their cause advanced that charlie would have stood in the way of because this is the most anti-democratic thing there is you're taking somebody with influence off the map you know it's a tragedy from the point of view of charlie's death from the point of view of his family but it's also a tragedy for the west and for democracy irrespective of what you thought of him this is not how we settle these things we settle them in conversation we settle them at the ballot box we do not settle them with the bullet so the disproportionate importance of figuring it out if it was a powerful force that presumably got what it wanted that means that we have to be extra careful to make sure we have left no stone unturned the amount of justice that there is to be done in simply convicting tyler robinson if he acted alone is small it's not going to fix anything the amount of good that there is to be done if we figure out that something larger wanted charlie dead and took action and made sure it happened the amount of good there is to be done in making sure that the perpetrators don't get what they wanted that's a tremendous amount of good so there's an asymmetry in these things and you know i'm pretty persuaded that the story of tyler robinson acting alone doesn't make sense it's not satisfying i agree and the fact that all of the people i'm going to say something nasty i don't understand why this story turns smart people stupid right built into the idea that it was not tyler robinson acting alone that hypothesis requires that there will be plenty of evidence against him right the idea that he's the patsy means that there will be evidence you know when you frame somebody the meaning of the term to frame is to paint a picture so that people will reach the conclusion that is in the picture right so it is not persuasive that yeah there's a bunch of evidence against tyler robinson the question is how consistent is that evidence does that evidence add up like a normal story or does it fall apart on scrutiny right that's the question and are there other things that aren't being pursued were there drones i think so i think i've seen evidence is it as clear as i would like it to be no could i be persuaded that the evidence is better explained by something other than drones sure could there have been drones there that were irrelevant yes but if there were drones there that were irrelevant then it should be all all of our obsession to figure out whose drones they were and whether they saw anything right we should all agree on that and the people on the other side should agree if they say those weren't drones those were birds can we at least agree that if they are drones that it is then a very important fact of the case and something that needs to be pursued no because then they feel like they're giving up some ground and if they give up an inch they're giving up a mile it's crazy right and so my point is i'm just trying to behave in a hypothetical deductive way in other words i'm trying to do this in a scientific way i see evidence that isn't accounted for i'd like to know what accounts for it maybe it all gets explained away maybe tyler robinson's story is clearer than i think it is fine i don't want i i don't i would like tyler robinson to be the explanation because frankly it's the least bad explanation on the table so i would like that to happen but i sure don't want to see the whole thing dismissed on the basis that tyler robinson acted alone if that's not what happened precisely because somebody had an incentive to kill charlie if they killed charlie and they got what they wanted then the point is that incentivizes this behavior going forward and we can't 100 percent and unfortunately we've done that again and again incentivizing it because we've seen major assassinations thinking of the ones in the 20th century specifically that happened that all have severe problems with them where there was a quick narrative that was brought out by the government and people were told this is what it is and the story really sorry we lost them let's move on and then some somehow something like that continues to happen so we've already seen your theory literally play out Charlie's just another notch on the belt of it unfortunately yeah I am going to correct you though because frankly the difference between hypothesis and theory is fundamental and it is because we misuse the term theory that we we make ourselves vulnerable okay can you explain that a little more 100 and mind you we all kind of know it because we've all heard you know Darwinism is just a theory right and then somebody will say that word doesn't mean what you think it does the fact that Darwinism is a theory that's as close to saying it's a fact as we ever get in science okay you've heard that now the problem is that scientists do not maintain that discipline over these words they only maintain that discipline over this one question is Darwinism a fact no it's a theory but that means every competing hypothesis has fallen right so the way to think of it is theorists do not produce theories they produce hypotheses if a hype and ideally if you're trying to explain something you want to produce every single hypothesis that could possibly account for it and then you falsify them one by one you scientific method yes yeah so you have a theory only at the point that every hypothesis has fallen but one and that one has withstood substantial tests and that doesn't mean it couldn't be overturned later it can be but you get a theory only as a result of a single hypothesis maturing into that state you should never have more than one Theory at a time okay the theory is the last hypothesis standing and the reason that I draw this distinction is because when I say when I offer a hypothesis like hypothesis Charlie Kirk killed by an armed drone I'm not telling you this is what I believe I'm telling you this is something capable of explaining what we saw test it it needs to be tested it can be one of a hundred different explanations many of which are so foolish you can falsify them yourself a few of them there's enough evidence that they remain standing for a while but I'm just saying the philosophically the philosophy of science that allows you to do this work regularly requires you to pay attention to the status you've got an idea an idea can be formulated as a hypothesis if it is a hypothesis it makes predictions those predictions allow you to falsify it and you are not responsible for putting a hypothesis on the table that turns out not to be true because it's actually your responsibility scientifically to put all hypotheses on the table that's right yeah and and I think that that has been as you say systematically shut down continually to this point now we're a year out so to be be interesting to see if is the number three years is it four years is it five how long after the trial after something's already been done that's perhaps irreversible someone found guilty and maybe execute or something like that is it going to be like oh yeah remember all those questions you were asking in October 2025 they're actually they were valid a couple of them were yeah oh surprise surprise yeah sorry now you you also knew Charlie though yeah and you were telling me before camera so I don't want to say anything because I I'm assuming some of that was off record until you tell me otherwise but as far as like what is publicly available that you're comfortable saying like how well did you know him and were you working with him on anything yeah I'm comfortable talking about it um if I I believe that in talking about our behind the scenes correspondence that I'm doing what Charlie would want done um I of course don't know that but I'm I wouldn't I wouldn't say anything that I would think Charlie wouldn't want me to say Charlie and I did know each other we did not know each other well I feel some sorrow about that because when I first became aware of Charlie I misread him I thought he was sort of a dyed-in-the-wool standard Republican you know taking Glee from the fact that the left was melting down and ready to you know drag anybody fleeing the left you know into the Republican Party that he might that's not who Charlie was Charlie was actually a very decent guy he was very decent to me in spite of the fact that I uh come from the left and was not about to join the Republican Party um he was just he was a very sweet genuine person he was also extremely helpful in making the rescue the Republic rally that I was one of the the founders of happen he uh he backed us he was actually supposed to be our closing speaker but he got laryngitis and his doctor forbid him so close to the uh the election to tell people what that was who aren't familiar with that but um rescue the Republic was a rally that we held on the National Mall to gather the coalition of politically homeless people Tulsi Gabbard Bobby Kennedy me Heather Jimmy door a long list of uh prominent people Matt taibi and we basically put on a a show for lack of a better term on the Capital Mall uh where we gathered people from around the country and you know it served a number of purposes one it sort of announced that there was this coalition of people who were dissatisfied with the way Washington ran I believe we broke January 6th syndrome where people did not want to do any protesting in Washington because of the concern that somebody was going to create a January 6th like moment we successfully held this thing they were you know there was no violence there was no uh you know it was a peaceful assembly First Amendment good demonstrate yeah we exercised our First Amendment rights and he was going to be a speaker at this that's interesting yeah he was gonna he was going to be our closing speaker and he was really excited to do it he had uh financially backed us uh we would not have pulled off the event without his help and uh his doctor forbid him to speak because of his laryngitis and so he he backed out last minute but was still very enthusiastic yeah made it happen yeah yeah but anyway Charlie and I you know so like I said I wish I had figured out who Charlie was earlier but I did figure it out and he basically drafted me in his quest to convince the president with whom he was very close of the danger of the mrna covet shots and so I was helping Charlie understand why that platform is so dangerous so that he could convey to the president hey we've got a real problem here these shots need to be pulled off the market we need to deal with the vast number of vaccine injured we need to start figuring out how to help these people we need to deal with you know people who've lost their kids and and other terrible things um you got a doctor over here shaking his head at every single thing you say up and down well very interesting once you've traveled amongst these people you realize that it's a um a cryptic tragedy of immense proportions um so anyway Charlie was very committed to convincing the president of the danger of these things and he needed my help to deal with the scientific questions what is it about the platform that makes it inherently dangerous so that it's not just the kobe shots anything you build on the mrna platform is going to do the same thing and he needed to understand that so anyway we partnered and and I must say I've now made it public again because I thought uh Charlie would have wanted me to but um Charlie and our private back and forth said something that still means a great deal to me he said um you know I congratulated him on on one of the early successes and he said that we were doing the Lord's work together which you know for a devout guy to say that to a you know materialist evolutionist um was was powerful you know and I and I I don't think he's wrong I think of these things in different terms I don't think of a deity but anyway so he said that and he also we had a we had a back and forth about uh the potential of war with Iran and you and he did yeah and I've now made my my chat with him public and he said that he was spending two full days in the White House trying to convince the president not to do it Joe Kent does back that up as far as I know yeah and I said something to the extent or to the effect that um these maniacs are steering our country into grave danger and we absolutely have to stop them for the good of the United States and the Israelis the people and the Israelis and the Israelis I do not think this is in Israel's interest I think I agree with you they have uh fallen under the spell of some absolutely terrible people who um I don't have any reason to think that these people value human life, that they see the long-term well-being of either their population or our population as important. I remember that Netanyahu has his syringe from his supposed COVID vaccine sitting on his desk like a freaking trophy. So weird. Yeah, so, okay, this guy oversaw the vaccinating of the entire Israeli population, or nearly so, with this very dangerous shot, and Netanyahu is still proud of this fact? Something's wrong. And anyway, Charlie agreed with my assessment that basically for the good of Israelis and Americans, we should not be going to war in Iran. And then, you know, I think I did use the term maniac. We need to stop these maniacs. Who were the maniacs, as you thought of them, besides, like, Netanyahu and some of the world leaders, if you will? I don't know. I wish I did. I would say one of the ways that I do this kind of work is I try to figure out what object best explains the phenomena that I can see. So in the same way that you might see, you know, a planet slow down in its orbit. Right. Think, well, I can't see anything out there, but there's something with a lot of gravity to it, right? I look for those things. And one thing that has made it very much easier for me to understand the world I live in is I have downgraded my belief in nations. It's not that I, you know, I am patriotic to my nation and maybe more importantly to the West, of which it is the originator and the exemplar. But I think. We pay too much attention to lines on the map. And we assume that the things that are taking action are patriotic to some patch of dirt. And I don't think that's how it works. I agree. We're dealing with elites from many different patches of dirt. And they have alliances we know nothing about. And they fail to have allegiances that you would expect them to have to their nominally their own populations. So anyway, I think of them as mafias. And I think. I think. I think. I think. This is just a literal description. It's a good take. They're criminal. They're organized. They're very powerful. And if you start thinking of them that way, then you stop scratching your head over, you know, why they would do certain things. Because, of course, mafias will do things that nations wouldn't. So anyway, who? I don't know. But I do think there is something that controls our nation. That is clearly at best indifferent to the interests of Americans. I think it's probably more like hostile. But it's at best it doesn't it doesn't give a shit about us at all and that we should act accordingly, that we should not expect it to be trying to help us and that when it tells us, oh, you know, for your own safety, you're going to have to be injected with this, you know, magic goo. The answer is, well, you know, somebody on the street walked up to me and said, I've got magic. You should take it for your own good. I wouldn't give it. I wouldn't give it a second thought. I turn them right down. And the point is, when somebody disguises that as a public health intervention, my feeling is the same. Who the hell are you and what have you done that demonstrates, you know, you even want me to live longer. Right. So, yeah, I don't know who. But I think you can you can just see our policy is not about the well-being of the public. It's about other things at our expense. And we need to solve that problem immediately because, you know, for a while we can rest on the laurels of past generations. The bridges don't fall down immediately. But the you can just see over the course of even five years, you can see the degradation, the quality of life in any American city. That's telling you something. Right. So. So anyway, yes, I wish I knew who. Well, this is actually a good place to bring it back to something you said at the very beginning that I put a pin in where you were talking about these perils that we're facing over the next 15 years. And obviously some people can hear some of the things you said already and draw some clear lines on on on some of those things. But like not to dumb it down or anything, but if you had if it's possible to answer it this way, if you had like the three to five kind of clear list of key concerns that you think if they are not. If they are not addressed correctly by us, the people, we could see a threat to our way of life in