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

(upbeat music) One of the really cool things about doing this job is every once in a while, someone who like I've listened to or watched for a lot of years and been a fan of or told other people about that they gotta go check out what this guy says, will hit me up and be like, hey, I watch your show. So it was a great honor and really cool when you hit me up to say that and I'm really glad to finally have it here, Brett. - Well, I'm really excited to be here. You've been doing great stuff. I think you're reaching audiences that need to be reached that maybe are otherwise inclined to be a bit more tuned into other things. So anyway, I appreciate your work and I'm excited to have this conversation. - Thank you. Well, you are in town right now because we're recording on the ninth and on the 10th you're doing an event in coordination with what's gonna be the 25th anniversary of 9/11. So what's going on tomorrow on the 10th here? - Well, I'm speaking on the 10th late in the evening for some reason it happens to be the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's murder. And I take that to be a significant fact and a kind of a sobering responsibility to be talking at a conference about 9/11 and what it is that may have taken place 25 years ago. So anyway, I think it's a significant event and I'm heartened to see the online discussion of the upcoming anniversary of 9/11 and people bringing footage back to the floor that some of which has not been seen by most of us. - It's a pretty fascinating moment. - Do you remember where you were that day? - 100% one. - 100%. Yeah, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was a grad student. I was a teaching assistant in a mammology program. And I somehow woke up, got word that there had been what at the time seemed to be an aviation accident. And I turned on the television and I was, I hope I'm recalling this correctly, but I think I was watching the tower burn. I was thinking about what little I knew in terms of precedent. I know that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade, not the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building long ago. - 1932. - Yeah, 1932. So I was thinking about that fact as I believe the second plane crashed into the tower. And of course, that moment everybody who was watching this had the same thought, which is okay, that just changed what this event is. That's not an aviation accident in any way. It's intentional and many things follow from that. - 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. - And I, at the time, we didn't have mechanisms for easily reaching out to anyone at any moment. I mean, they existed, but they were crude. And I didn't have any way to reach the professor who was gonna be teaching this class. And I rode my bike to school. And I think because I'd been watching the aftermath as I arrived a few minutes late, I was sort of expecting nobody to be in the class. And the class is sitting there, in their seats, and the professor, mammologist is up at the front of the room lecturing as if nothing had happened. - Really? - And I remember thinking, I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do, but I know that something historic is taking place at this very instant. And I walked up to the front of the room, and I pulled him aside, and I said, not in a way that the class could hear. I said, I think you need to know that something is going on. The twin towers have been attacked in New York. Two aircraft have crashed into them. And he said, yes, I know. And then he just kept going. And I thought, on earth, does anybody not realize that mammology, important as it may be, is not the priority at this moment, right? - I don't really ever heard anything like that before, like someone just so continuing operations without even really acknowledging it at all. - It was weird. And in fact, I've thought of it rarely. It's so out of keeping with that, the moment, the hours and weeks that followed, which to me, I think a lot about the hours and weeks that followed 9/11. One of the things that struck me about it, I was already quite skeptical of our news environment. I wasn't a believer that we were being widely told the truth about much. - Good for you, early adopter. - Yeah, early adopter. And I remember having the experience of watching, okay, this event happens that towers are hit. They collapse, the Pentagon's been hit. Everybody is grappling with what just happened. This is historic, but at what level is it historic? What happens next? And my impression was that you had a bunch of phonies who didn't know they were phonies, who had been hired to pretend that they were reporters. So they had all the equipment and they dressed the part, spoke the part. But they didn't really defense the news because the news was so corporate that it wasn't in the news business. But at the point, the attacks happened. These people were kind of like, okay, I'm in the street in New York, just terrible things happen. There's chaos. I've got a microphone. And they just started behaving like reporters. Right, it was the strangest thing. And I don't know how well you remember it, but the commercials were pulled off the air. Immediately it was considered inappropriate to have them. They were off the air, I think, for a couple of weeks. And there was this period. And now I regard the official story of what happened during 9/11 to be laughable. But there was something very authentic about the reaction of the population, the way people Americans found the humanity in each other. And to reporters started doing their jobs. It was a very different moment. And it was like a moment outside of time. - Yes. - And then there was that moment when the commercials came back and things sort of returned to the non-stop propaganda regime. And I always wonder, is there not, can we tap back into whatever it was that had us thinking organically and authentically during that brief period? - Yeah, I just had two guys here yesterday who were kids when 9/11 happened and they both lost their fathers in the North Tower. And this has come up on podcasts before over the years, but something about the spirit of 9/12. And the days after that to where people often forget we were eight months removed from what was at the time the most contentious presidential election in modern history. And yet all things like that went outside, went out the window the next day. And it's interesting. I was eight years old and we have a booth still in here from earlier, we did a podcast together. He was also eight. So it was interesting to talk to someone around the anniversary who experienced the same age I did. But it is really the first day in my life where I can remember every single thing, like from start to finish. And so it's a seminal, it was always personal to me. I'm from this part of the world too. But the fact that it takes such tragedy, regardless, we'll talk about the story and all that too, obviously that's a huge issue, but that it takes such tragedy and such loss for people to put aside not even just stupid disagreements but human disagreements and come together around a shared humanity. There's something about that that's really sad to me because 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 then you get the people out here who are like, well, it's gonna 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 is something like that happened? I do know, and I think my whole adult life, I've been watching some version of the slowly boiling frog where our media environment, our information environment, the academy, everything is coming apart and becoming captured by something that is hostile to our well-being, 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 to 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. If people understood the danger that we are in in the near term, 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. 