Warning On America's Collapse, Don Lemon vs Elon Musk, Racism, Hitler & Rising War | Bret Weinstein

we are being naive not at least publicly entertaining the possibility that our antagonists abroad would take advantage of our famous lack of security and you're going to see why we have to talk about genocide somebody has to open these topics if we are to get past them and not have them haunt our future why has it become a meme to say that America is collapsing like the Roman Empire growth is petered out we borrowed from the future we can't do that anymore uh and now we're getting tribal yes but I don't believe that it is hopeless if I'm honest I believe we will probably screw it up and it will become inevitable lovely yeah um but there's a reason that I'm taking the risks that I am to talk about these things in public which is I believe we still have um the potential to rescue Western ization and probably if I'm honest about it to present a 2.0 version that is capable of dealing with the uh the novelty that the 1.0 version is straining under the the key thing is human beings detect the failure of growth because the failure of growth is not an economic fact it's a fact of resource scar scarcity and it has applied to all of our ancestors for 3 and a half billion years so it's not that you know growth didn't get invented uh in a modern economic context economics formalized an understanding of something that is as Primal as anything else what must be true in order for us not to descend into this other phase the phase where musical chairs the Music Stops and there are way too few chairs in which blood is thicker than water and that's the rule that governs the day the way to avoid that fate is to a recognize that it predicts a great deal about the noises people will make as it's happening so I'm watching the shocking rise in anti-Semitism and I'm thinking it's right on time why because when I did my work back in college about Hitler as a rational monster I understood that the targeting of Jews was a predictable phenomenon that Jews because they live as a diaspora are and because they succeed as a diaspora are a a an obvious Target When the Music Stops you get very concrete about that why does being in diaspora which for people that aren't familiar with that uh you're an outside group living in another country so um people often refer to the Chinese as being part of a diaspora because they have a strong sense of the Homeland but yet they may live somewhere else yep so let's say you've got a population and it's industrious and capable for whatever reason I would argue that those reasons are largely cultural maybe entirely so um but it accumulates some wealth it achieves some position in society and then uh the racist impulses return and one way that you can generate growth for a population is to come up with an excuse to transfer the wealth of another population so the obvious thing to do is to say well you know geez the reason that Germany Lost World War I was a Jewish fifth column and the sorry state of Germany today is the result of being stabbed in the back by these people I mean maybe they shouldn't even be called people maybe they're Vermin they're diseased they're disgusting right you start making those noises and you justify a significant transfer of wealth from one population to another but and this goes back to the question about the founding fathers obviously the time period is different but if you imagine that Germany prior to the Holocaust was a place that involved a few lineages and then one lineage starts playing against the others right well you create growth for the one lineage without having to invent a new tech technology or discover some more efficient way of accomplishing something it's phony growth what is it made of it's made of the stuff that the people you're killing are leaving behind it's made of their homes right you're creating something that feels like growth for one population by targeting another population and when that happens inside of a land mass we call it genocide and when it happens across a border we call it War but they're the same process right you come with an excuse to attack some population that can't defend itself and you create the appearance of growth through theft right I mean if you had a company and it could steal from some other company it would feel like oh well the value of this company just Rose and the point is yes you took stuff from somebody else so I knew that at the point that the growth ran out you were going to get rabid anti-Semitism and frankly it precedes other form forms of virulent racism but you're going to see those too and I know where this heads you're going to come up with excuses for doing away with people who aren't entitled to what they have and that does end in genocide so um you know I think the bad news is this is where we are in history the good news is we actually have much better tools than we did when this happened previously to understand what's taking place and to course but the way you would have to do that is you would have to create a mechanism whereby the population was immunized from the immediate sense of peril that comes when you run out of new ways to generate well-being right when growth is not a sustainable process and the fact that our institutions pretend like all you've got to do you know is keep the thing pointed in the right Direction and there will always be plenty of growth that's not true growth comes from somewhere and it does not come from that somewhere regularly you cannot just create a system that hums along and is always making new stuff there's boom and there's bust and you can't afford to have the bust triggering these genocidal impulses which is what they will do if you don't figure out how to address the question okay uh so right now we have two Wars going on one in Ukraine and Russ Russia one in Israel Gaza uh are they both the genocidal impulse this is tricky I will say something is going on in Ukraine and if there's one thing I know it's that I don't know enough to understand it okay there's the obvious part of it right there's Russia having attacked a Sovereign Nation and now a generation of young men have been sacrificed to this battle so I have nothing but compassion for the Ukrainian people in that circumstance but I also know that there was a question about NATO expansion and NATO behaved in a way that did not elay Russia's fears and more to the point I know that my own government is in the hands of people who had their hands on stuff inside of Ukraine utterly mysteriously before this war broke out why is the son of the president involved as some kind of energy expert inside of Ukraine this is a story about things I don't know right so I don't I can't say how genocide maps onto the conflict in Ukraine I can say it's a complicated puzzle Israel and Gaza the Unspeakable truth is