the West or, you know, a world that we don't recognize in 15 years. What would those things be? Well, you could build a pretty long list and it would be nice to. Yeah, if you want to go longer than three to five, go ahead, please. Let's say my top priorities would probably be corruption. I don't mean that in some sort of garden variety way. I think our entire system has been corrupted and that we are now routinely targeted with somebody else's profit of one kind or another in mind. Clearly, there is no bar to the dispensing of medications that make us crazier and sicker and more dependent. And sure. There's no interest in discovering when we've done that. So it's obviously not an accident. But I would just say across the board, we have a system that on paper involves the consent of the governed, which means as frightening as it is that we decide for ourselves how we are to be governed. And that system has been unhooked. I don't know what all the mechanisms are. Mechanisms seem to include election tampering. A very common. Various kinds. They seem to involve things like assassination. They may involve blackmail. But whatever it is that causes our governmental structures to do things that they would not do if they were under our control ought to be our top concern. Because at the moment, we're on a ship headed where we don't know, headed into what kind of waters we can't say. We can't turn it around. We're just at the mercy of whatever has taken control. The second thing is subordinate to that, I guess. But it's the question of, well, in evolutionary terms, I would say the human beings are built really like all creatures for lineage against lineage competition. Lineage against lineage competition. Yeah. So populations displace each other. That's the evolutionary battle that is at the bottom of what takes place in a forest, right? Backed by history on that. Yep. Now, the point is people play that game, too. And I would say the displacement of one population by another is the way human evolution has worked until the invention of the West. And the invention of the West, which I place at the founding of the United States. Mm-hmm. I don't mean that. Obviously, there are rudiments that go back to ancient Greece and all of that. But the modern West is based on a different premise, which is that what lineage you come from actually doesn't count. It literally counts for nothing. And we're going to partner with each other based on the fact that partnership is productive, that it creates wealth. And what do you bring to the table? Right. What you bring to the table and what I bring to the table. And if we put them together, we have a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. That is lightning in a bottle, right? Class movement, the ability to flip on a dime generationally. Right. And here's the thing. If you build that structure, you say, ignore, you know, I'm not telling you that pretend we're all alike, that our backgrounds aren't interesting. Maybe they are. Maybe it has interesting things to do with, you know, you can taste various cuisines and we can mix them together and do fusion. But at some level, who you are doesn't count. It doesn't get you a pass. It doesn't, you know, cause you to be held back in any particular way. You're just you have access to the market and you bring your goods there and you try to make wealth that makes us all richer. Right. And that is the reason that in the aftermath of the founding of the United States, the idea was just contagious. People who saw how well it worked either wanted to come here and be part of it or they wanted to do it at home because it's just. It's just a better way of living. And my concern is it is a system that lends itself towards the peaceful resolution of conflicts because war is expensive. But we are now facing something that wants us at war. I think the campaign in Iran is as clear a case as we've seen. seen the war in Iraq. was pretty obvious if you knew where to stand, but in this case, who exactly was clamoring for a war with Iran? This was not done for the American people, right? The rationalization that we were initially given, that this was to deny Iran a nuclear weapon, fell apart within months. So the point is, our system is an alternative to the battlefield, to displacing each other, one lineage against another, which is the nature of human history until modern times. That view of the West, where every person is entitled to human dignity, where we create wealth together and ignore our populations of origin, is the only game in town. If you want humanity to be here 300 years from now, this is the way it has to be. We have to stop trying to displace each other from this planet because our weapons are too powerful, and we're too interconnected. So I would say we have to fix the corruption, and we have to figure out how to get off this treadmill where we're constantly fighting the next war for reasons that none of us can explain to each other. Before I get to the war part, because that's a really important thing, and I don't want to lose that in here. Could you see why, especially in 2026, across the population, people are even more cynical than ever about the ability to uproot corruption, when you have now seen the government release half of the Epstein files that they were legally required to release? They've held back the other half illegally without any consequences, and none of the people who clearly, at the very least, should be investigated and under American rights, I guess, presumed innocent before proving guilty. They're not even being charged. Many of them are not even being questioned or investigated. People are going to be the same people that are part of an elite class that have paid off and pillaged our society into the current state that it is. Could you see why people are very cynical about something like this getting fixed when we're having that moment right now and nothing's changing? A hundred percent. And I hope that people can hear me, especially Gen Z, which I know I'm an unlikely person to be listened to by Gen Z, but I think they should listen up because I'm trying to help them not die in a desert somewhere. You got the Gen Z haircut. You had good flow. Good Gen Z flow. They're going to like that. Excellent. It's a compliment. Appreciate that. So, yes, look, let's just start with what I've learned. Okay, I backed President Trump for re-election. One of the reasons that I backed President Trump for re-election, A, I don't think I had a choice. I think the alternative was apocalyptic. It was basically a finger in the eye of the Constitution, right? Kamala Harris was basically being installed by a party. It was a vote for party rule. She was an empty suit. That was an attack on the rule of law. Her administration, by the way, was literally trying to censor you and other people. Like, they came directly after you. A hundred percent. So I don't think we had any choice but to vote against that. And I would vote for President Trump again. But my rationale, not a rationalization, my rationale at the time was that, in part, President Trump was at least a real guy, which means he can be hauled in front of Congress and forced to answer questions. He can be impeached. He's a real human being to inhabit the office. He's qualified to do it. And, more importantly, or equally importantly, no new wars. I specifically voted for no new wars. And, what was top of mind for me in voting against new wars? Iran. Because I knew the neocons have wanted war with Iran since 9/11. Or before then. Before then. We became aware of it in the aftermath of 9/11. But the point is, it was the last one on the list. And so I knew that there was a force pushing us towards this war. And I knew that it saw the window, the opportunity closing. And I voted for the guy who said he wasn't going to do it. And next thing you know, it's happened. And many other things that I thought I had, you know, yes, he's closed the border. On the other hand, I was involved in bringing people's awareness to the huge number of illegals who crossed our southern border and were transported into the interior by the Biden administration. He was supposed to remove those people. They're not supposed to be here. That's not an anti-immigration stance. Right. Right. But he was supposed to remove them. And that has not happened. And in fact, inside of the last couple of weeks, we've been told that their plan is to remove the worst of the worst. Does that mean that they're going to leave the best of the worst and I'm supposed to be happy about it? I mean, look, what the hell are they telling us? Why did they surrender on this? So I am very disappointed in this presidency and I feel betrayed over it, having advocated for the president, though I still think we had no choice. But nonetheless, the point is, what lesson did I get and what lesson did all sorts of people who, like me, were not Republicans, but joined forces in a coalition to change things once and for all, to drain the swamp? What did we learn? Well, you're not going to solve this problem by working through the duopoly. The duopoly, the uniparty, that thing is owned one end to the other and there's no solution inside of it. Now, I do think that there's something that we can do and I'll get to that in a second. But my point is, I think, among other things, you've asked who is doing this to us? I don't know. Some mafia something, some organized crime, the name of which we don't know. Could be more than one too, right? It probably is. It almost certainly has to be. And I'm sure they partner when it makes sense for them to do so and they fight at other times. And globally, I don't know how many of them there are and all of that. But one of the things that that force clearly wants is for us to feel sophisticated tuning out and saying, "Well, there's no solution at the ballot box, so I'm not going to be a sucker. I'm going to walk away." Yeah. And that, I believe, is a terrible error, even though I think that the lesson of the second Trump presidency is that many of us discovered what we thought we were voting for just simply didn't show up. Okay. So let's talk about what the solution might be. Well, maybe first, we should talk about what the problem is. Part of the problem is boomers and- Speak of my language. Let's go. I wish to be fair to the boomers, but let's just say there's a reason that there are an indefinite number of scams that take advantage of old people. Old people lose the ability to spot bullshit. And at the moment, we have boomers who have lots of defects, who have hoarded power and wealth and do not appear to have a plan. Yeah. And the problem is that they don't have a plan to bring us into the future. But they're also now susceptible to pure idiocy, where they are now mortgaging our future at a rate like we've never seen. So I would just point to the ad campaign run against Thomas Massey in his primary that used AI to appear to depict him in a threesome with Ilhan Omar and AOC. How is that legal? We're just off the map somewhere. Yeah. Right? And the point is, you could say it's an obvious joke, something, right? But of course, it's only obvious if the people on the receiving end of that joke are up to the challenge of spotting it. And- That's right. You know, we're in the land of AI. The boomers- Mm-hmm. -bought it at too high a level. So point being, the antidote to the boomers mortgaging our future out from under us is Gen Z. And Gen Z, A, has the right sort of constitution to it. It has the right ethos to join the battle. And, you know, it's clever. It's properly cynical. It's, you know, young and ready. And- Yeah. Ready for, for a battle. And I believe Gen Z is the only force that can take power from the boomers in time to save the West. And I hope that they will take that seriously. Now, the problem, the thing that will stop them is that they will be worried that they will try to do this and they will look foolish if it fails. But I don't think we have another choice. I think this is the path that actually saves us from the forces of the West. I think this is the path that actually saves us from the forces that are otherwise liquidating the well-being that is, frankly, our birthright. So how, how might that work? Here's the, here's the path. There is a movement, a coalition. It does not look unlike the coalition of people that lined up behind Trump in 2024, right? These are politically homeless people who came together as part of Maha, as part of the first movement and supported Trump and are now feeling betrayed. That coalition is in a position to, I want to be careful with the terminology, to make a friendly takeover of the Libertarian Party. Now, I know every eyeball in the room is going to roll when I say Libertarian Party, okay? Here's the question, though. Libertarian Party has done what no other party has been able to accomplish. They've got broad ballot access, which is the kind of thing that has been impossible for third-party candidates to generate. The Libertarian Party has a problem, which is that not all of it, but a large fraction of it are people who effectively are allergic to power. They don't really want power because. Then things get messy. You have to compromise. It means that you, you know, your high-minded principles get tested. So there's a group that doesn't want power. And then there's another group that's sort of frustrated. But here's the thing. It is possible, and there is a movement afoot involving very good people who wish to take over the party and effectively relaunch it as something like the American Liberty Party. Yes. And the idea is it would honor the best Libertarian impulses. In other words, the government that governs best governs least. That does not mean no government, but it does mean that anything government does has to be justified by it ultimately liberating people, right? Government action that does not liberate is not justified. And that coalition, it does not liberate is not justified. It does not liberate. And I think that's one of the things that we need to focus on. But it could, depending upon how the next several years go, it could elect a president and vice president. If it did not, but it got 5% of the vote, it would become a very important political force. Now, I said something that I felt very clever about some weeks ago, and then I discovered Ron Paul had said it first. So he gets the point. But I think that's one of the things that we need to focus on. focus on. But I think that's one of the things is a good thing. is a good thing. is a good thing. But the fact that we have an architecture that has been built up over time, a politically robust architecture, and a vast coalition of people who are, like we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, ready to put aside their philosophical differences because we are so far off track that at the moment what we need to do is restore the basics, right? We need consent of the governed. We need informed consent. We need equal protection under the law. We need to restore verifiable elections, etc. The basics are obvious. Being able to do them is a heavy lift. But Gen Z can make it happen if it's willing to wrest power away from the boomers who are otherwise going to get us killed. I'm going to translate this, and please correct me if I'm wrong. If Gen Z were to check out to the system and check into an organized, non-violent revolution, and those two things kind of happen one after the other simultaneously, if you will, maybe you're saying we could actually create a movement that circumvents current party financials, if you will, and duopoly financials, to hit a reset button on American politics. You think that's possible in the next decade-ish? Well, let's put it this way. I think it's possible. It is always wise to position yourself in case Goliath trips. Goliath is senile. And the likelihood of Goliath tripping is very high. So you've got very smart people working against the public, but Goliath as an emergent property is prone to make significant errors. But what if through no fault of your own, you're there in its shadow to cushion its fall? Let's put it this way. I have Gen Z sons. I owe them this. They need to have a future and my protecting my future at their expense is not acceptable. It's not what a father does. So my point is I'm in, and I don't think it's safe to be in for me. I think Gen Z can rise up and nobody's going to come after Gen Z. As a population, I'm sticking my neck out and I'm taking what I perceive to be a risk pointing out that Goliath has a vulnerability and we need to be picking up our slingshots. And my point to Gen Z would be if you check out and you don't come up with something that looks like this, and if you've got a better plan, I am all ears. I want whatever plan is most likely to work. I do not need credit. I do not. I will participate in