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 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 the constitution, then 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. The bullshit. The bullshit. 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 Revolveman. Think of it as a place where guys who care about how they look, shop and do it easily. Revolveman is stacked with elevated essentials and trend forward styles from brands like Ralph Lauren, Solomon, Veer of God Essentials, and more. The experience feels curated, not chaotic. You're not drowning in 10,000 results or 50 pages of product. 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Go to Revolve.com/Julian to shop that link is in my description below. And use code Julian for 15% off your order. It's free today shipping, easy returns, and the whole experience is simply the best. Once again, that's Revolve.com/Julian. Link by the description below. And use code Julian for 15% off your entire order. Offer and soon, don't sleep on it. To go away 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 like your career has been a demonstration of the fact that no one can ever really put you in a box. Like you always have been open to so many different ideologies and 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 like thought leader. Like 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 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 your 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 that 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 the 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 trying? 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. It's one I've hypothesized for a long time. 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 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, so okay, A, why didn't they own up to that? But B, now you've got the physics of towers one and two. The physics of towers one and two, those aren't standard controlled demolitions. Control 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 seven 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 simply never added up the four knowledge, the physics of buildings one and two. you know, the thermide 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, it's a pretty important one of 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 you're, 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 them, but like Terence 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, they 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, I'm not onto something and it doesn't bloom large in your thinking going forward. Maybe give them 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 else's. And so I know what came from it that contributes to the weird places I end up. One of them is that what I trained 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 or 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? 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. 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 walk into a tropical forest. There are lots of creatures they're trying to deceive you. So you can't find them and eat them. That sort of thing. Or you 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 is 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 the expertise you built in something else your whole life and put it to use to where everyone from an intellectually curious 15-year-old to someone who has watched things really fall off from where they were maybe 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 chain like the woke conversation on campuses really at the forefront of that. And stuff. It's like you've really had a quite a diverse repertoire here of things that you've had to get really deeply involved in for sure. Well, it's strange. 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 above your weight class. That's an interesting I would call it a fact. It's at least been a fact in my life. Yeah, I keep finding myself, you know, COVID. Perfect example. 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 liberal college 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 about that. The teaching of 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, 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 COVID happens. Well, COVID is a very different beast. But who better than an evolutionary biologist or even better than that, a pair of married 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 the, you know, I studied bats in my graduate work. There 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, but at some point, I think you just have to accept the most fundamental obligation that each of us are handed. 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. 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 COVID as best you could see 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 got to 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. I would say And 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 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 teaches you what you need to know about the way the world actually works. And I would actually use it to surface a principle that I think everybody needs to be aware of. And 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 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. 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 overt and window, but in time. So I think of it as maybe, you know, the overt and gapped 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, 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. Okay, I get it that it's the particular detail who warned him is news, but he was warned by many people, including the Egyptians. This has been long known. So the point is, well, well, 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. Yep. 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. But it will not be with the intensity if you get close to something sensitive. Getting a business is hard. 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And I can't think of one major story where that is not the case in my lifetime at least. At least where there is a villain, a powerful villain that has in some way, and I think we need to be agnostic about what the way is because I think, you know, there's direct control over the media, there's nudging and everything in between. I don't know how it's done. But when powerful forces engage in behavior that is hostile to the public's interest and wish is 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. Sam pronunciation. I got that down. Oh yeah. Weinstein and Einstein. Oh, that's good. There's that, but I think what he said, there was like a publication, something like 50 physicists against Einstein or something like that. And I don't want to put you on a 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. It's like you're over the target. Yeah. Now, you actually just did, deep got it, Albert Einstein famously responded to the 1931 critical book, 100 authors against Einstein by saying, why 100, it was 100, not even 50. Wow. If I were wrong, one of them would have been enough. In Germany, as 100, autorin, gagan, Einstein, it featured essays by various critics attempting to discredit history 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 reputation as all it takes to disprove a wrong theory. So that is a lesson I was imprecise, but not inaccurate. Yeah, no, you were actually conservative on it, but yeah, it was even more. But you know, the Charlie Kirk thing, you and I were talking about this quickly right before a 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 La Frey and Jimmy Doron talking about this. I don't know, you know, I had a couple people in here as well, but it was 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 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 what do you think's happening with the public discourse here? 