that you have innocent people trapped on both sides of that conflict and you have a genocidal influence on both sides of that conflict it's something I have not I don't think I've said that publicly I've implied it and I've hoped that people would get it and I've been told by both sides that I'm a terrible person but what I said at the beginning of the conflict was that it was threatening to drag the entire world back into lineage against lineage violence that if we want to save the west and save the world we have to rescue the Middle East from this predicament because I don't think either side is being irrational I think they both understand that they are in a fight to the death and in a fight to the death the rules are quite different than you would expect so there there are clearly a majority in Israel who wish to be part of the modern world would like to get along with their neighbors I believe that is clear I cannot say the same thing about the leadership and I am particularly troubled by the fact that Netanyahu himself who um I must say engaged in absolutely alarming behavior during the pandemic also appears to have been a facilitator of Hamas in advance of October 7th in what way what I've seen is video that appears to be Netanyahu advocating for the cynical fueling of Hamas for the purpose of dividing the Palestinians now my feeling is whatever that was everybody who participated in any way in making October 7th occur has no business anywhere near any kind of power this is the last person that should be in charge of a military engagement in Gaza and I don't know what his motives are I I honestly can't say all I can say is that he appears to be a madman and Netanyahu yes do you think that Netanyahu is responsible for October 7th if what I have seen that I believe to be credible evidence of his arguing to fund Hamas if that is accurate then he is responsible in some way in like a conspiratorial hey guys here's the money I know you're going to to do it kind of way if we believe in the consent of the Govern MH and somebody else from outside the governed acts to choose your leaders and those leaders behave badly and you suffer mightily because of the bad behavior of leaders that somebody else chose for you you're responsible do I know what he was really thinking how would I know I couldn't possibly be more of an outsider to this is this a hypothesis or a thesis no it's an extrapolation I don't know how it could be any clearer Palestinians are people I believe that the right that allows me the as a governed person consent over that process of governance extends to all people or it should do you think it matters where we Define a people is that a relevant part of this or it just it's a practical question but I you know this is this is going to drag us cuz I don't know if you're saying that based on the UN Charter which talks about a people and there are certain protections afforded to them or if you just mean look any group of people whether it's somebody in a city or whatever look if you're going to be governed you have a a right to consent in the consent of the Govern sense of that term I believe people have a right to self-determination I am not an expert on Palestinians or the Palestinian mindset I do not know what the people of Gaza would have done without netanyahu's meddling maybe it would have been the same thing I don't know what Israel is supposed to do in light of this absolutely barbaric attack but I do know that whatever engaged in that attack put Israel in a bind there was no way for Israel not to respond to that attack the brutality was calculated to make it impossible for Israel to choose it was calculated to bring about a response that would be overwhelming because somebody thought that was a good idea presumably Hamas thought that would be a good idea now Hamas should be wiped from the Earth Earth there's no question about that these are terrible people whatever they were thinking these are terrible people and eliminating them would make the world a better place that's obviously not the same thing as the Palestinian people and given the way Hamas embeds itself what Israel is supposed to do is not obvious but if there's one thing that is obvious Netanyahu shouldn't be in charge of it okay um so that was born of the question as to whether or not there is a genocidal impulse that we can actually put to bed through conversation by getting people to understand what it is pulling it into the public Consciousness and by doing so eradicate this kind of thing well let let me let me add one thing just so it's clear we are all the product of genocides that does not track for me human history is long yep people killing their competitors is common MH in history most of it has been lost it wasn't recorded you're just saying we are the we're the ones that won yeah we're here and we are also it is fair to say all the product of multiple rapes human history is very long give me give me a percentage what percentage of people do you have are Downstream of a rape oh I think all of us literally 100% yeah I think you as soon as you realize how long a period of ancestry we're talking about the chances that there's not a rape somewhere in each of our backgrounds is approaching zero um that's dark it's dark but it's also yeah it's dark look at it but once you have looked at it realize what that means the potential for rape and genocide side is something we all carry we are also capable of getting past it there is so much hope in that recognition once you realize that you are not condemned to live this reality just because it had a significance in ancestral times that's where Liberation comes from we don't have to live that way we can actually sit and write down our values and we can say what is the system that actually makes us realize those values at the highest level right what would we like to happen with rape well we would like it to go to zero likewise genocide that's what it means when we say never again so when I say that there is a genocidal impulse on both sides we are seeing the predictable outcome of a zero sum game in the Middle East that is triggering potentials that we all carry right we can see exactly why we have to take these potentials seriously in this configration and the right thing to do is actually not beat each beat each other over the head each side accusing the other side of genocide the correct thing to do is to recognize this was predictable and we have the power if we'll stop [ __ ] around with nonsense we have the power to make the future better than the past man I'm with you and look um this this has just become an interview where throwing out a platitude of I hope everything's going to be okay it just does not feel right uh so I will ask the the more revealing question um it is not agreed upon as to whether what's happening right now is genocide and this is um