anything that looks promising. But if Gen Z does what Gen Z is being induced to do, which is to not pay attention and to feel clever by not taking any of it seriously, I think you're going to end up dying in the desert. Dying in the desert? Yes. What does that look like to you? Actually, it looks like literal dying in the desert, although in this case, it might well be. It might well be mountains. I mean, something is using our military for purposes they have not shared. And so, you know, look, I don't know how much you've been paying attention to footage from Ukraine. I still pay attention to it. Yeah, me too. Did you see the recent clip of these middle-aged guys, you know, guys my age, handcuffed, being taken to the front? Yep. Okay, that's what happens when something decides that your population is expendable, that it wants war in your region for some reason that it doesn't share with you. Now, I knew from the beginning of this Ukraine thing, there was something wrong with the story, right? On the one hand, I have ancestors from Ukraine. I'm sympathetic with the idea. I would like Ukraine to be prosperous and peaceful and all of that, but for some reason, Ukraine was fed to us. It's an excuse for something. It's a hole in the universe to which American tax dollars will be poured and will be completely unaccounted for. And a, you know, now a couple of generations of Ukrainians will be liquidated on the front. It's somehow. Oh, Jesus, that is so dark and so true. I mean, it's what's happening. It is entirely what's happening. So, okay, you've watched. Something psychopathic decide that the well-being of the people of Ukraine doesn't matter and that it's going to put its foot on the gas and then, you know, I've had long had the sense that something about the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East is the same and I can't figure out why they should be, but the point is I don't know what's going on in Ukraine. I don't know if the idea is chaos creates vulnerable people who can be trafficked, if it creates a source for human organs that can be transplanted. I don't know what's going on, but something about the Ukraine story doesn't make sense and never made sense and it is increasingly in some way connected with the madness in the Middle East which. It's literally connected now. You saw that attack a few weeks ago? I caught wind of something, but you tell me. I'll pull that up, just so I don't fuck up the details, but it is now literally that, like, they're trying to connect the two through warfare. There was some sort of, it was a drone attack conducted by Ukraine that involved like Iranian supply lines. We talked about how just, Diefel, pull it up while we're talking, but yeah, I share your fear. Okay, so all I'm saying is, look, if you're as long in the tooth as I am, you begin to get a sense for how dark this can get. The problem with being young, is that you haven't lived long enough to understand that what you are experiencing is not normal. And so anyway, when I say you're going to end up dying in the desert or in the mountains, I mean something actually that the, I think I learned, I used to make fun of libertarians. I don't make fun of libertarians anymore. I've learned an awful lot from them. the power of government is terrifying, okay? I think we need it. We need good governance, but we need to be properly frightened by what happens when that power falls into the hands of something that doesn't care about you. And one thing that it can do is it can send you to the front line of some war in which you don't have a stake, right? It can literally decide that lawfully speaking, you have to go and whether you're gonna last a few minutes or a few days on the front line, you don't have a choice because it can shoot you otherwise, right? That power is so terrifying that you can't tune it out. I don't care that it's fallen into the wrong hands. I don't care that elections don't work the way that they're supposed to. You have to figure out what you're gonna do about that power. Otherwise, it is going to use it against you at the point that you have no tools left. And like you said, you have two sons who are prime military age. You know, they were, drafted or something like that. You have literal skin in the game here. I have skin in the game like nobody who doesn't have kids can really understand. So yes, the time is now. Enough with this boomer madness. We have to take power from them. And if you're a Gen Z, you have to understand who Gen X is and what it is, right? Gen X has a lot of powerful people in it. Not all of them are good, but you've got a generation that now has a bunch of tools and a bunch of wealth. It's also a tiny generation. My generation is so small that, you know, we can't do it, but we can partner, right? Your generation, frankly, I think your generation has kind of checked out in an unhelpful way. You're talking about the millennials? Yeah, the millennials. I won't argue with that at all. I think my generation actually is really disappointing when it comes to this stuff, for sure. Well, I will just tell you, it is the renegades in every generation who are going to have to do the heavy lifting. There is a back-end part of which, because I'm at the very back-end of the millennials, though, there is a large swath of us on that back-end that I will say, and I'll definitely speak for myself on this, that identifies much more with the traits and characteristics of Gen Z, for sure. I know Boo's over here shaking his head agreeing with me, you know, because, we're also the same age, and I think that there can be like a banding together, especially leading from the front example with the millennial generation as well from maybe my back-end of it to do what you're saying because also, like, have you read The Fourth Turning before? No, I'm aware of what it is. Okay. You, of all people, definitely would be fascinated by that because what you were saying patternistically ties into exactly what they talk about in there. So I'm not going to go through the whole thing, because I've bored people with that in the past, but, you know, 1996 book by Strauss and Howe, brilliant. I highly recommend you check it out. They look at cycles of the population by 21 and a half year generations, and it always follows the same four cycles, long story short, over and over again, which means the same generations exist in the same type of time periods during the same eras of their life, zero to 21 and a half, 21 to 42, 42 to 63, 63 and a half, and when you look at Gen Z, Gen Z is what's known as the artist generation. They are the generation that is born and growing up from zero to 21 during the era of crisis. So think like post 9-11, endless wars, global financial crisis, political upheaval and populism and unstrife, COVID, Ukraine war, Middle East wars, like nothing's been good. And so that's what they know. And in some ways they're desensitized. To the world, because they've just seen like a lot of bad, but there's also great. Like the way they explain it is there, there can be great risk taking or, or great bravery that comes from a generation like that, because they operate more from the end of, they have nothing to lose. And when I think of the boomers who are on the opposite end, they're what's known as the profit generation. They are the beginning of that quote. Joe Rogan always says about strong men create good times, good times, create. Yeah. I always forget what it is, but people get the point. Like they operate. We ran weak men create bad times. That's right. Yeah. I always fucked that one up, but like they only saw the world through rose colored glasses. Cause they were born into the boom, no pun intended. And so like, I think Tim Dillon has the best rant ever on this, where he explains why the boomers are the way they are and why they bought all the propaganda because everything they, they were the last, the last frontier of like catching everything, just at the right moment, selling the stock at the top notch, you know, being able to retire at the, at the, at, at a moment where you could still actually do it every day, own a home, buy something for 20 grand, 30 years ago, and now it's worth 800 grand and the younger generations, they didn't experience any of that. Particularly Gen Z, they can't even buy a home. Now the average price to the, the average age to start buying a home now is 40. You know, they're inundated in college. They're in college debt for educations that largely are not worth it. That aren't going to get them anything. And we're just going to handcuff them. They don't have that they're living in this like post inflationary world. It's only seeming to get worse every minute. And so the gloves can come off with a generation like that. And I think that when you show people throughout their childhood, that they have nothing to lose, they are the most likely candidates to have a subset of their population say, yeah, we can check out of this system because we've never been able to do it. We've never been checked into it. The danger of that is if you allow that to be circum, in my opinion, to be commandeered by other totalitarian methods. And I don't want to necessarily even put labels on this, but like you get what I mean. It's like if people say, yeah, I hear you, I understand you, this isn't working. So let's do this. And this is a really bad option. You need to be able to have people like you who say, Hey, I see you guys, what we have ain't working, what they're selling. You ain't going to work. Either, but there's a third door right here and that can work and create a coalition. And I hope you can do that. I'm a little cynical about it. I'll admit that, but I don't want to sit here and stop it from happening because it would be good for everyone if there were a third frontier created. There is no reason not to try. Yes. To try this. I will say I have painfully learned that you have to figure out who you're going to partner with very carefully that. People who shined during the woke revolution fell down during COVID people who shined during COVID fell down over October 7th right people who shined in one of these prior things are now falling down over the Charlie Kirk assassination and what I'm increasingly realizing is there are a lot of flawed good people out there. There's a lot of people who have some issue that's a deal breaker for them right some issue where the principles that they showed over here they will sideline over there. That's not good. I think Gen Z you're right they have nothing to lose that they're not already slated to lose so might as well I would also point out this is a place I worry about Gen Z. We do not have a proper culture and I mean that in a literal biological sense. Oh yeah. We do not have shared narratives in which that are actually robust things that have stood the test of time that we pass on that allow people to know where in the movie they are right my generation did this stuff wasn't perfect and some of it was corporate you know or polluted by corporatism you know the matrix looms very large there's a reason that the term red pill has been co opted so many different times and it's because it is so. You know the idea it's Plato's cave really right so the idea that there is a reality that you can see if you choose and it ain't pretty but you're better off knowing what it is because then you can fight that is a very important idea I don't know where that idea exists for Gen Z maybe the Gen Z will have to bootstrap it but if they can get their mythology right then the point is actually not only is this the right thing to do but it is the right thing to do. Because it means that you might have a future it's also the high integrity thing to do it's the thing that allows you to sleep at night to look at yourself in the mirror to wake up in the morning and have meaning and to know what it is that you're supposed to be doing and I'm not saying it's going to be easy in fact the opposite but I can tell you as somebody who has faced tremendous pushback and frightening. Adversaries but wakes up every day with no question about meaning and where it might be found it's worth it it's it's the thing you should want and you should fear a life in which you don't have it right you're being denied the ability to have meaning somebody has decided to make you helpless and decided to entertain you to the point that you can't think straight right to have meaning because your life is about about. A battle that you don't know if you can win it but you know you have to is in many ways a gift. So I just hope that this generation will wake up to what's been taken from them, will be properly animated by it, and will bring tools to the table that you and I probably can't imagine because they have a very different developmental environment. So they're going to fight differently. But if they're willing to fight, they're going to find partners in the millennials and the Gen Xs, and there's a real battle. You'd know it if you saw it on the screen. You'd know which side you were rooting for, and you want to be on that side. It's a guide to life, really. It's the – Gen Z is the most fascinating generation I've ever personally seen because there's a wide spectrum there, right? Yeah. You have like the back 20 to 25. You have like the back 20 to 25% who are like furries and I guess they're kind of lost. But then you got 20, 25% that you still have to see grow up more and see where they land. And then I'd say you – and these are just anecdotal observations on my part, obviously. I'm rounding. But then you kind of have that top half who are no bullshit, regardless of what their beliefs are, which is a range. Like they hear something that doesn't make sense. They don't go, well, everyone's saying it. I'll just go along with it. They go, fuck that. And they're unaffected. I'm afraid to say that. I find like all the people that work with me, they're all Gen Z. I find them all to be like work smart over work hard, and I mean that in the best way, trying to find good solutions to things. And they cut through the noise and trim the fat very quickly. And that is not something that I noticed at all in the millennial generation or frankly, the generations older than mine as well. And I think that there is enough of a volume there to do what you're talking about, even without looking at the pattern. Well, I agree with that. I've seen that uniqueness, and it's frankly the first hopeful thing I've seen in quite a while. I do worry that the world that the Gen Zs are being handed has some sabotage in it that they are going to have to opt out of in order to fly straight. And what are those specific sabotages? The primary one, I would say, is the destruction of normalcy around mating, dating, romance, all that stuff. It's hard for me to emphasize how important romantic relationships are and that the substitute that Gen Zs are. Gen Zs are being given not only doesn't work, it doesn't do the job that a proper romantic relationship would do, but it actually undermines all of the other jobs in life that need to get done. So, and I hesitate to say this a little bit because I'm sure that listening to a guy, you know, I'm 57 years old. That's pretty old. Now, I have been married since 1998. And I've been with Heather since 1989, since shortly after we graduated high school. How'd you guys meet? In high school. Now, we were not high school sweethearts. I will tell you. So, I went to an all-boys school, which completely arrested my development in this regard because I was shy. In an all-boys school, it's very hard to figure out how to meet girls. If you're not brave that way. So, anyway, when I got kicked out of the all-boys school I was at. Oh, you got kicked out? You were a rebel. 