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 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 theorists is probably a fair term what they should be offering as hypotheses. That's what a theorist does the distinction is incredibly important and most people don't get it. So we can 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. 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 the 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. It's a tragedy from the point of view of Charlie's death, 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. 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 on a turn. 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. It's a symmetry in these things. I'm pretty persuaded that the story of Tyler Robinson acting alone doesn't make sense. It's not satisfying. 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. Built into the idea that it was not Tyler Robinson acting alone. That hypothesis requires that there will be plenty of evidence against him. The idea that he's the patsy means that there will be evidence 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. It is not persuasive that 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? That's the question. Are there other things that aren't being pursued? Are 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 of our obsession to figure out whose drones they were and whether they saw anything. 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 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. 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 up 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 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 in a correct year though because frankly, the difference between hypothesis and theory is fundamental and it is because we miss you as the term theory that we we make ourselves vulnerable. 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. In 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 high 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. So you have a theory only at the point that every hypothesis has fallen but one and that one has with stood 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 tested 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 this the philosophy of science that allows you to do this work rigorously 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 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 interesting to see if is the number three years is a four years is a 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. Number all those questions you were asking in October 2025 they're actually they were valid a couple of more 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 because 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 if I I believe that in talking about our behind-the-scenes correspondence that I'm doing what Charlie would want done 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 died 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 Come from the left and was not about to join the Republican party 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 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 The election - you can tell people what that was who are familiar with that, but Rescue the Republic was a rally that we held on the national mall to gather the coalition of Politically homeless people to see gathered Bobby Kennedy me Heather Jimmy Dore a long list of prominent people Matt Taibi and we basically put on a Show for lack of a better term on the capital mall 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. There were you know, there was no violence. There was no You know as a peaceful assembly good first amendment Good demonstrate. Yeah, we exercised our first amendment rights. He was going to be a speaker at this That's interesting. Yeah, he was going to he was going to be our closing speaker and he was really excited to do it He had financially backed us we would not have pulled off the event without his help and His doctor forbid him to speak because of his laryngitis and so he he backed out last minute But it was still very enthusiastic. Yeah, I 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 M RNA Covid 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 other terrible things You got a doctor over here shaking his head and every single thing you say up and down Well, very interesting once you've traveled amongst these people you realize that it's a A cryptic tragedy of immense proportions 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 Covid shots anything you build on the M RNA platform is going to do the same thing and he needed to understand that so anyway we were partnered and and I must say I've now made it public again because I thought Charlie would have wanted me to but Charlie in our Private back and forth Said something it still means a great deal to me. He said 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 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 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 so Kent does back that up as far as I knew yeah and I said something to the extent or to the effect that 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 fallen under the spell of some absolutely terrible people who I Don't have anything any reason to think that these these people value human life that they See the long-term well-being of either their population or our population is important You know, I I remember that Netanyahu has his His syringe from his supposed COVID vaccine sitting on his desk like a frickin trophy and 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 and then you know, I think I did use the term maniac We need to stop these maniacs Who are 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 the 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 slowdown and orbit and you 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 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 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 think 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 mafia's And I think I think this is just a literal description. These are take their 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 mafia's 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 gonna 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 goo. You should take it for your own good. I wouldn't Give it a I wouldn't give it a second thought. I turn them right down on 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, 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 know, you can just see over the course of even five years, you can see the degradation and 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 pen 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 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 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'd be nice to, yeah, if you want to go longer in three to five, go ahead, please. Let's say my top priorities would probably be corruption. And 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 shorter lived. 