there are several things you feel like nobody's listening to you you're screaming from the rooftops and people just aren't getting it I have a very similar sense when I talk to people people about somebody's frame of reference the the whole life beer goggles that will control how they interpret what people are calling facts and people of quote um Ben Shapiro and say facts don't care about your feelings bro we we cannot agree on what the facts are or certainly We can't agree on what the facts mean and I actually don't think people are playing a game I think people don't understand how distorted all of our World Views are that we actually see only the distortions and to us you're going to get people that look at this and go obviously what's happening in Gaza is a genocide obviously and you're going to get people that obviously that's not genocide this is crazy I can't even believe we're having this conversation and each side thinks the other's trying to play a linguistic game or something like that and they're missing what I think is the real truth which is they they see the world so ferociously in one way there is literally nothing that you could show them and I mean nothing that would make them go oh I see your point and because there is literally nothing that you could show them like let's set the the Jews aside for a second because this just gets so weird so fast especially right now uh in Rwanda like almost a million people were hacked to death with machetes in like six weeks so that's insane and it keeps happening now I've not researched the Rwanda in genocide so for all I know they were both like yeah this genocide and it's completely Justified which then just enters another problem which is yes genocide what's the problem people really become convinced I am doing God's bidding I I am doing the just and right thing in what I'm doing and the only way that I see getting to the other side of that is everybody has to wake up to one simple fact ideas control everything and what I mean by that are you believe certain things to be true you confuse it for objective reality which is physics but you believe certain things are true call it is then you have a set of things your values that you believe ought to be true and so now you have is which they confuse for objective reality and a which they often confuse with just self-evident or Divine whatever and like this is non-negotiable and both of those things will be ferociously debated by the other side who sees the truth of neither they have their own is and their own ought and so until we all go huh I know I'm in the grips of a delusion I cannot see things clearly and so we all have to come to some set of shared values and then you build up from that if we can't share values I don't no matter how much you talk about genocide you will death Loop because people just sidestep it by saying but this isn't genocide or genocide is right yeah it is genocide but hey it's what we have to do that was a very good summation uh it overlaps many things that I also believe I think distinguishing between uh beliefs and values is crucial um what you're what you're saying uh with respect to we are all suffering a delusion I agree is correct I call this the carian crisis and I think we are kneed deep in it and it is if you understand its implications it's terrifying um the cartisian crisis I I named it that after dick Hart Who became spooked when he realized that all of the things that he thought were facts what you say you think it's physics but it's beliefs he had not established himself self and therefore was taking it on some kind of authority um the problem is that the systematically induced blindness that is being inflicted on the public is creating a scenario in which we really can't establish much of anything and that does leave us vulnerable to being sold a narrative right it just fills the vacuum of what you might actually believe in common the obvious right thing for us to want is an agreement on Basics that Enlightenment is better than deciding what you're allowed to believe for example let's pursue Enlightenment let us agree to share facts we can differ over values we should talk about which values should govern how we are to live but we should not be differing over the basic facts and we should be and this is crucial if you love coffee and a little bit of caffeine but hate the Jitters and that afternoon crash that comes with it there is finally a coffee replacement that you've got to try it's from Peak and it's called Nanda Nanda is made from the highest quality ingredients and claims to activate your metabolism promote healthy levels of testosterone production and provide sustained energy without the Jitters or crash with slow release caffeine that comes from fermented probiotic teas Nanda delivers an energy boost that last last throughout the day so you can stay focused and productive Peak has well over 15,000 fstar reviews and for a limited time you can get up to 15% off plus a free rechargeable fro and cup with my link peaklife docomo directly to Peak life.com SL impact to get up to 15% off plus two free gifts using the one tool that actually allows us to establish those facts in a way that is utterly nonpartisan science works because it is built to tell you what you do not believe it corrects for biases if it were not for this one value it wouldn't be worth doing it's too cumbersome and slow but because it is the only system that allows you to see exact exactly the thing that you do not expect it has the capability of telling us what is true and to know that it is true on the basis that it predicts things better than some other idea so that's the tool it belongs to no one or it belongs to us all equally and those who politicize it are putting us all in Jeopardy this is really this is why I I'm trying to bring this tool to people in this way and show them that it applies to the things that they're battling over and that the only uh the only way out is through we have to learn to wield this tool to figure out where we even are in an era where all of the institutions that should be doing that job are failing at once we're going to have to build institutions that work some people think we can rescue the institutions we have I'm less and less convinced of that but I know that we can build something that does the job and we have to stop bludgeoning each other over over the product of scientific inquiry you know the facts are what they are and then the values tell you what to think about them and if you divide things in that way so that we're not battling over the facts based on the the idea that they are somehow themselves immoral then there's there's hope can I try an idea out on you please all right I think that the way the human animal is designed that there is no way for us to come to a cons ensus the only way to get us to operate in mutually