100%. No shit. Of course. I'm surprised you thought otherwise. I know, but would you get kicked? I would think you're the kind of rebel that operates underneath the noise and just finds a way to fuck everything up without people finding out. What'd you do? Oh, no. I did the one thing you mustn't do at an elite all-boys school, which is not perform to potential. Oh. So, anyway. That's it? Eh. You know. So, you were like a low-grade Brett Weinstein? I almost said Weinstein. That was bad. That is bad. The Weinsteins are not good people. Yeah, it goes from like genius to rape real fast. Oh, man. You know. Yeah. So, thank you for correcting yourself. But, yeah, look, I was not on board with school. School did not work. It didn't work well for me, and it has turned out to be a marvelous gift, because at some level, it was like I was pried away from the thing that causes you to become a robot. And, you know, it's had its costs, but it's also had its benefits. But I've digressed. Anyway, got kicked out of the all-boys school. Got kicked into a co-ed school where Heather was. Fate. There it is. Sorry. Sort of seems like it. Yeah. I did not fall in love with her right away. It took 30, 40 seconds for me to fall fully. But, anyway, I was just not ready. And we got together. She knew that I had fallen in love with her. I did not know that. They always know. Yeah, they always know. You can't hide it. Yeah, you can't. But, anyway, so we got together in sophomore year of college. And I've been together ever since. And it has been a – it has been such an important – I don't even want to say it's been a key to my success because it's not even that. It's like it's a key to who I am because Heather and I effectively grew up together from 1989 from being, you know, what seemed like adults. But, frankly, looking back, not really adults. We spent all that time adventuring and forming each other and, you know. That's really what a good romantic partnership does. You change them. They change you. And you become unrecognizable from what you would have been. So, my concern about what's going on now is that the mythology around mating and dating is totally wrong. Absolutely one end to the other wrong. And there's lots of, like, market forces pushing young people into behaving in ways that then close off doors that they – will wish had not – if they knew what they were losing, they wouldn't allow it to happen. So, take, for example, the COVID era. COVID era was an era drenched in bullshit like no era before it. Why did Heather and I do well? Key thing was we had each other. There was nothing electronic that intermediated our relationship at all, right? Somebody could say something on television or on the internet about the danger of the virus, about the glory of the shots, about repurposed drugs. And Heather and I could sit down and have a conversation with each other and say, well, does that make sense to you? And the fact is we knew each other so well there was just no – there was no disrupting that, you know, we could make errors together, sure. But nothing was going to get between us. People who didn't have that, people who didn't have at least one person. in their life that they could trust completely in which there was no electronic intermediation didn't do as well in general. And so I'm concerned, among other things, that the formation of those bonds is not only disrupted by the, you know, hook up, settle down later if it's the kind of thing you want to do. If not, no big whoop. That culture is broken enough. But AI is making things even worse because the temptation to consult AI for everything is irresistible, right? You're trying to navigate a relationship with somebody and you're stuck in a bind. You don't know what it means. You ask the AI, well, you know, why did she say this? And the AI gives you an answer. Maybe it's even a pretty good answer. But next thing you know, you're both consulting the AI about forming a relationship. You don't even know what relationship you have. Because the AI is actually literally intermediating between you. So that's a very dangerous place to be. How about also like the swipe right, swipe left, you know? Well, look, again, these are things that are going to make me sound like, you know, they're going to make me sound like a boomer. Yeah. Get off my frickin lawn, right? But here's the reality. First of all, let me just say, it's not that my generation had this right. Sex and dating was already. Wildly fucked up for Gen X. It's been fucked up since the boomers, frankly. Now, maybe before. But the thing about the boomers. It's always the boomers, man. Well, it's birth control. Reliable birth control plus abortion did something to humans. It was really, you could argue about whether it was the first major transhumanist transition for humans. But it was certainly a transhumanist. Revolution. It gave humans power over when to react and when not to react. reproduce and how much to reproduce without having to regulate sex it decoupled the two and the problem with that is at least for men sex is the most powerful motivator in the known universe yes okay when sex is scarce because women are terrified of being stuck raising a child alone which causes them to regulate sex men have to live up to the standards that women set in order to have a sexual relationship okay and you can you can argue that that's all very you know provincial or i'll keep going archaic or whatever interesting but the point is sex is supposed to be absolutely awesome and rare and the things that allow you to gain access to it are important things right men moved mountains in order to win the favor of a attractive woman okay that logic evaporated with reliable birth control plus abortion it made sex common it lowered the stakes to the point that it became you know people will laugh if i say it's uninteresting but it is apparently uninteresting that people are now opting for substitutes for it because it's not worth the hassle right so that is a critical problem in the motivational structure of people now i'm not arguing that we should go back to a state before birth control not only do i not think it's possible but i'm not even sure it's wise but we do have to do something to fix the motivational architecture so that people are inclined to do good things we have been basically lured into a kind of frivolousness over everything right we're i'm uh on a lonely quest against things like um entertainment right entertainment is the trivial version of something powerful i'm not arguing that you shouldn't be entertained but the idea that you should be just simply entertained by something is a waste of all of the cognitive power you put into processing it that's right right whereas a powerful narrative that spoke to you yeah it would entertain you along the way but that's not the most important thing it would be doing so anyway i that's a long-winded way of saying i think if if i were if i could take the wisdom of my 57 year old self but i was you know 20 or 25 i would be trying to find somebody with marvelous starting materials somebody with really awesome character and depth and i would be looking to opt out of the sexual culture of gen z you know i i think that's a really fascinating way you just said that i think that's a really fascinating way you just said that out and i'm gonna play that back again later and listen to that because i think there are some really valid points in there there's something i would add to it to start and that is i think like the access to porn and the dopamine you know gooning and and and all that that people can do at all times at the click of a button there's something very broken in society with that for sure i do think that regardless of what you're doing you're not going to be able to do what you're doing you're not gonna be able to do what you're doing you're not gonna be able to do what you're doing regardless of there being birth control and therefore wider spread sex and i don't think this is anecdotal i i talked to a lot of people and either they admit this or you can see it very clearly at least speaking from the men's side i can't speak to the women's side from the men's side even if you do have access to sex a lot easier now than you would have in 1950 or whatever there is still the concept of being motivated by the fact that many men operate who maybe have access to women all the time and are able to do that they still operate from the secret place of they have everything they want except the one that they do right and i see that a lot i've seen that a lot in my own life too and you know so even if you're getting sex it's not the same i 100 agree with this this is one of the things i think women young women do not understand it's something that their grandmothers did understand or maybe their great grandmothers at this point but here's here's the problem men have two reproductive strategies okay one of them is a high investment strategy where men invest in their partners and their partner's offspring and the other is a no investment strategy and they function separately right for evolutionary reasons that actually it surprises people right from the point of view what is the what is the best way to leave your genes in the future as a man well traditionally it's been to invest in a partner and her offspring right the other strategy is low success but it's also low investment it's a bargain yeah so the point is a man so you know when guys when there are no women around or at least it was this way 25 30 years ago men would openly talk about the fact that you know that girl future wife i'd like to fuck that one that's the way it was described that's where mary fuck kill started yeah okay well there you go so yeah played it all the time so point is in a man's mind this makes perfect sense right it's not a contradiction if a woman presumably no woman has ever been a man in a woman's mind having never been a man the distinction is blurred right in other words you will watch young women think that if they are getting the sexual attention of a man that that's progress even if what she ultimately wants is a husband the idea is oh if you're getting his attention you're getting somewhere and the answer is no you actually may be turning him off on the future wife channel as you're turning him on the getting laid channel right so if you understood that and you realized actually as a woman it is in my interest that you know how do i say this women used to have a tremendous amount of power it was not power of the same sort that men had and i'm not arguing that it was fair or desirable or whatever but just a simple fact is women used to have a ton of power like how much they had on the planet earth with what they brought to the table now they're trading it for nothing right what they've lost in terms of power is spectacular but they feel empowered in the process i think they've been conned and if you know look i'm often using heather as an example because heather has sort of done the thing that i think feminism promised and few have gotten from it right heather accomplished much in science not only did she get an advanced degree but she was very good at it you know award-winning stuff and she did it under really difficult conditions right her dissertation work was done in madagascar there was no field station no support of any kind she bootstrapped her entire project on the other side of the world under conditions that were dangerous and difficult and unpleasant that's an independent woman right there right she also has two marvelous children right she's had one marriage it's in very good condition good so seems that way seems like you guys are perfect for each other you know i think i drive her crazy and i wish i didn't but the point is she's not going anywhere so the point is okay she didn't give up something she's not a 50s housewife right her children did not suffer for her absence as a career person yes she benefited from some luck along the way you know we were teaching at a college that had a daycare center which allowed that job to be reconciled more easy but the point is it's not traditional at all but it does show that there's a pathway yes in which you don't surrender all your power and you do chart your own course but you don't surrender all your power and you do chart your own course it is possible so the the failure to understand that men have this divided nature has i think caused women to try to behave like men at their worst that women behaving like men at their worst is causing men to not find them sympathetic and men are defaulting to their frankly predatory side when a man tries to have sex with a woman that he has no intention of investing in it's predatory because really what he's trying to do even though it's not the terms that he thinks of it in what he's trying to do is impregnate her and force her to raise the offspring right he's like trying to steal 18 years of labor from her right that's pretty nasty um and women are playing into it and the whole time the question is well you know women are thinking god these men suck well okay you're playing the game in a way that's bringing that out of men and yeah they're behaving in a predatory way towards you and then women seeing that men are behaving in this way sort of feel like why am i bothering to be decent maybe i should be doing this right i should be doing this right i should be doing this right and then women seeing that men are behaving in this way sort of feel like why am i bothering to be decent maybe i should just you know play the game as i feel like it by no rules whatsoever and that's causing men to resent the women they encounter and i think that this is just it's a clusterfuck that basically men and women are um alienating each other yes men and women have the ick for each other in gen z and it's very dangerous and i think what they've come to believe is that that's the fundamental nature of men and women rather than we've fallen into a state that is causing us to behave in ways that we don't like each other and that feels like a long series of things some of which you just laid out that's almost coordinated in a way to make sure that that's the end result for some larger planet just feels that way well not only that but think about all the other things it goes along with yeah right the uh encouragement of um so-called gender positivity the most ironic term so-called gender positivity the most ironic term all right uh or you're what is it gender affirming care well you're affirming one gender and negating another at gender affirming care well you're affirming one gender and negating another at exactly the same moment but exactly the same moment but exactly the same moment but anyway the point is it is amazing how anyway the point is it is amazing how anyway the point is it is amazing how our civilization embraces absolutely our civilization embraces absolutely our civilization embraces absolutely every single thing that would keep every single thing that would keep every single thing that would keep people from romantically pairing up and people from romantically pairing up and people from romantically pairing up and producing producing producing uh a healthy family yeah i think you uh a healthy family yeah i think you uh a healthy family yeah i think you just tapped into something extremely just tapped into something extremely just tapped into something extremely right on brand evolutionary about the right on brand evolutionary about the right on brand evolutionary about the concept i forget how you just said it concept i forget how you just said it concept i forget how you just said it but you were like women are behaving but you were like women are behaving but you were like women are behaving like the most predatory of men which is like the most predatory of men which is like the most predatory of men which is bringing out the predatory side of men bringing out the predatory side of men bringing out the predatory side of men how did you say it i'm sorry women are how did you say it i'm sorry women are how did you say it i'm sorry women are behaving like men at their worst okay behaving like men at their worst okay behaving like men at their worst okay so you ever seen this nyc divorce lawyer so you ever seen this nyc divorce lawyer so you ever seen this nyc divorce lawyer guy yes guy yes guy yes he's great he's great i might finally he's great he's great i might finally he's great he's great i might finally amanda i might finally amanda i might finally amanda i might finally do that podcast he's just been on like do that podcast he's just been on like do that podcast he's just been on like every podcast i've been kind of putting every podcast i've been kind of putting every podcast i've been kind of putting it to the side but it to the side but it to the side but the guy's awesome and he says a lot of the guy's awesome and he says a lot of truths that you don't want to hear that truths that you don't want to hear that truths that you don't want to hear that then you're like then you're like then you're like damn it he got me and he said this one damn it he got me and he said this one damn it he got me and he said this one thing one time i saw the clip i was like thing one time i saw the clip i was like thing one time i saw the clip i was like holy he nailed it he goes listen i holy he nailed it he goes listen i holy he nailed it he goes listen i don't make the rules argue with a don't make the rules argue with a don't make the rules argue with a wall but it's the truth wall but it's the truth wall but it's the truth every good girl secretly wants every good girl secretly wants every good girl secretly wants a bad boy that only she can make good a bad boy that only she can make good a bad boy that only she can make good and every good boy secretly wants a good and every good boy secretly wants a good and every good boy secretly wants a good girl that only he can make bad girl that only he can make bad