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 of 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. 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, I don't mean the West, 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 I don't know what do you bring to the table. Right. What you bring to the table and what I bring to the table. And if you put them together, we have you know, 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, 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. I either wanted to come here and be part of it or they wanted to do it at home because 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. 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 shoving under the rug and many of these people happen to be the same people that are a 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 like 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, Kamal 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. The last minute heard administration, by the way, was literally trying to censor you and other people like they came directly after you. 100%. So, I don't think we had any choice but to vote against that. 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 holding front of Congress and forced to answer questions. He can be impeached. He's a real human being to inhabit the office. 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. 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 a 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 we're 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? 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. 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. Come up more than one, too, right? It probably is. It almost certainly has to be. And, you know, I'm sure they partner, you know, 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 just going to, I'm not going to be a sucker. I'm going to walk away. 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, 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. Okay. Part of the problem is boomers. And speaking 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 to bring us into the future. But they're also now susceptible to pure idiocy, where, you know, they are now morgaging our future at a rate like we've never seen. So I would just point to, you know, 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. 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, you know, we're in the land of AI, the boomers bought it at too high a level. So point being, the antidote to the boomers, morgaging 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 to join the battle. And, you know, it's clever. It's properly cynical. It's, you know, young and 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 that 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, 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 American 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 now. 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, here's the thing. It is possible and there is a movement of foot involving very good people who wish to take over the party and effectively relaunch it as something like the American Liberty Party. Change the name. 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 it's not justified. And that coalition 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 stolen bar for bar word for word. Let's put it this way. I think I reinvented a canonical because I wasn't aware that he had said it, but it's possible I'd heard it and forgot. Anyways, did it somewhere in the back here? It may well have. What it was was somebody had said, oh, you know, you're talking about a third party. And I said, no, no, what we need is a second party. So anyway, Kudos to Ron Paul for having it is a bar. It's good. But yeah, we need a second party. What we effectively have is, you know, Tweedle Dom and Tweedle Dumber in the form of the Democrats and the Republicans. We know there's no way out through that door. We can't seem to vote against a particular war that we don't want. If we can't do that, what use are these things? 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, you know, verifiable elections. et cetera. 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 rest power away from the boomers who are otherwise going to get us killed. So I'm going to translate this and please correct me if I'm wrong. If Gen Z were to check out to this, check out of the system and check into an organized nonviolent revolution. And those two things kind of happened 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 do bodily financials to hit a reset button on American politics. You think that's possible in the next decade. 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 to your own, you're there and it shadowed a cushion. It's fall. 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 you know, 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 know 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? It actually looks like literal dying in the desert, although in this case, it might well be mountains. I mean, something is using our military for purposes that 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 it's a hole in the universe in 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 somehow, oh Jesus, that is so dark. I mean, it's what's happened. 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. Pull that up deep 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 there was some sort it was a drone attack conducted by Ukraine that involved like Iranian supply lines. We talked about it. I'll just default 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, my when I say you're going to end up dying in the desert or in the mountains, I mean, 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. Yes. 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 going to 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 going to do about that power. Otherwise, it is going to use it against you at the point that you have no tools left. So like you said, you have two sons who are prime military age. If 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, but you tell them about the millennial. Yeah. I won't argue with that at all. I think my generation actually is really disappointing when it comes to this stuff. Well, I will just tell you, it is the renegades in every generation who we're going to have to do the heavy lifting. There's 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 have boots 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 in 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 them the past. But, you know, 1996 book by Strauss and how 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 errors of their life. Zero to 21 and a half, 21 to 42, 42 to 63, 63 and above. 