beneficial ways is to tap into other base [ __ ] which I will just round to Greed but I don't mean in a bad way I think the only way out for something like Israel Hamas is to get people obsessed with the future of their children if you believe that the brightest future for your your kids could be um getting killed uh being martyred going to heaven then that idea traps you now violence is rad like that's a great way to ensure that your child has a wonderful future if on the other hand you believe my child's future can be full of education and I guess I'll say terrestrial love here on this planet for at least this period of time and tomorrow is going to be better than today and that they're going to make progress and it's going to be wonderful and they're going to grow up and they're going to fall in love and they're going to have kids and you know this is going to go on forever that feels like when I Look Backwards to identify how to move forwards I go yes you want progress health and safety love for one's kin to see them grow up etc etc uh I think you're right on the question of Islam I will just simply point out that there are numerous examples in the Middle East in which Islamic States attempted to modernize were embracing values that were not exactly Western but we moving in that direction and I believe that unfortunately for reasons that in the end were profoundly economic we have disrupted this process we in the west have disrupted this process and it has created a a conflagration that did not need to happen how did we disrupt it well uh the Sha of Iran was installed uh to basically facilitate uh uh transfer of economic resources we overrode a democratic impulse in Iran and it has resulted in a Theocratic Rebellion so what would have happened uh if we had not meddled in Iran would Iran today be where it is or is that entirely the result of resentment against the West that has left a vacuum that has been filled uh by a a um well to connect it to an earlier part of the conversation you have these two bases for cooperation you have reciprocity which I would argue is the way the modern world should be structured and there is lineage against lineage violence and I believe that our meddling in the Middle East has set the course to lineage against lineage violence which we now largely wrongly blame on the content of the religious Doctrine right the religious Doctrine does contain this violence but the question is exactly as is the case uh with Israel right the Old Testament contains some really toxic stuff but most Israelis want to be part of the modern world right the fact that there's this bad stuff uh in the founding documents is not fate um so I'm not sure what to do with that and I've I've gotten detained um trying to trying to explain this connection but the right thing to do is to recognize that we are all better off all of humanity is better off if we do Embrace you're calling it greed I wouldn't use that term but if we recognize that humanity is improved when human beings are enabled to compete in a way that uh ecologically we would call exploitation competition there's two kinds of competition you've got exploitation competition and interference competition right if I bomb your Factor so you can't make stuff I am arguably competing with you but it's a destructive kind of competition if I try to make better stuff than you in order to out compete you in the market and you try to make better stuff than me because you want to succeed then the point is what we get is an improvement in the quality of the things we have access to so what you really want at the end of the day and I'm not telling you I know how to instantiate this but you what you really want at the end of the day is for people to profit when they bring things to the table that improve the quality the length of human life um the way to do that to the extent that there's a something we can describe is to internalize all of the costs of our activities and let the market solve the problem if you let the market solve the problem and if somehow and I'm not claiming I know how to do it because it may just simply not be possible but if you did internalize all of the costs of every product and every process so that at the end of the day the only people who profited were people who made things that actually made us better off you don't need to do anything else that solves the entire problem right there then you get people spending their time trying to figure out how to improve the standing of humanity and when they succeed the quality of their personal life gets enhanced that's what you want that that allows the market to do what it's good at without interfering with our values and um it minimally facilitates or it it prevents the outbreak of tyrannical impulses the market simply tells us uh what things should be augmented and which things should be abandoned based on whether or not their impact on Humanity was positive yeah why has it become a meme to say that America is collapsing like the Roman Empire what are people trying to deal with when they say that I think there is a palpable Sensation that the system is coming apart so I think it's not incorrect to think of collapse occurring I think of it as a slow motion collapse I don't think of the Roman Empire very frequently other than just the simple fact that something that seemed as robust as it must have can also come apart I also remember from childhood the surprise collapse of the Soviet Union but once you recognize that things that seem like they are forever still end uh it's not hard to recognize the signs in in where we are now I guess I'm glad we're finally having that discussion because the risk that that the Republic was going to come apart was there and has been for decades and uh if if we are going to get through this phase either by rescuing the republic or figuring out how to walk away from a a crash landing it's going to be because we understand what the implications are I've heard you say that the rational Optimist position isn't wrong we can get there but we're not going to get there by accident so what is it that is being chipped away at now that's stop stopping us from naturally ending up on the optimistic path I think we have antagonists to our ability to understand where we are and in fact um I've grown tired of the idea of sense making you know that that concept became Hackney but there is some need to Grapple with the evidence around you and to put it together into some kind of model and uh we have some force that is opposed to our ability to do that well it is denying us basic information on readily answerable questions that would allow us to navigate the most basic issues of of life well and so we keep injuring ourselves because something is is acting to keep us in the dark what are some of the things that it's stopping us from seeing well let's take an