girl that only he can make bad and i think what's happened here is that and i think what's happened here is that and i think what's happened here is that that that that some of the some of the paradigm has some of the some of the paradigm has some of the some of the paradigm has shifted to where shifted to where shifted to where maybe they'll just let out the bad right maybe they'll just let out the bad right maybe they'll just let out the bad right away for everyone such that it's just away for everyone such that it's just away for everyone such that it's just defined that way that you know if that defined that way that you know if that defined that way that you know if that sorry there's a better way to say that sorry there's a better way to say that sorry there's a better way to say that maybe maybe the girl jumps to be in bed maybe maybe the girl jumps to be in bed maybe maybe the girl jumps to be in bed right away because right away because right away because she thinks that's what everyone wants she thinks that's what everyone wants she thinks that's what everyone wants and then suddenly it creates and then suddenly it creates and then suddenly it creates you know this reputation that women are you know this reputation that women are you know this reputation that women are suddenly just loose with their bodies suddenly just loose with their bodies suddenly just loose with their bodies and being and and and none of them are therefore desirable and none of them are therefore desirable for having a mate and it creates for having a mate and it creates for having a mate and it creates tension from the male side towards the tension from the male side towards the tension from the male side towards the female side and then when the males female side and then when the males female side and then when the males reject them reject them reject them it creates tension from the females it creates tension from the females it creates tension from the females towards the males because they're like towards the males because they're like towards the males because they're like all men just leave all men just leave all men just leave and it feels like that's not at all a and it feels like that's not at all a and it feels like that's not at all a new phenomenon and that's why it was new phenomenon and that's why it was new phenomenon and that's why it was really hitting me with like your birth really hitting me with like your birth really hitting me with like your birth control point like when the pill came control point like when the pill came control point like when the pill came out 60 years ago because i'm like you out 60 years ago because i'm like you out 60 years ago because i'm like you know that feels like it's probably been know that feels like it's probably been know that feels like it's probably been in the works over the last two three in the works over the last two three in the works over the last two three decades especially and maybe now i'm decades especially and maybe now i'm decades especially and maybe now i'm thinking it could be longer like you thinking it could be longer like you thinking it could be longer like you said said said well i think i think that's exactly well i think i think that's exactly correct and i also think you know you correct and i also think you know you correct and i also think you know you don't know how many of these things are don't know how many of these things are don't know how many of these things are just happenstance and what if it might just happenstance and what if it might just happenstance and what if it might have been a somebody's plan have been a somebody's plan have been a somebody's plan but the idea that but the idea that but the idea that men and women finding each other men and women finding each other men and women finding each other unsympathetic and becoming very unsympathetic and becoming very unsympathetic and becoming very instrumental and mercenary with respect instrumental and mercenary with respect instrumental and mercenary with respect to sex just kind of using each other to sex just kind of using each other that then creates that then creates that then creates vulnerability to propaganda on every vulnerability to propaganda on every vulnerability to propaganda on every front if you don't have the partner who front if you don't have the partner who front if you don't have the partner who stands above civilization and its stands above civilization and its stands above civilization and its conversation if you're basically conversation if you're basically conversation if you're basically embedded in the civilizational embedded in the civilizational embedded in the civilizational conversation and sex is just something conversation and sex is just something conversation and sex is just something it's an activity right it's an activity right it's an activity right then then then you're vulnerable because there's you're vulnerable because there's you're vulnerable because there's nobody with whom you have a special nobody with whom you have a special nobody with whom you have a special union that i you know i know it sounds union that i you know i know it sounds union that i you know i know it sounds corny but that it's not corny yeah the corny but that it's not corny yeah the corny but that it's not corny yeah the special union thing special union thing special union thing let's put it this way sex is extremely powerful sex is extremely powerful sex is extremely powerful and it can be rendered trivial and it can be rendered trivial and it can be rendered trivial the ability of sex to modify the ability of sex to modify the ability of sex to modify a person is profound a person is profound a person is profound and and and foregoing that foregoing that foregoing that for for for you know you know you know basically the uh you know basically the uh you know basically the uh you know i don't know the uber eats version of i don't know the uber eats version of i don't know the uber eats version of sex is not a win sex is not a win sex is not a win right right right let's even even if we were to say the let's even even if we were to say the let's even even if we were to say the question is how to maximize your sexual question is how to maximize your sexual question is how to maximize your sexual pleasure over a lifetime okay pleasure over a lifetime okay pleasure over a lifetime okay well there are a bunch of factors in the well there are a bunch of factors in the well there are a bunch of factors in the equation of sexual pleasure one of them equation of sexual pleasure one of them equation of sexual pleasure one of them would be frequency would be frequency would be frequency well we've now increased the frequency well we've now increased the frequency well we've now increased the frequency with which you can access it with which you can access it with which you can access it but another one would be the but another one would be the but another one would be the import the stakes import the stakes import the stakes right the the the sex with somebody where the stakes are sex with somebody where the stakes are sex with somebody where the stakes are high because you can't live without them high because you can't live without them high because you can't live without them right right right that's a whole different sport that's a whole different sport And it seems to me relatively likely that most people who don't realize that there are different things flying under the same banner may go their entire life and never have that experience, right? I mean, the itch isn't supposed to be that easy to scratch. And the modification of humans by our technological intervention is profound at a level that I just don't think moderns understand. It's really changed who we are. - Yeah, I think that whole idea there has given people a lot to think about, certainly like a jumping off point. You don't have to agree with every single thing you said, but like there's some harsh truths in there too that we've seen play out like the boiling frog, like you were talking about. It's very slow and over time. Now, how do you, how do you un-ring some of that bell without saying like, we're gonna go back to the time where there's no phones or something like that? You know, obviously that's not feasible, but how do you bring it back a little bit? - I will give you two pieces of advice. Hard to take, but they would have to be in order to address a problem this serious. One of them, you know, I've tried to figure out how to navigate this with my own sons, what to tell them. - Oh, one thing, one thing I want to say first. I think it is important to recognize that the problem is a game theory problem, right? Let's say that everything I've said here is true. It still doesn't solve the problem from the point of view of let's say a young woman, because if she opts out of this situation, then she just gets ignored. Basically the, all the women who are playing this game are undermining the power of any woman who elects not to. She's not in a position to end that game. She's not in a position to end that on her own. So basically every woman is dragged into this. In light of that, what I've told my sons is, I don't think you should sleep with anybody that you know is not on the list of potential long-term rights. - That's good advice. - And you know, you could go more conservative than that, but I would just say at the very least, if you know that somebody is not on the list, then what you're saying is that by going to bed with them, you're willing to behave in this predatory way. It's not nice to do to them. What does it do to you? Probably not a good idea. Second thing is if I were 25, I would find somebody awesome and I would opt out together. Right, and I think it's harder to find somebody awesome because I think the corrosive effect of all of this bad culture is to degrade potential mates so that they're probably not still on the list of people you could invest in. But if you find somebody, I would say, opting out is the way to go. Figure out if the relationship can work long-term and then don't look back because it's the most important decision you will make. And the key, the key, you know, I think our mythology around soulmates is badly broken. I think people imagine that what you're supposed to do is search the landscape and find your soulmate. And when you meet them, you'll realize, oh, this is the one, that's not it. is to find somebody who can become your soulmate you mold each other into that right that is the recipe that actually works and it's fantastic so that does not suggest delay delay delay you know learn everything about the marketplace before you finally make a deal on the best one you can find you're talking about actually shaping somebody into the person who's right for you for the rest of your life which is a great deal if you can make it work okay can i make sure i understand that right yeah so what you're saying is don't look around trying to find someone perfect who checks every box look around and be open to the possibilities and when you run into a girl you like allow open yourself up to the possibility that the two of you can mold each other into the right direction over time such that you become soulmates yes now i only have my own experience to go on but i think the alternative plan is actually magical thinking i think i agree and the longer you wait the more formed the other person is going to be so the less wiggle room you have to to fix things to to make yourself right for each other you're you're then you know if you delay too long you are actually looking for the person who matches you and maybe you're not going to run into them or maybe you're going to you know pass like ships in the night um but find the awesome person and then you know the joy of the relationship is in part in the fact that you are growing in ways that you wouldn't otherwise right you don't want to find the fully formed person you want to find the person who's ready for the adventure and up to the challenge i think i think that's pretty perfect i also and i'm totally getting in semantics here it's not to like correct what you're saying or anything but you know if we were really getting into the nitty-gritty i think even like using the word find with it can get you in the wrong direction i think you have to be open to letting life happen to you you know let things through your door and test it out you know i i think when people are constantly like you'll hear people be like yeah i'm looking for a relationship right now well that that that can lead you to maybe be a zealot towards what you want rather than allowing yourself to experience something new that might actually be what you didn't know you needed totally yeah and you know um i think it is also the case there's something about human beings we have a capability that no other creature has because we are able to exchange abstract ideas with this magic that we call speaking i mean really it's a miracle if you think about how it works but because we can do that you can actually see through someone else's eyes right you won't see perfectly through their eyes but you can see you don't have to guess right they can tell you what they understand what they're experiencing you can tell them how you hear it and they can say no that's not exactly right you can get good at seeing the world as they see it that's a that's an unbelievable gift right the the the idea of being a human without engaging in that is a very lonely idea if you think about it and it doesn't have to be lonely so the idea of being a human without engaging in that is a very lonely idea if you think about it and it doesn't have to be lonely so right the the idea of being a human without engaging in that is a very lonely idea if you think about it and it doesn't have to be lonely so there's something gorgeous about searching for the person who you want to make the trade i want to be able to see the world through your eyes and i want you to see the world through my eyes and i want us to level each other up each other up each other up and you know and you know and you know i want to have your back at a level that i want to have your back at a level that i want to have your back at a level that nobody else ever will nobody else ever will nobody else ever will those are important uniquely human those are important uniquely human those are important uniquely human things and things and things and bypassing it over bypassing it over bypassing it over some some some somebody's guess at the way we're somebody's guess at the way we're somebody's guess at the way we're supposed to live is just an absurd thing supposed to live is just an absurd thing supposed to live is just an absurd thing to do to do to do they also take going through the conflict they also take going through the conflict they also take going through the conflict or the hard times to be able to test out or the hard times to be able to test out or the hard times to be able to test out whether or not whether or not whether or not that person does stand with you that person does stand with you when it matters you know you can't just like be like you know what i i think i think you've got enough boxes checked that i know how you're going to behave it's it's the same thing i talk about this with a lot of different things but it's a really dangerous thing and i try to be very careful with it to say about something very serious if i were blank then i would definitely blank you don't know till you're faced with that moment on these things and i try to humble myself in the face of that i think it's no different when you're talking about like someone who appears like they you know this girl could be a great partner for you or something you still have to go through those hard times and see how not only how she handles it but how you handle it and how that mix works out you know you and heather have definitely as you've laid out today like you you've seen that in every facet throughout your relationship and have a great marriage all these years later so it's worked out for you but there's other people who will go through that and then maybe even for not bad reasons realize you know what we're not meant for each other because this is not you know we we got to some difficult point whatever that is and like we couldn't agree on how to navigate that or how to handle that and that doesn't bode well for the future you're exactly right and in fact i would argue that you should seek the experiences together that will reveal how you handle this um you know things like uh that's funny tandem bicycles and tandem kayaks are known as divorce bikes boats in the in the industry because they have caused more than a few divorces but the point is if if you go rent a tandem bike together and then you know 10 miles later see how you feel um