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 0 to 21 during the era of crisis. So thank you. like post 9/11 endless wars, global financial crisis, political upheaval and populism and on strife, 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 can be great risk taking or great bravery that comes from a generation like that because they operate more from the end if 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 the, 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, I always fuck that one up. But like, they only saw the world rose colored glasses 'cause they were born into the boom, no pun intended. And so like, I think Tim Dylan has the best rant ever on this where he explains why the boomers are the way they are, why they bought all the propaganda because everything, they were 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 a moment where you could still actually do it, every 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 average age to start buying a home now is 40, you know, they're inundated in college debt for educations that largely are not worth it, that aren't gonna get them anything and are just gonna handcuff them. They don't have, they're living in this like post-inflationary world that'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 checked into it. The danger of that is if you allow that to be a circum in my opinion, to be commandeered by other totalitarian methods. 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 gonna 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 to try this. I will say I have painfully learned that you have to figure out who you're gonna 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 seven. 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. 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. That stuff wasn't perfect, and some of it was corporate, or polluted by corporatism. 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 resonant. The idea is 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 'cause 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 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 gonna 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 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. If 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 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 gonna fight differently. But if they're willing to fight, they're gonna find partners in the millennials and the Gen X's and there's a real battle. You'd know what 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's the most fascinating generation I've ever personally seen because there's a light spectrum there, right? 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. You know, 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 unafraid 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 patterns of history, like I was laying out with the fort turning. 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 were gonna 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 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 on 57 years old, that's pretty old, and 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 mean? - 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 and in all-boys school is very hard to figure out how to Meet girls if you're not if you're not brave that way. So anyway when I got kicked out of the all-boys school I was oh you got kicked out you're a rebel hundred percent no shit. Of course I'm surprised you thought otherwise. I know, but would you get I 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 I had an elite all-boys school, which is not performed to potential So anyway, it's it You know there was a you were like a low grade Brett Wines Brett Wines I know almost at Weinstein. That's bad. That is bad. Yeah, the Weinstein's are not good people. Yeah, it goes from like genius to rape Oh, man. Yeah, so thank you for correcting yourself But yeah, look I Was not on board with school school did not work well for me and it has turned out to be a marvelous gift because at some level it was like I was Pride away from the thing that causes you to become a robot and you know, it's had its cost 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 There it is 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 I was 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 can't hide any it 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 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 went on 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 it 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 Repurpose 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 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 the 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 the AI is actually literally Intermediating between you so that's a very dangerous place to be Also like the swipe right swipe left, you know, well look again These are things that are gonna make me sound like you know they make me sound like a boomer. Yeah, get off my frickin lawn, right? but But here's 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 is always the boomers 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 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 what 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've been basically lured into a Kind of frivolousness over everything, right? We're I'm On a lonely quest against things like 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. That's a long-winded way of saying I think 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 laid 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 This some I would add to it to start. And that is I think like the access to porn. And the dopamine, you know, gooning 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 there being birth control and therefore wider spread sex, and I don't think this is anecdotal, 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 to be emotivated 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 of 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 they're great grandmothers at this point. But 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 partners offspring. And the other is a no investment strategy. And they function separately. Right. For evolutionary reasons that actually it surprises me or not obvious to people. Right. From the point of view, 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 a 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 they're 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, like to fuck that one. That's the way it was described. And very fuck kill started. Okay. Well, there you go. So. 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 all 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 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 could they make happen on 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 him. 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 fricking 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 it seems that way. It seems like you guys are perfect for each other. You know, I think I drive for crazy. 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 in which you don't surrender all your power. And you do chart your own course. It is possible. So 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. He's like trying to steal 18 years of labor from her. That's pretty nasty. And women are playing into it. And the whole time, the question is, well, 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 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 alienating each other. 