obvious question from the covid crisis we were told that the MRNA shots were safe and effective they have now been given to literally billions of people we have highly credible claims of certain patterns of pathology that have Arisen Downstream and we have a mind-numbing set of denials over the connection between for example tumors uh various kinds of cardiac issues and anybody who has gone through the process of studying science knows that these are not difficult questions there are difficult questions but the simple are people who took these shots more prone to X Y or Z condition than people who didn't take them that is not a hard thing to ascertain and yet we are just simply going to battle over it till the end of time because it is somehow become important that we not be able to reach a scientifically robust conclusion about it that's what I want to better understand so uh as a student of History I am growing more and more concerned just about a slide towards totalitarianism for a desire for authoritarian control being a good thing seeping into the public Consciousness I look at the world as a battle of ideas and when the wrong ideas become celebrated you get really deep problems so what I'm trying to map is okay uh we have this thing you'll often refer to it as Goliath but whatever an entity the elites the whatever whatever uh government whatever we want to label that thing as is trying to Blind us but I don't think that they care about the efficacy of the V like that doesn't feel that feels like it's the symptom not the thing they really care about what they really care about I think is they want to make sure that you comply and compliance is the game and if you can see that they're fallible and talk about it then it's much harder to get compliance um does that feel right an element of it feels very right but they left us with a mystery they had a technology on which to build something that they called a vaccine very deceptively but they used that term to place it in our blind spot because most people myself included had the sense that vaccines um were tremendously well tested that the the risks that come along with them tend to be small Co has forced a a rethink of that but if the entire Point had been compliance they would have been smart enough to recognize that that the technology that they were using to make these shots was extremely risky and that it could well backfire because the range of pathologies that you could in principle trigger with such a shot was huge so the question is if the real point was can we can we make you take a shot the smart thing to do would have been to give a shot that was effectively uh neutral that was a placebo you know maybe you could have such low concentrations of the active ingredient that it wouldn't have had any impact and if they had done that I think they'd be in a lot better position today because people would not in general have a list of friends who had some severe negative reaction to these things and they would be able to play the same games they play with Statistics to claim that they had been effective and if they had done that and there wasn't a pattern of pathology then all of those of us who were worried about what we were told these these things were going to do to the body uh would look foolish and their ability to get people to comply in the future would be that much greater so I don't have the sense that a simple game of forcing people to comply could possibly explain the shots for some reason they wanted people to take them okay so I want to start teasing two ideas apart so one I want to figure figure out why they want to Blind us while I think it's overblown to say that America is declining like the Roman Empire when if you're thinking the Roman Empire declined quickly when in reality I think it's probably a very slow process uh that we may or may not be in we may get better over the next 10 years and and then collapse who who knows or drag it out forever whatever um so I think it is important for people to understand when they're talking about you or anybody else in that group that I see sort of being attacked now in a way that they weren't five or six years ago to understand when you're saying I think this is worthy of exploration and when you're saying I've explored a lot of stuff and this one I'm really going to plant a stake in the ground uh because I have a feeling we're going to touch on both in the conversation today okay so uh going back to the question I really want to pin down which is why blind us what's the point let's talk about the issue of blinding and I'll just tell you my own thought process I come from a background studying complex systems I'm a biologist I'm an evolutionary biologist and I'm very interested in levels of analysis so I I I come to questions of uh how human societies function through that lens and a hypothesis in such a case tends to be actually a nested series of subhypotheses and you build them out and the more that they stand up to new observations the more truth they are likely to contain so I build up a model and if I see something next week that's inconsistent with it my point is well my confidence in that model is pretty low but if I have a model and it goes a year or two years and all I see are things that actually fit with it I tend to get the sense maybe it's it's right or it's analogous to something that's right so the question of why they are blinding us here is what I have become increasingly confident of again is a hypothesis but uh it's amazing how well it predicts events and phenomena going forward we are locked in competitive struggles all the time inherently and that's not a bad thing in fact it's the engine that makes Western Civilization work it just needs to be placed in I used to think of it as like the explosive energy in an internal combustion engine cylinder right an explosion isn't a productive thing but in that context it can be very very productive but when you are in a competitive system there is a an advantage that acrs to anybody who has Superior information and what I I mean this almost feels too obvious to me at this point for it not to be on everybody's mind but we proceed by imagining that there is a level of patriotism that we share with other people in our system that surely they have the same sense of America or the West being this marvelous structure in which to accomplish new things to innovate and they must therefore want to protect it as well and we have a harder time grappling with well what if they don't see it in those terms and what if actually there's a group of folks who's very powerful who views democracy as a frightening mechanism that can upend whatever it is you're attempting to accomplish based on the whim of a public that may not know what it's doing I mean I actually I understand that concern democracy can do things that are destructive