if you if you've managed to navigate that it's actually a really good sign and heather and i did a ton of that stuff oh my god we shared a tent in madagascar we you know headed off into central america together with a car that we didn't intend to bring back uh just to see where it took us you didn't intend to bring back no it was her stole it or no no no not like that it was her first car was in bad shape we tried to sell it to raise money for our trip but we couldn't sell it because nobody wanted it and so we decided to just take it to central america and figure out how far we get it's probably still out there you know the beauty of central america is that uh you know a good toyota is not something you throw away um but but the point is the uh the adventures that we had that revealed that we were actually a very good match for each other that forged us um i wouldn't trade him for anything i mean just the um the those experiences that that is life it's like life at its most intense so cool um and you know you you want to have that with your partner but good for you brett it's it's always nice to hear that too like when you i we get to observe the two of you because you do a show together i've seen that for years and like everything seems amazing obviously nothing's ever perfect but like to hear you express it that way and look back on all of it is like kind of reassuring like it's possible you know what i mean you can find the right one it's totally possible and i will just say you know look i got so many mistakes under my belt it's just it's you know i cringe thinking of it but i wouldn't change a thing because it would put at risk something that i value more than anything else so yeah it's possible well on the note of relationships let's get back to perils oh yeah we're talking about some of the perils of society yeah we had talked about corruption and wars talked about dying in the desert um ai knew you were going there yeah so what do you think um i think even if we take the terrifying sci-fi scenarios out of the picture that the mundane stuff that's absolutely guaranteed to happen and is already happening is apocalyptic if we don't think about how to address it what are those mundane things um the disruption of the job market would be one um the use by bad people you know i have said in other places that i think the abuse cases may outnumber the use cases it's not that the use cases are few or unimpressive but the ways that this can be used to parasitize us are are many and profound so and you know we have a governmental structure that does not appear to have a plan for what to do when some huge fraction of the labor force is sidelined simultaneously and does not appear serious about generating one i don't think ubi covers it i think ubi at best is a band-aid that will um create a catastrophe when the meaning crisis is you know taken to the tenth power because nobody has anything important to do what if that's the point though to where they give you just enough of the drip the iv drip that you're you're breathing you're alive but you're you're weakened to the point that you're not going to revolt um here's the problem with that put it put yourself in their shoes whoever they might be people who are not contributing are degrading the quality of life for our overlords they're blocking the view they're here's the problem look we are useless eaters from the point of view of our overlords mm-hmm if we are necessary because they can't get their plumbing to work they have a reason to keep us around at the moment the immigration crisis across the West looks like the replacement of a population of people who are attached to the idea that they have things like rights with a bunch of people who don't have a long history of having rights okay if you think that the overlords at the point that they no longer need people because frankly AI plus humanoid robots does any job that humans do better than the human race I don't think it's a good idea to have human rights and humans can do it if you think they're going to keep us around for sentimental reasons you have not been paying attention they think about the difference of this planet from their perspective with billions of people who need to be taken care of who constitute a constant danger of revolt have to be managed in some regard they're going if they have not already they are going to settle on the idea that we are unnecessary and that they are morally justified and taking care of the issue somehow I just think that that's where this goes inevitably so do you look at that as a lot just like a large percentage of the population versus the whole population and the reason I asked that very darkly is because I still think of those people they need someone to open their doors they need someone to pick their stuff that eventually becomes food they need you know their drivers and stuff like that so for the next five minutes they do for the next five minutes so you think that these people and I'm going to put people in air quotes because they feel like something different in some ways but you know what I mean like you think that they would be content to live completely alone to where the power of their money perhaps didn't matter anymore I don't entirely understand your last sentence but so if the world were gone if we if the people blocking the view were out of their way and it was just a select few of them does money even matter in that world we're not talking about that many people I don't think money matters now I think money is for us little people um well I think money constitutes uh two things money constitutes a store of value and a means of exchange and money still works as a means of exchange but I don't think it could possibly work as a store of value at the moment because the whatever these mafias are the really powerful ones have access to information that allows them to print money and I don't mean in the fed prince money way think about let's just take an example proof of concept the NSA has access to pretty much all electronic communications within the U.S. probably within the west right okay so they know probably signal oh yeah for sure someone's like yeah can I talk to you on signal I'm like for what yeah no if you can read it so can they okay so if you had access to all of the communications that are taking place and you had AI probably better AI than the rest of us do and you had a huge budget to process you don't think you could figure out what stock prices were going to do you know when the big trades are coming you know when they're being contemplated you can position yourself in the market for all the big trades suddenly you don't need your budget from the federal government because you can print money I call it the time traveling money printer it's like you have a time machine that allows you to know what's coming so you can make money okay in light of that the value of money isn't there right because they can make it out of thin air that's right at will so anyway I don't think money means anything other than you know you can buy a pizza right you can buy you can use it to exchange for stuff that's certainly true but that's a temporary and it's the much less interesting feature of that system so yeah I don't think I don't think money means anything I don't think I think wealth means something yeah I was just going to ask you so what's the difference well the words out of my mouth let's put it this way what's really even if we take this into a biological context take people out of the equation there's a paradox at the bottom of evolutionary biology which is why would you bother being a 30 trillion cell organism when you could be 30 trillion single-celled organisms wouldn't that be in terms of fitness a win for you to be 30 trillion times the organisms that you currently are hmm right yeah the answer is because your 30 trillion single-celled compatriots don't have a lot of control they don't have power right you'd probably if I turned you into a 30 trillion cell puddle of goo that puddle of goo is very likely to go extinct in the next hours I thought you're gonna say it was gonna be mRNA for people or something no but my point is your ability to make it into you know the 2030s is way higher as one organism that functions in a coordinated way than is 30 trillion organisms functioning in a discoordinated great okay that's the same principle that has something above money and even its control okay so wealth is the ability to exert control money is the ability to exert control money is the ability to exert control wealth is a form that wealth can take right it's sort of the lowest tier here wealth is the ability to you know get a ship to move across an ocean right um control is like the top level how much control can you exert in the universe and yes I think the psychopathic elites that appear to not care about us would be very happy to have us gone and to have their needs taken care of by loyal artificially intelligent robots that don't need health care and well but I mean think about it why are we building humanoid robots it's not an obvious form to make a robot right a human is kind of a clumsy weird creature that's not really I mean at a biological level the only things that human beings are really distinguished at are like long distance running right long distance running is something a human being is better at than other creatures but there are lots of creatures that swim better than us there are creatures that can fly we got lots of other forms that you might make a robot and you could frankly make robots in all of those forms so why would you make a humanoid robot there's one reason can't think for itself oh sure it can that's part of the glory of it it can do anything a person can do that's why you'd make a humanoid robot so how's that if it can't if it can think for itself how's that better well if it can think for I mean imagine imagine the near future right everybody says the trades are safe from ai no they're not imagine that your house has problems in the crawl space right so now you can get a robot to show up any time of day or night doesn't have to report to hr isn't gonna molest anybody whatever it can go into your crawl space it can diagnose not only your plumbing situation but your hvac system and your electricity it can source the materials that it needs to do whatever repair and have them delivered by some sort of autonomous thing it can change its own battery it's smarter than your plumber plus your electrician plus your hvac guy put together because it has the entire history of all of these things it has every manual for every you know unit that was ever produced that thing is superhuman the fact that it can think for itself that it can solve a problem that your plumber might have to go home and ponder over or something makes it better the only thing it mustn't do is revolt as long as it's obedient it's better than all of the people that it's going to replace in many many different ways it's not grossed out by what's you know in your sewer line it's just better so yeah the ultra elites would love to have robotic servants that for the moment can do anything a human being i mean i'm not saying we're there yet but we're very close to the point where because we've built the world for you know stuff that can be operated with human hands a humanoid robot that has hands is capable of stepping into any role right that's why we're building humanoid robots So in some sense, the question of useless eaters is already on the table in the investments that are being made by robotic companies. It's a very dystopian, scary thought. Well, I was kidding. Well, I wish you were kidding. Yeah, I wish I was kidding. But like even if what you're saying is like – let me even put it low. Even if what you're saying is a 0.1% chance, that is 0.1% far more than I'm comfortable with. Maybe it's higher than 0.1% to be honest with you. But I just don't even see how it goes anywhere else, right? The basic economics dictate that at the point that the robots are cheaper to build and capable of doing anything that the person does, you'll replace the person with the robot. So we're already headed there. The limiting factor is really how quickly can we build the robots that can take over. These jobs. Not whether or not the robots can do it in principle. Of course they can. So the economic realities dictate that the robots will replace the people. That will make the people surplus. At the point the people are surplus, what is it that is supposed to keep psychopathic elites from looking at them and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nicer if they weren't darkening my doorstep? I just – I wish that there were a lot of ways this could play out. But to me, this looks inevitable and I would – you know, I'd love it if somebody would come up with an argument and say, hey, Brett, you've got it wrong. Here's what you missed. I'll be like, whew, good. But I haven't heard it yet. Are you familiar with Doug Rushkoff? Heard of him. Yeah. So he's a tech futurist who got a lot of predictions about the future like the internet and technology pretty over the target back in the early 90s, which was kind of his rise to prominence. Very nice guy. Interesting dude. I had him in here a couple of months ago and one of the things we were talking about is, you know, he's often paid to go speak to people at events and he was paid to go speak at an event out west somewhere in 2017. So a few years before COVID and he arrived to his engagement. When he walked in, it was just a room of five billionaires and it wasn't like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, like the household names or anything like that. In fact, he was like people whose names probably wouldn't even recognize, but he knew who they were. And what they did is they all, they all had these notebooks out and everything. They were very matter of fact. And they were referring to this thing called the event as a foregone conclusion, like very darkly. And when they said that, what they meant was a world ending or pretty much population killing event that would happen. They weren't sure what it would be. Would it be a pandemic? Would it be something with the climate? Would it be AI like going very wrong, whatever it was going to be. There was going to be an event that they called the event that would happen in the next 15 to 20 years. And they wanted to talk to Doug, like in a very dystopian way about how to properly plan their bunkers that they were building. And they're like taking notes, like it's a little class. And first of all, he's like, are you not seeing the humanity like problems in this? You're talking about this so callously about an event that's going to kill all these people. And he's like, they didn't care. He's like, these are the types of people. And he used these terms and it's just ringing back when you're saying this. He's like, these are the types of people that are into sex robots and shit like that. And you know, this, this, this weird future and everything. And it was so real. I had heard him talk about it before, but like when I was talking with him and then I guessed one of the billionaires, which I have to keep off record, but I like held up a thing camera on him. I'm like, was this one of the guys? He was like, yeah, I'm like, Jesus Christ. You know? And I wish I could say that that was, but I can't, but it's like there. That sure of something like this, such that when I hear you lay out a scenario like that, I can't shut it down. It doesn't mean they're all powerful. Hopefully they're just dumb and they think they're way smarter than they are. And none of it's actually real. That's the best case scenario. But the reality is when we see things so continually to exponentially create within the technology realm, and then you consider that things behind the scenes are always way ahead of things we actually see, you start to even wonder if we're in the reality we think we are, you know, like, has it already been unleashed? Is there already, I don't know, some AI super weapon or whatever. That's actually changing what we actually see. And this is already a foregone conclusion. Now that's really dark, but I can't rule out shit like that. You know, I don't, I don't think you should. Um, in fact, you know, in my circles, we're looking at a bunch of different components. That could be taken in isolation from each other, but look like they are pieces of what often gets described as a control grid. Control grid. Yeah. So, you know, we're all talking about flock cameras and the fact that they can be used to, you know, read more than license plates and to create a, you know, a map, a moving map of where you've been and all of that. That is such destruction. That's the shallow end of the pool. I mean, frankly, that's the kiddie pool, right? I agree with that. Yeah. It's