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, right? The encouragement of so-called gender positivity, the most ironic term, all right? Or you're, what is it, gender affirming care? Well, you're affirming one gender and negating another at exactly the same moment. But anyway, the point is, it is amazing how our civilization embraces absolutely every single thing that would keep people from romantically pairing up and producing a healthy family. Yeah, I think you just tapped into something extremely right on brand evolutionary about the concept. I forget how you just said it, but you were like women are behaving like the most predatory of men, which is bringing out the predatory side of men. How did you say it? I'm sorry. Women are behaving like men at their worst. Okay. So you ever seen this NYC divorce lawyer guy? Yes. He's great. He's great. I might finally, a man, I might finally do that podcast. He's just been on like every podcast. I've been kind of putting it to the side, but the guy's awesome. And he says a lot of truths that you don't want to hear that then you're like, damn it. He got me. And he said this one thing one time. I saw the clip out of his hole. He's shedding nailed it. He goes, listen, I don't make the rules argue with the fucking wall, but it's the truth. Every good girl secretly wants a bad boy that only she can make good. And every good boy secretly wants a good girl that only he can make bad. And I think what's happened here is that that some of the some of the paradigm has shifted to where maybe they'll just let out the bad right away for everyone such that it's just to find that way that, you know, if that's, sorry, there's no way to say that. Maybe maybe the girl jumps to be in bad right away because she thinks that's what everyone once and then suddenly it creates, you know, this reputation that women are suddenly just loose with their bodies and being horrors and none of them are there for desirable for having a mate and it creates tension from the male side towards the female side and then when the males reject them, it creates tension from the females towards the males because they're like all men just fucking leave and it feels like that's not at all a new phenomenon and that's why it was really hitting me with like your birth control point like when the pill came out 60 years ago because I'm like, you know, that feels like it's probably been in the works over the last two, three decades especially and maybe now I'm thinking it could be longer like you said. Well, I think I think that's exactly correct and I also think, you know, you don't know how many of these things are just happenstance and what of it might have been somebody's plan but the idea that men and women finding each other unsympathetic and becoming very instrumental and mercenary with respect to sex just kind of using each other. That then creates vulnerability to propaganda on every front. If you don't have the partner who stands above civilization and its conversation, if you're basically embedded in the civilizational conversation and sex is just something it's an activity, right? Then you're vulnerable because there's nobody with whom you have a special union. I know it sounds corny, but that it's not corny. Yeah, the special union thing, let's put it this way. Sex is extremely powerful and it can be rendered trivial. The ability of sex to modify a person is profound and foregoing that for, you know, basically the, you know, I don't know, the Uber Eats version of sex is not a win, right? Even if we were to say, the question is how to maximize your sexual pleasure over a lifetime. Okay? Well, there are a bunch of factors in the equation of sexual pleasure. One of them would be frequency. Well, we've now increased the frequency with which you can access it. But another one would be the import, the stakes, right? The sex with somebody where the stakes are high because you can't live without them, right? 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. I 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 is giving 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're talking about, it's very slow. And over time, now, how do you how do you unring some of that bell without saying like, we're going to 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, I've tried to figure out how to navigate this with my own sons, what to tell them. One thing I want to say first, I think it is important to recognize that the problem is a game theory problem. 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 and she just gets ignored, basically 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 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 events. 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. And the question is, is that 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. You're supposed to find somebody who can become your soulmate and then 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 to check 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 fix things to make yourself right for each other. 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. 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 think when people are constantly like, you'll hear people be like, yeah, I'm looking for relationship right now. Well, 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. And, you know, 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 an unbelievable gift, right? The idea of being a human without engaging in that is 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. I want to have your back at a level that nobody else ever will. Those are important, uniquely human things. And bypassing it over some, somebody's guess at the way we're supposed to live is just an absurd thing to do. They also take going through the conflict or the hard times to be able to test out whether or not that person does stand with you when it matters. You know, you can't just like be like, "You know what? I think you got enough boxes checked that I know how you're going to behave." 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 to your face 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 someone who appears like 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 and Heather, as you've laid out today, 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 we got to some difficult point, whatever that is, and we couldn't agree on how to navigate that or how to handle that, and that doesn't bowed 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. Things like, that's funny, tandem bicycles and tandem kayaks are known as divorce boats in the industry because they have caused more than a few divorces, but the point is if you go rent a tandem bike together and then 10 miles later see how you feel, if you've managed to navigate that, it's actually a really good sign, and Heather and I get a ton of that stuff. Oh my god, we shared a tent in Madagascar. We headed off into Central America together with a car that we didn't intend to bring back just to see where it took us. You didn't intend to bring back? No, it was her stroller. No, no, no, not like that. 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. It's probably still out there. The beauty of Central America is that a good Toyota is not something you throw away. But the point is the adventures that we had that revealed that we were actually a very good match for each other that forged us. I wouldn't trade them for anything. I mean, just the those experiences, that is life. It's like life at its most intense, and you want to have that with your partner. A good for you, Brett. It's always nice to hear that too. When we get to observe the two of you, because you do a show together, I've seen that for years, and everything seems amazing. Obviously, nothing's ever perfect, but to hear you express it that way and look back on all of it is kind of reassuring. It's possible. You know what I mean? You can find the right one. It's totally possible, and I will just say, look, I got so many mistakes under my belt. I cringe thinking of it, but I wouldn't change a thing because it would put it 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, Perils. Talking about some of the perils of society. Yeah, we had talked about corruption and wars. Talked about dying in the desert. AI, maybe we were going there. Yeah, so what do you think? 