and so if you had a position of power you might view the fact that the public can throw out leadership and install somebody who's saying things that resonate with them with a certain amount of trepidation so if you didn't have the sense that the west and its its uh obligation to the consent of the Govern was a positive thing you might start playing against people that we would tend to think they would be playing uh alongside they would be building up a whole range of topics in which they Superior information allowed them to get ahead at the expense of others I mean this is if we think about a financial Market economists talk about the greater fool how do you make money you find somebody who understands less than you do and you trade things and basically you take advantage of what they don't understand and their wealth is transferred to you in so doing and that actually can be a positive force if what you understand is something about the future that is not clear to others if you're really insightful then you can get Wealthy by seeing the future with greater Clarity but you can also do the same trick by blinding your competitors by making it so that the information that they would use to figure out what's coming is not available to them and what would that look like well this is where the rubber meets the road with this idea it would look like an attack on all of the things that allow us to navigate all of the sources of public truth seeking it would look like an attack on all newspapers it would look like an attack on universities and science it would look like an attack on journals it would ultimately look like an attack on the courts and that just simply matches the evidence that we have all of these public truth seeking mechanisms are becoming Dumber by the hour and what that is doing is it is putting people in people who who see this problem are correctly recognizing that they are much better off to unplug from those institutions and attempt to figure out what's going on outside of them but what many of them do not realize is what a poor substitute for public truth seeking that actually is you know I mean might be good for people like you and me it brings an audience that wants to hear a conversation that hasn't been sanctioned by one of these lobotomized institutions but from the point of view of the average person trying to figure out what to make of the advice that their doctor is giving them or the FDA is telling them about nutrition uh it's a poor substitute and it is the reason that I fear collapse is that I don't you know you can put on a blindfold and you can keep driving down the road for a time but at some point there's going to be a curve and we can't we can't can't drive like this we we have to rescue ourselves from whatever it is whatever Force whether I'm right about its nature or not that is keeping us from establishing the basic facts of Our Lives okay do you see this as a WF super conspiracy or is this just emergent behavior of um people who get into positions of power whether economically like somebody running a big company or politically uh and they think huh I like what I'm able ble to do better in this position and so there's you know whatever 50,000 people that just have that slight inclination of oo this would be a little better for me if I had a little bit more control and then the emerging Behavior starts to look like a coordinated attack but in reality it's just a lot of little people um trying to make their own lives a little bit richer more controlled uh I have substantial confidence that it is going to be a combination of both things now I look at the we F and there's a part of me that thinks that's too dumb and too obvious to actually be the entity that maybe it stands as a a front for whatever actual thing is colluding behind the scenes but I do I do think that there is a component that is quite obviously colluding against public understanding but there are also numerous mechanisms that will cause people to innovate in the direction of that Force without ever being contacted without being paid by it they will simply do it because a system of incentives causes them to uh to to move in the same direction and we see this on topic after topic if we try to establish the basic facts for example of climate change what we find is Fields full of people presumably most of them are well-intentioned concerned about what they see as a real emergency and doing their best to elucidate it so the rest of us can see it but if you if you've lived inside the academy you know also that a field like climate science at the moment will not welcome counterveiling evidence and what that means is that the evidence you see doesn't have the implication that you think it has even if the studies you see are accurate you're not seeing the studies that weren't done that would have provided a different View and across all of these questions our ability to have an open Frank conversation in which all of the evidence is aired is fundamental it occurred to me the other day that this really is the reason that free speech and the free exchange of ideas is so tightly bound with the other rights of the West is that the consent of the Govern means nothing if the Govern can't have a discussion that would allow them to vote in the direction of reason so you can you can wreck a democracy by Wrecking speech even if people are perfectly free to vote for whatever they want you don't need to game the election itself if the public mind is confused by being starved of actual information so that's what I'm seeing uh both in the informal sphere and very much in the institutional formal sphere it is uh it's hallucinating is what we're seeing the hallucinations that will cause a person with suspicions to see them rendered in elaborate form um I don't know if I fully answered your question about emergence versus collusion well so you did in the sense that you said it's going to be a combination of all of them what I want to do is start pursuing what exactly that looks like in reality um because I we may be saying exactly the same thing or we may be saying something different but my take goes something like this um you well know what I'm about to say because you're the one that taught it to me but the Earth uh its rotation it changes its tilt changes there's like these three different things that add up slight variations over different time scales um that caused the Earth to cool and warm and so we have long before humans were here Ice Age no Ice Age Ice Age no ice age and it went back and forth back and forth because of these slight pertubations that change that determine how much cooler things get in the summer how much snow then accumulates over years which then turns into an ice age and then it wobbles back the other way and a little bit of snow melts and a little more and a little more until um you warm