bad, but it's, it's the shallow end. It's the shallow end. The fact is we already have a company, Toka, Israeli company, that is offering a service that they claim can access any CCTV camera that is connected to the internet, that can shut them down, that can alter them in real time without the owners of the camera being aware that there's any modification. In other words, without fingerprints. Oh, that's black mirror stuff. Well, think about it. That right there is the ability to convict a person of a crime they had nothing to do with or to exonerate a person from a crime they had everything to do with. And the fact that this is for sale today and somehow it. It never gets brought up in the discussion of what happened to Charlie Kirk. I'm not saying this stuff was used, but you've got a product that's being advertised. Maybe the advertisement is bunk. Maybe it's a sales pitch that's empty. But the fact that we've got people talking about how to modify video evidence in real time so it tells any story that the people who have availed themselves of this technology want told, that's the end of jurisprudence. Or at least it should be. Yeah. Right? What that is, is the ability of power to decide who to put behind bars. How do you spell this company? T-O-K-A? T-O-K-A. Yeah. So, you know, we've got that. Empowering governments to. Yeah, they're protecting citizens. Yeah, it's for your own safety. Oh, right out of a Norwell textbook. Empowering governments to protect citizens through cutting edge intelligence. Yep. Oh, my God. Right. So, why are we talking about flock cameras? I mean. This is so far beyond flock. That's nuts. Yeah, it's crazy. And, okay, and it's one of a dozen things. You know, we also. We have the dollar being undermined. Mm-hmm. And what looks like a plan for shifting us to some kind of electronic currency. Programmable. Programmable money. Well, programmable money is the ability to silence anyone. Yes. Right? If my money is suddenly not capable of being spent anywhere, then the point is that is a level of control over me that never existed during COVID. Right? Because, you know, basically you can be debanked in an instant. You can be unpersoned at an economic level. Right? That is an incredible level of control. And we don't have the. We don't have the constitutional architecture to prevent this. My state, the state of Washington, has decided that it has the right to, on the basis that there's an emergency, inject citizens with any medicine that they deem relevant. Wait, that's like a passed law? Mm-hmm. So. That's interesting. It's fascinating. What's an emergency? Oh, it's ill-defined. Oh, geez. Do you think they. Do you think they might utilize that? Uh-huh. Right? So, anyway, all I would say is, look, these could all be separate, ill-conceived projects, or it could be that the discussions that you were talking about resulted in discussions that. Was it Raskoff? Didn't hear? Yeah, Douglas Raskoff. You know, discussions about, well, geez, what are we going to do? We can see that we're on a collision course with the public, and so we better build some architecture so that, at the point that the public gets wise to what's going on, we have enough control that it's not a problem. Am I saying that happened? How would I know? But I am saying it's certainly plausible, and that when you discover that right there on the internet, you've got a company advertising the ability to falsify history seamlessly without it being detected, we are in dangerous, dangerous waters. And, again, would go back to the uh the you know middle-aged ukrainian men being taken off to the front yeah those are people who don't have power that's what that is you're being taken someplace for the slaughter yeah pigs to the slaughter exactly and hey gen z that's your future if you're not very careful it's the time to fight is now because you won't be able to fight if this stuff is deployed at scale and you can be debanked in an instant or you can have somebody you know if you become a problem somebody can create the evidence that you did something you didn't do that's right lock you up that's the end of our ability to fight that's the end of civilization if something like that happens 100 there's nothing you can do at that point yep you know unless everyone checks out of the system all at once which is a very difficult psychological scenario but you know i do have issue to this day with people's inability to hold two thoughts at the same time on a lot of things which is something i think you're really good at and that's why i have a long time because there's a lot of nuance when you do that and you were talking earlier about how in the past election you know basically the biden administration part two as it would have been with kamala harris we had seen enough disasters there that you merited it like hey i don't really have an option here i'm gonna vote for trump even if i disagree with some things politically and i think you have amazing arguments for that i mean they they didn't want to define what a gender was they wanted to shut down any speech that they didn't like the pan the pandemic measures and the vaccine stuff was totally up in that entire administration they pulled us out of afghanistan completely in the wrong way started another endless war with ukraine didn't do anything to de-escalate the conflict in in in gaza you know i could go on and on and on all these things remain true now that trump has gotten in though as you've already laid out there are so many promises that were made that he has done spongebob opposite day on and so do you wonder sometimes if like trump was like the ultimate trojan horse yeah i mean and there are really two schools of thought and i don't know which one's right um it's certainly true that as trump did the inverse of what many of us hoped and expected him to do that lots of people who took us to task in advance and said he's not who you think he is this is all a con of course leapt up and said see right and those people might be right it's not quite how i read it when i look at the man and i calculate the things that i think i know about him right you know his strengths and his defects one the man is a political genius i don't think that's ambiguous okay yet he's doing things that seem to cannibalize his legacy it does not strike me as something that a guy with his um insecurities and his skill set would do in other words i think he went into office wanting to show up his critics to be remembered as a great president in spite of all of the fear-mongering that was done about him and for him to behave in this way seems strange yes he does seem to be cashing in on many opportunities and it's possible that was the plan all along but he i read him as resentful of what he has to do in other words i read him as he feels like a man who does not have a choice why oh i don't know why i would imagine some kind of leverage we can't see and you know again i am not saying anything other than when i look at the screen and i watch the person that i supported i feel that he is doing things that he finds distasteful and that he resents the people who made him do it but that he doesn't have the power not to do it interesting could be me being a sucker again that's possible but it feels that way and i can't think of a reason that a guy as politically savvy as president trump with the position of power that we elected him to would forego the legacy hmm it seems like something he would not have done by choice i think i agree to an extent there because he's never demonstrated anything in his life this is maybe like where the narcissistic side would actually play a positive role if it went right but he's never demonstrated wanting to do things that would sacrifice his image right people this this was this was my argument in advance of his election was i do think his motivations are not pure but his desire to be remembered as a great man is closely enough aligned with our well-being that it's a good bet right if he does what he would have to do to be remembered as a great man then he will do so by doing our bidding to a large extent that was the gamble and it has not worked out that way for you know for one of these two reasons do you think it's possible for at this point you know we're towards the end of 2026 he's going to he's got he's probably going to lose all the midterms and everything and be handcuffed in some ways he's got another couple years left do you think it's possible for him to even reverse course from some of the catastrophic in some ways mistakes that have been made to this point i don't know i mean he'd have to get us out of iran and every time he has tried to do that he has been been undermined so i don't know i don't know what his constraint set is but i think what we are discovering is he can't get us out and short of that i don't know what else there is this this is a catastrophic mistake and one that now has a kind of momentum that seems unstoppable um again to my point about gen z yeah you've been signed up for something at the very least you've been signed up for the bill for a war which we cannot afford and i would argue that the people who signed us up for it do not seem inclined to pay yeah in other words that this one of the functions here may be the hobbling of the united states as a power right if if that was your objective this would be a good way to get there yes um so so um something is being stolen from you i wouldn't take it lying down because there's no substitute something this this was a great and undeniably powerful country you were going to inherit it it is being liquidated opposing it is the obvious first thing to do yes now how do you fix something though like us kicking the can down the road so many times and now we're over 40 trillion dollars in debt the fed which is an independent institution certainly not in a good way is printing money again and again inflating away the value of our currency we're now currently locked in a foreign war that is threatening potentially the reserve currency that the dollar is possibly i hope that's not true but it's a real threat how do you undo that if you're gen z because that feels like a check your ass can't cash through no fault to gen z zone by the way well look the founders were unambiguous geniuses i agree and the solution to that problem is not for us to figure it out it's for us to gather people of excellent character who have the ability to bring those with proper expertise into a discussion to figure out what the plan would be right it's like anything else if you were on a battlefield if you were on a sinking ship you would say all right let's take stock what do we have what works in our favor what are the liabilities what plan is most likely to get us into the next round of the game you would do that in the process that the founders laid out out and so really step one is get honorable people into positions with sufficient power to steer the ship in a safer direction what exactly they would do i don't know cynically you look even as far back as the church committee in the 70s frank church in his next election cycle was spent out of office by money presumably through cia sources and stuff like that or at least backed by them you look at guys like thomas massey and the other people who are in the church committee and the other people see and now what will be coming up on the other side rocon in a primary that we have yet to see stands up on some things is voted out of office through a lot of money spent against them and stuff how do you how do you stop things like that from happening you laid it out earlier they were able to do ai ads that boomers bought hook line and sinker that's pretty dark well you overwhelm the boomers at the ballot box that's job one what do you overwhelm them with well you take honorable people people who are in the church who are in the church who are in the church who are in the church people like massey and you attempt to put them in positions where they can wield power right when somebody has demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice on your behalf that means that they are somebody who can be relied on in a firefight and And so I would just take all of, you know, I would take all the people who are being slandered because they stood up and tried to tell you the truth. And I would say, actually, those are my people. And let's see what we can do about turning them into something more than a, you know, slate of podcast guests. Right. Right. Put them in positions of power. And then we'll go from there. Yeah. Now, what do you think, you know, I'm this year with the 250th. I've always been so fascinated by the Revolutionary War and I study it like crazy. And I agree with you. I think the founders, well, like any men in history, they're imperfect men. It was amazing. So many of the things they did. But if I took four guys who had a range of different political beliefs during that time, but I think were great Americans for different reasons. Let's say George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In some cases, like Adams and Jefferson even had a falling out. And I think that's one of the things that I would say, you know, I would say, you know, that's one of the things that I would say. But the things that brought them together were able to pull off one of the most insanely beautifully executed revolutions of all time. If you spawned them in today and at least read them in on some technological things that, you know, they couldn't have conceived back then, but now they could at least have a basic understanding of, what do you think they would say about where we are? I mean, unfortunately, you've painted a very vivid thought experiment. And I know for sure that their brain. Their brains would just short circuit on the realities of the present, right? Yeah. There's no way that the gap is too big between what they lived and what we are now living. If you were to somehow bring them up to speed without breaking their minds. Tall task. I think what they would say is this, and I don't, I don't, I don't like speaking for them, but you've asked me the question, so I'll do it. It's my fault, I'll take the blame. Yeah, it's your fault. Yeah. Let's start with that. I think what they would say is this. They would probably say that the values around which the constitution was built are largely the right ones, but the level of change that civilization has undergone, what they would, at the point they wrapped their minds around it, think of as technological change, is so great that the structures, they would say that the values around which the constitution was built are largely the right ones, but the level of change that civilization has undergone, what they would, at the point they wrapped their minds around it, think of as technological change, is so great that the structures, can't manage it. Even the brilliance of a living document that lives by virtue of a court system that interprets the meaning in modern context. Even that is incapable of keeping up with the predicament of the present. I think they, I'm not the first to say, I think they would be shocked at how little we've actually updated the system. That they built a mechanism for change, and that they might be surprised, given the change of the realities under which we live, at how little we've changed the structure under which we live. They might. This is much more speculative. They might question the first-past-the-post system that we have, that they created, which basically prevents coalition governments from wielding power. First-past-the-post? Yeah. That a winner-take-all system defaults to two parties, so we now have two incoherent, dysfunctional parties. Right, right, right. So if we had a system where, you know, a spoiler party wasn't a spoiler party, but it was actually a partner in a coalition that actually wields power, it's a much more dynamic structure. I'm not saying the founders would have supported that, but they would have recognized that a winner-take-all system has produced a certain failure mode, and they might have preferred a different one. But my guess would be they would say, you need to separate. The values from the architecture, and that the values that they outlined were very high quality. There are a few things that are missing. You know, informed consent, for example, would be something that didn't loom large when the Constitution was written, but now it's clear why it must. So the values are basically right. The structures are not up-to-date and probably need something like a 2.0 version. Mind you, I'm not advocating for a constitutional convention. It would be a disaster if we attempted it now. But a 2.0 version of the structure is probably necessary to preserve those values, which they correctly identified. I think you might be right about that, which is unfortunately like a catch-22, like you said. Because it's like what would be required to do that would probably break it in half. Well, I think we need a Jesus with the card tables thrown. Throwing out the money changers moment. Oh, yeah, with the switch and everything. Yeah. He was pissed. He was not happy. Yeah. But you get the money changers out, you can have a whole different conversation about what to do. As long as they're in that position, we can't yet fix the structure. It's too much. We're in an emergency that needs to be addressed before we can get to the deeper questions. Yeah, that's unfortunately one place I'm just like a full-blown cynic, I have to admit it. Like the money in politics is so deep and runs so firmly that like, shit, I'd take a 10% fix to it if we could get it, you know, which would still create enormous problems, by the way. But like I don't know how you unwind that when it's so firmly rooted into legislation itself to where they're allowed to do this. Yeah. You know? It's a tough situation. But you have to solve it. I don't think 10% would do anything for you. Probably not. But I get your point. It's better than nothing. Well, I'm not – I'm literally not sure it's better than nothing. But the point is the problem is so critical that you have to start thinking about that problem first before you – I mean it's why it's number one on my list. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think Trump kind of 180 – kind of – I think he did 180 from the campaign trail on the Epstein files? Why do you think he did 180 from the campaign trail on the Epstein files? Well, I would say we are stuck in the public guessing at what our system is actually made of, how it actually runs, what an election actually is, how much power actually resides there, all of those things. So we are looking – we got a glimpse of something with Epstein and we still don't know. Why? Why? Why? Why? What part of the mechanism it was. We don't even know if it was a blackmail operation. There's real reason to think that that's not exactly what it was. Meaning it was more than that? Yeah. That it was certainly a power-wielding operation and absolutely disgusting and despicable in every conceivable way. But did it function by actually saying, do this or we will release these things on you? Probably. Probably. Probably not because that would be unstable, right? Once you revealed that it was a blackmail, you get to use that mechanism once or maybe twice. You don't get to keep using it. So maybe that's not how it worked. More layers to it, yeah. Yeah. But let me point something out about the Epstein files. Every time I hear that term, I think that we are the victims of a kind of bait and switch. Before the three million documents were dumped on us, I had an idea of what the Epstein files were. We were discussing the Epstein files. We want to see the Epstein files. The Epstein files were not Jeffrey Epstein's emails. That certainly would have been a piece of the Epstein files. But the Epstein files should be the FBI's file on the Jeffrey Epstein case. What did they find and what did they conclude about it? Why did they not search the Zorro ranch? Somewhere there's a memo that explains that. We're not going to search the Zorro ranch because. We didn't see any of that. So they gave us a huge amount of stuff, very tantalizing, hard to look away from. But it is not what we were talking about. And we still don't know. We don't know our own history. We don't know what Epstein was. We don't know why he was handled in the way he was. He was, I think we've all now concluded, clearly operating. With the knowledge of and probably the complicity of intelligence agencies. That's right. We've got the question of why would an intelligence agency create an Epstein-like character? Any other, you know, we've now, if you look at the October 7th stuff, what we're now discovering, you know, the Israelis were warned by multiple different governments that something was coming. Well, all of those people have been. Quiet, right? We don't. So this is the same sort of situation where, okay, some intelligence operation created an Epstein. Other intelligence operations were either part of it or they knew it was happening and said nothing. So what is this shadow world? How does it work? Who, you know, who is entitled to be protected from it? Anybody? Or, you know, is it, is this simply just organized crime wearing the skin suit of the American government and laughing at us? I mean, is that what it is? That would, that would at least answer a lot of questions. Something above the government. Yeah. Yeah. This is where that Tucker Carlson's idea of like the supra government I've talked about a million times now comes in. And I think he's going to something there. Yeah. It's like the people you thought were the most powerful. It's not that they don't have power. They do, but they're not layer one. They're really layer three and layer two is where the fixers like the Epstein's live. And layer one is the one that you never know about it and you're never allowed to talk about. Yeah. And you know, it's some hybrid of intelligence agencies and organized crime, maybe organized crime of a form we know of or organized crime of some form we've never heard of, but that it would function in that way as a substitute that the government is really the theater that covers its activity. Yeah. When, the last time John Kiriakou was in here, he told a story about David Rockefeller as an old man when John was stationed over. And I want to say Bahrain, he got noticed that David Rockefeller was going to be coming in to accept some really weird award, like where you get like a trophy or something. It was like, that's kind of odd. And they're like, yeah, you know, we're going to help him with security, all that. So Rockefeller comes in, he goes and gets the award one night. And then John Kiriakou is with him, I guess, like the next day. And he's like, ah, Mr. Rockefeller, congratulations on that award. And Rockefeller like looks at him like, yeah, thanks, man. Okay. And shakes his hand and walks away. And the other guys, the CIA guys come in and they're like, John, what the fuck is wrong with you? He's like, what? I'm congratulating the guy on the award. And they're like, John, he's not here for a fucking award. That's just a cover. He's like, a cover for what? And they're like, John, we put him on a military, transport last night to secretly fly him into Iraq to go meet with Saddam Hussein and tell him if he doesn't stop this shit in Kuwait, he's going to get a bomb up his ass. And John was like, oh my God, that's really how the world worked. So I ran this story by Andy Bustamante, who's definitely still in the CIA. And, you know, shout out to Andy. But he said something to me, because sometimes Andy will say some shit that's like really matter of fact. And afterwards you're like, damn, damn. But he said to me, he said, there's two, he nodded his head, along with that. And he said, there's two really difficult days at CIA. Day one is the day where they tell you how the world actually operates. And day two is the day where they tell you how you're going to operate in it. That first day is a really hard fucking day. And I was like, why? And he goes, cause you find out that those families, the places like the Rockefellers, they do exist. And there's certain things you got to do. And maybe it's way above your pay grade and you're never going to know why. And I'm like, oh God. God damn it, man. Like, how do you stop something that's so generational like that? Because it goes against exactly what you were talking about earlier with the fact that America was founded on the idea that these lineages aren't supposed to exist. It's the exception, the break to the rule. But there's, including some American families, by the way, there's a way that people are trying to say, no, no, no, we're going back to the old way, just like we did it thousands of years ago. Well, unfortunately, evolutionarily speaking, the old way, the lineage against lineage violence way is more fundamental. And so the West beats the crap out of the lineage against lineage violence paradigm when it's functioning. And when it stumbles, it breaks down into lineage against lineage violence. And what I said, if it was not on October 7th, 2023, it was within a couple of days, is that what's going on in the world is that Israel has a foot in the West, and it has a foot in the Torah, and that it is threatening to drag the entire world backwards into the Old Testament, which is a document about a world of lineage against lineage violence. End times. Well, whether or not you see it as end times, it is a commitment to a true version of the world that is intolerable and would be unstable, with modern weaponry. We can't play that. We can't play king of the raft, right? So my point is, look, the West is better, it's safer, it's fairer, it's more productive, it's better in every regard. The one disadvantage it has is that it functions when times are good. It functions with growth. When growth stumbles, we collapse back into this other way. We have to prevent that from happening and frankly, you know, we have let the lineage against lineage violence people take power. The barn door is open. The barn door is open, and just in the same way that the universe favors entropy, it favors this brutal way of viewing each other, where there's. I think they think we're naive in the West, because we. Because we think that there is another way of doing things. We are a little naive in the sense that we think the other way, the better way, can be permanent. And frankly, I wish I knew for sure that they were wrong, right? Maybe nothing we do can prevent us from sliding back into lineage against lineage violence, which basically means extinction. It's going to happen, and maybe there's nothing we can do. But if there is anything we can do, we damn well better try, because the Their failure mode is dystopia. It's total control by people who don't care about us, who do not value our suffering at all. And that's unthinkable. So we have to, and I guess just to say it cleanly, the West and its commitment to individual dignity is born, even though the founders were not, by and large, Christians, and their relationship to Scripture was complicated, to say the least. Yes. Yes. The West is unthinkable absent the New Testament. So I would argue that the story of the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule, that these are innovations, that they are fundamental to the way the West works, and that they are necessary. It's not to say that everybody has to be a Christian, but we have to all embrace those updates because those updates allow the more peaceful, more productive, better world to exist. Social principles. Social principles, if you will. Yeah. If you allow them to be guiding principles, you don't need to accept them at the level of Scripture. But at the very least, we have to all agree that the alternative is populations that are genocidal because they don't have an alternative. That is the way the world works, and so it's genocide or be genocided. We can't live in that world. Yeah. And we shouldn't want to. I agree. And you're also clear. You're clearly a great student of history and patterns and how things have played out, even from a scientific standpoint in your career and your expertise. Do some of the patterns that we're on the course of right now remind you ominously of some great past civilizations that have fallen? You know, I wish I was a great student of history. Yes, loosely. It reminds me of, you know, the hubris of… Probably all great civilizations, that they feel so secure that the little things that ultimately take them apart are not noticed. You know, I'm more familiar, frankly, with what took place in the New World and, you know, the case of the Maya. The Maya who fell before the Spaniards arrived, right? After a run of more than 3,000… After a run of more than 3,000 years. A long run. A long run. And a brilliant run. Like the things that the Maya accomplished, some of the things that the Maya accomplished exceeded even the Greeks. And, you know, ultimately in their collapse, you see, you know, the failure of the mortar in their buildings, that there were equilibria that weren't quite managed, and that it resulted in basically, you know, you can see in the chemistry of their buildings, the… You know, the leak that ultimately results in their collapse. So, you know, we have bigger, more profound, more obvious, faster acting kinds of problems. But the basic sense that I have is everybody is focused too narrowly. Nobody seems to understand the gift that we've been given, right? If you understood the beauty of… The beauty of getting to exist, getting to exist without having to worry about feeding yourself or being preyed upon by a predator. The gift of being a human being that can partner with other human beings and create things that societies that are wealthy allow you to create. like, you know, art or great mythology or to innovate in some way. That's such a beautiful place to land, right? It's unthinkably glorious. And if you knew what you had, even in the broken form that we have it now, and you understood what's coming, how awful compared to even the broken version it is, you would find it unthinkable to play these games. You would never allow this to be jeopardized. You'd be obsessed with, okay, how can we just preserve what we've got and then we'll figure out how to make it a bit better. But you wouldn't gamble everything on this insanity. And it's that myopia that I think dooms all great civilizations, that somebody can't resist the game even though what they're effectively doing is gambling the well-being that we've already won at great cost. Oh, that's really well said, unfortunately. Unfortunately. Yeah, really well said. Well, Brett, we left one thing from the beginning. I want to tie that loop and then I'll get you out of here. But this has been amazing, by the way. It's great to finally talk with you. But you had said we started talking about 9/11 at the 25th anniversary, obviously, and you're doing this event tomorrow from when we're recording on the 10th where you guys are getting together in New York, but we never got to exactly what's happening there. So can you explain like the event and- What it is? The event's being put on by Richard Gage's organization. It's called Turning the Tide. And it is about finally having the conversation that we should have had 25 years ago about the things about the 9/11 story that don't add up. You know, the evidence of foreknowledge, the physics of the buildings, the stories of the first responders, what they experience on that day. I think it's kind of a moment of healing, right? Lots of people, victims, families are going to gather and we're finally going to have an open conversation. And you know, it's 25 years overdue. Yeah. Kennedy's still 60-some years overdue. So it's like- You're right about that. Let's go with this. You know what I mean? I'm sick of these overdue receipts. Well, what we were talking about, it's like, you know what I mean? Well, what we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast was the pause between when it becomes obvious that there are unanswered questions that need to be addressed and when you can finally talk about it without being punished. And I think those periods are getting shorter. I hope you're right. Right? October 7th was more than three years ago. We're talking about Netanyahu and the advanced warning that he- Yeah. Seems to have had, people have talked about the Hannibal directive and the damage inflicted by the Israelis themselves. That's a much shorter period than obviously from Kennedy or even from 9/11. So maybe we're making a kind of progress and we should be heartened by that fact. Well, I have really appreciated listening to you, as I said at the outset, over the years, talking bravely on so many different topics and aging well with a lot of them, like fine red wine, unfortunately in some cases. But I admire someone with the courage to start these conversations. So if people somehow are not familiar with all of your social media and your podcast with your wife, we're going to have all that linked down below. And I hope to do this again with you sometime. Thank you so much for coming to do it. It's been great fun. I really enjoyed this and I hope we do it again soon. Absolutely. Real honor to have you, brother. Thank you. Everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. All new drinks are now at McDonald's with refreshers like the strawberry watermelon refresher and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba to crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew? Ice cold drinks could be so fire. Six all new drinks are here now at McDonald's. Refreshers contain caffeine.