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? The disruption of the job market would be one. 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 fewer, unimpressive, but the ways that this can be used to parasitize us 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 bandaid that will create a catastrophe when the meaning crisis is, you know, taken to the 10th 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 breathing, you're alive, but you're weak into the point that you're not going to revolt. Here's the problem with that. 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 blocking them. That's so dark. Here's the problem. Look, we are useless eaters from the point of view of our overlords. 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. 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 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 taken care of the issue somehow. I just think that that's where this goes inevitably. So do you look at that as a large percentage of the population versus the whole population? And the reason I ask 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 their drivers and stuff like that. 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. So if the world were gone, if the people blocking the view were out of their way, and it was just to select a few of them, does money even matter in that world? We're going to tell about that many people. I don't think money matters now. I think money is for us little people. Well, I think money constitutes 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 mafia's 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 we're 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 at will. So anyway, I don't think money means anything other than you know you can buy a pizza, right? You can buy it. You can use it to exchange for stuff. That's certainly true. But that's a temporary and it's the much less interesting future of that system. So yeah, 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 towards out of my mouth? It's really, even if we take this into a biological context, take people out of the equation. There is 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 cell organisms? Wouldn't that be in terms of fitness or win for you to be 30 trillion times the organisms that you currently are, right? The answer is because your 30 trillion single cell 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 or I thought you're going to say it was going to be MRNA for people or something. No, but my point is your ability to make it into the 2030s is way higher as one organism that functions in a coordinated way than it's 30 trillion organisms functioning in a discord. Great. Okay. That's the same principle that has something above money and even it's control. So wealth is the ability to exert control. Money 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? 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 healthcare 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. It'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't 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 going to 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 human annoyed 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, I mean, you've been put it low, even if what you're saying is a 0.1 percent chance, that is 0.1 percent far more than I'm comfortable with. And it's maybe it's higher than 0.1, to be honest with you. But I don't, 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't. So the economic realities dictate that the robots will replace the people. That will make the people surplus. At the point that 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 dark any more? Yeah. 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, oof, good. But I haven't heard it yet. Are you familiar with Doug Rushkov? I 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 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 few years before code. 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 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 bringing 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? And he was like, yeah, like Jesus Christ, you know, and I wish I could say that was, but I can't. But it's like, they're 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? They're 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 think you should. 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 movie map of where you've been and all of that. That is such the shallow end of the pool. I mean, frankly, that's the kitty 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 never gets brought up in the discussion of what happened to Charlie Kirk, 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, 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-- Oh. Yeah. They're protecting citizens. Woo! Yeah, it's for your own safety. Oh, right out of an Orwell textbook. Empowering governments to protect citizens through cutting edge intelligence. Yeah. 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. Okay. And it's one of a dozen things. We also-- we have the dollar being undermined and what looks like a plan for shifting us to some kind of electronic currency, 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 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 past. A past law. So-- It's interesting. Fascinating. What's an emergency? Oh, it's ill-defined. Oh, jeez. 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 Russ Koff? Didn't hear? Yeah. Douglas Shoshko. Um, you know, discussions about, well, jeez, 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, we are in dangerous, dangerous waters. And again, I would go back to the, uh, the, you know, middle aged Ukrainian men being taken off to the front. Yep. Those are people who don't have power. That's what that is. You're being taken someplace. Pick to the slaughter. Yeah. 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 and lock you up. That's the end of our ability to fight as the end of civilization or something like that happens here. There's nothing you can do at that point. Yep. It's 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've admired you for 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 going to vote for Trump, even if I disagree with some things politically. And I think you have amazing arguments for that. I mean, they didn't want to define what a gender was. They wanted to shut down any speech that they didn't like. The pandemic measures and the vaccine stuff was totally fucked 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 the escalate the conflict in Gaza. You know, I could go on and on and on. All these things remain true. Now the 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. 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's not strike me as something that a guy with his 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 caching 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. 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. 