back up okay so it's it's these huge huge macro trends that are basically colliding waves and every now and then they hit it just the right way and you get a rogue wave and that's what I think is happening right now I yeah there's probably a little bit of collusion yes there's probably just the authoritarian desire for power um yes some people probably just aren't intellectually powerful enough to hold really nuanced ideas in their head and so when you're dealing with social media and there's just a massive velocity and volume of information H I just need something so I'm team blue I'm team red nice simplistic just tell me what to do and I'm going to do it just so that I don't have to think through all these problems and what this moment feels like is a rogue wave I have no sense of how big the Rogue Wave is I just know it's the biggest wave in my lifetime uh so certainly possible that now compared to the Civil War this is nothing and we're super safe and all is going to be well but what I want to begin teasing out are what are those elements that are coming together now so we've talked about whether it's the WF but just like Elites actually colluding and I will say um the fed the way that banking is run all of that guaranteed even if they're just out in the open it is a group of people that have an agenda and they very much control what you know what you understand what they tell you when they tell you uh they want to make sure that you understand as little about printing money as possible so on and so forth so you definitely have the what I'll call official collusion maybe with the best of intentions maybe not but nonetheless um then you get things happening at the local level where at the Schoolboard level there's movements there that are taking over where they're trying to ice out parents and they've got the FBI investigating parents as terrorists and so you've got some weird sort of local thing happening then you've got what's going on at the uh social media level where people the platforms are being pressured on what to show what not to show on and on and on we go but each of those feel to me that they are driven by the same sort of it's all humans but slightly different things like the FED to me is not the same thing that's going on at the local school board two things and I'm I I don't want us to get lost but your your example the milankovich cycles that cause the oscillation between ice ages and interglacials uh is well Chosen and it it it illuminates actually the way to reconcile your presentation and mine but I think your audience is going to have to indulge me in order to make it clear why so we have these three orbital oscillations we have uh the obliquity of the orbit we have the procession of the axis of the uh Earth and we have the degree Dee of tilt these things are independent of each other and they oscillate on separate time scales we have 100,000 year cycle a 41,000 year cycle and a 21,000 year cycle each of them has a very tiny influence on the amount of solar radiation that actually reaches the Earth even together they have a small impact so if I was to push a button and cause them all to go into the phase where they cool the Earth for one year you wouldn't be able to tell that year from any other it might be slightly cool but it would not be decidedly cool what happens though is that when these patterns align such that they cause the amount of ice that remains in the northern hemisphere over the summer to be slightly larger they turn the Earth slightly whiter because ice happens to be white and white surfaces reflect energy back into space which causes the following year to be slightly cooler when the following year is slightly cooler slightly more ice sticks around through the northern summer the year after that is slightly cooler so almost all of what causes glaciation to happen is the result of this amplifier it is not the result of the milankovich Cycles which set it in motion it is the amplifier that does the work right it's like if you imagine uh you know MC Jagger in the Rose Bowl singing his heart out nobody in the back row would be able to hear very much right it's the mechanisms that amplify his voice but they're not adjusting the content of his voice he's still mcjagger he's just having a huge impact based on all of the things that amplify his voice and then project it to all of the people at home who weren't there that is likely where we are the actual collusion maybe a tiny fraction of what's going on but it's like a navigational fraction it's setting our Direction and then these organic emergent processes are causing it to become a terrifying Force rather than you know a joke where 10 Apes gathered in a room and decided to steer the world in some direction that sounds Preposterous but given the capacity for markets and Fields of study to amplify thinking to amplify motivated reasoning we we get the same kind of puzzle so I don't disagree with you that the majority of it may be emergent but I don't think that's the that's the place to concentrate if we want to fight back but the the way to understand where we're headed is to focus on the part that is doing the steering and um that's not so easy to do because of course we're not invited we have to we have to extrapolate from the pattern on the outside yes but I think we'll be able to describe the um the phenomena of okay we're being blinded we're being censored there are things the the just massive attempt to shrink the Overton window so that so many things were not allowed to be spoken about um which again from where I'm sitting that feels like the um the emergent phenomenon more than just just overlords cuz this really gets complicated I've been over here trying trying to like write down all the things that I think um create this so the current variations of uh the movich minkovich cycle uh but so you've got growth has stopped which we probably need to talk about uh you've got just the internet and social media again going back to the idea of velocity and volume of information you've got the nanny state which I guess Jonathan height wrote a new book about not read it yet but I'm super eager to see uh the consequences of that you've also got uh I forget who wrote the book but about um therapists now just affirm affirm affirm and how that's creating additional spiral of this like sense of I need to be protected uh and then you've also got just the um postmodernist thinking that has swept through the institutions that now is as we have a generation of people that have been taught that they all have Tik Tok and Instagram accounts and they're just like blasting this stuff out there as fast as so you can and now as from my Thinking Beyond the collusion those are the things that are creating this moment do you think I missed anything well you you mentioned it in that last piece um but I'm not sure I'm not sure