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 got it. He's probably going to lose all the midterms and everything and be handcuffed in some ways. There's got another couple years left. Do you think it's possible for him to even reverse course from some of the catastrophic and 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 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 is a catastrophic mistake. And one that now has a kind of momentum that seems unstoppable. 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, at this one of the functions here may be the hobbling of the United States as a power. If that was your objective, this would be a good way to get there. Yes. So something is being stolen from you. I wouldn't take it lying down because there's no substitute, something. 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 that now we're over $40 trillion in debt, the fed, which is an independent institution, certainly not in a good way, is printing money again and again inflating way 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's own, 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. 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. Synically, you look even as far back as the church committee in the 70s, Frank Church and his next election cycle was spent out of office by money, presumably through CIA sources and stuff like that or at least back by them. You look at guys like Thomas Massey, and now what will be coming up on the other side, Rokon 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 stop things like that from happening? You laid it out earlier. They were able to do AI ads that boomers bought hookline 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 like Massey and you attempt to put them in positions where they can wield power. 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 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 slate of podcast guests. Right. Put them in positions of power. And then we'll go from there. Yeah. Now, what do you think, you know, 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. They 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 we're 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 at a fall and out over politics, because they were so different. 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 spawn 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 brains would just short circuit on the realities of the present, right? 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, 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 it's my fault. I'll take that. 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 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, and 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. Winter take all system defaults. to two parties. So we now have two incoherent, right, dysfunctional parties. If you 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 constitution intervention. 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 throwing out the money changers. Oh, yeah, with the switch and everything. He was pissed. He was not happy. 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, which would still create enormous problems, by the way. But I don't know how you unwind that one. It's so firmly rooted into legislation itself to where they're allowed to do this. It's a tough situation. But you have to solve it. I don't think 10% would do anything for you, but I get your point. Or 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 before you jump in, so why it's number one on my list. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think Trump kind of 180, I think you did 180 from the campaign trail on the Epstein files in particularly. 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 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. I mean, it was more than that. Yeah, that it was certainly a power wielding operation. And, you know, 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 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. But let me let me point something out about the Epstein files. Every time I hear that term, I think that we have, 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 Zoro Ranch? Somewhere there's a memo that explains we're not going to search them out the Zoro 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 in 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 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 about the government. Yeah. This is where that Tucker Carlson's idea of like the Supra government that I've talked about a million times now comes in and I think he's on to something there. Yeah. It's like the people he 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 fixtures like the Epstein's live and layer one is the one that you never know about it and 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 Kiriaku 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, were you getting like a trophy or something? It's like, that's kind of odd. You know, like, yeah, you know, we're going to help with security all that. So Rockefeller comes in, he goes and gets the award one night and then John Kiriaku is with him, I guess like the next day and he's like, yeah, 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? You know, 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 Kuwaiti, he's going to get a bomb up his ass. And John was like, oh, my God, that's really not the world work. So I ran this story by Andy boost Amante, 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, because 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 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 Middle East is that Israel has a foot in the West and 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 doors open. The barn doors 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 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 it may be, at 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 about a try, because the road to their failure mode is dystopia, right? It's total control by people who don't care about us, do not value our suffering at all. And that's unthinkable. So we have to, and I guess just, just to say, 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. 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, 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, you know, 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. And we shouldn't want to. Sure, I agree, and you're also 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. It's loosely, it reminds me of, you know, the hubris of probably all great civilizations that they feel so secure that it is on them, 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 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 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, 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 events 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, 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? Most of the 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 overdosed, so it's like, you're right about that. Let's go with this. I'm sick of these overdue receipts. What we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast was the pause between when it becomes obvious that they're 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. October 7th was more than three years ago. We're talking about Netanyahu and the advanced warning that he 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 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. And so if people somehow are not familiar with all of your social media and your podcasts with your wife, we're going to have all that link 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. Thank you.