it's highlighted well enough yet there is an aspect of social media that causes a totally unnatural amp simplification of very natural human Tendencies and I've been thinking more about the Overton window and the fact that it has um it has an analytical uh connotation to it right what are the ideas that are beyond the ones we're ready to to contemplate but then I started to notice uh I've I've become increasingly Su uh suspicious of what I call polite society and more what does that mean well polite Society uh at the risk of causing your audience to think me crazy I I took up I accepted uh Alex Jones offer to come on his program and that caused an interesting freakout most of what most of which was not actually about what I said on Alex Jones program but it caused what I said on Joe Rogan's program to be scrutinized in a way way that was uh new and I think quite mean-spirited um and because people think Alex Jones is off his rocker if you've gone on his show you must be off your rocker let me go look at what you said and prove it yes but I also think there is a [Music] concern I think going on Alex Jones program would have made less sense before Tucker Carlson had interviewed him that that actually brought Alex Jones into a discussion where it had formally been possible formerly been possible just to Simply dismiss him out of hand and the problem with Alex Jones from the point of view of polite Society is that he's not just simply wrong about everything that would be easy to deal with but he's often right and so uh what does one do with somebody who has simply given up up on uh staying within any bounds is willing to explore any idea that's very dangerous to certain folks so my going there you know I'm a I'm a PhD in biology I've made a couple contributions to my field and if I'm talking to Alex Jones it creates a question it it it causes a reexploration of the question of whether or not one has to actually take him seriously so that became the moment at which it was important to come up with reasons not to make take me seriously right so that that question could again uh be sidelined and what I realized was that I was getting a lot of push back um from people who were driving up the cost for me doing what I did right that I there was content in what they were saying but the real message was actually you shouldn't have done that it was a don't go there girlfriend kind of a moment right and so I started to think about what that was made of and I realized that polite society which to me takes the form of um you know like a fractal set of of cocktail parties the people that you want to like you that they have the ability to steer You by threatening not to invite you to the next one and my feeling is I no longer care because these folks have gotten so much so wrong that um it's not obvious why uh their sanction should have value and the more I thought about that question the more I realized that polite Society exists in every era and I leave open the possibility that it might have a positive amplifying effect in a good ERA right that it might spur people to accomplish great things so that they could you know be heralded at the next cocktail party for their their insights but I realized you've seen there are some photographs that were discovered somewhere in the last couple decades uh a Nazi photo album that had been languishing in somebody's attic um and it revealed not the stuff that we're so familiar with from the Holocaust but it it revealed the the private recreational lives of Nazis outside of aitz you know the I heard something about this but no it's remarkable and there there are a couple photographs that I find just absolutely chilling where there are these you know well-dressed Nazi girls one of them they're enjoying blueberries right bowls of blueberries like right outside of aitz um woof yeah it's it's it's wild and I I guess my feeling is look actually no I want to turn the spotlight back on polite society and I want to ask the question which is why should we care what you think at this moment when you you know okay polite Society is very committed to the idea that we have no choice but to vote for Joe Biden because of the you know the terrifying Prospect of Donald Trump being elected again well if polite Society was making any sense it wouldn't be running Joe Biden as a hedge against the reelection of Donald Trump it would offer up somebody serious it would in fact sideline its influence pedaling racket so that that was not an important argument against in blue in this election if it cared about us that's what it would do and the fact that it doesn't do that suggests that actually it's as cynical as it ever was but it wants the little people to jump based on a fear of Donald Trump that is irrational in my opinion right so when that's the game of foot when polite Society wants to turn you know its Gaze on me and say you're out of line but it's not looking at the DNC and saying what the hell are you people doing Do you realize what you're playing with Joe Biden shouldn't have been elected in the last election the idea of running him again at this even more advanced state of decrepitude is insane and yet doesn't cause the the Democratic machine to Blink so anyway my point again I think I think this is important to say clearly I'm not accusing anybody of nazil likee defects that's not my point about the Nazi girls and their blueberries my point is polite Society existed right outside of aitz it exists in every era the fact that it does or doesn't invite you to its cocktail party has to be evaluated the meaning of that has to be evaluated in the context of whether or not polite Society is doing its job of amplifying the good things about civilization or if it's doing the exact opposite and actually making us worse making us Petty and superstitious and that is exactly what I think it's doing at the moment so uh I guess I'm I'm I'm gladder to be outside of it and not welcome at those parties um than I would be continuing to attend them okay so um again this is something that I concretized after listening to you but the idea that shame has its place uh you've said you don't want to throw that out you have to understand it you use pain often times as the example if you go to a doctor and they think that pain is in and of itself a malady that is to be gotten rid of you've got a problem because pain is signifying there's an issue that you need to address and it is adaptive not maladaptive I would say the same thing about polite Society though I will agree with you that you you don't want to blindly accept polite Society so I'm going to take that as the shame mechanism and I'm going to say okay I don't I'm not going to discard this lightly but the thing that I disagree with with and what you just said is that I don't think polite Society will ever be its own policeman and so this is why we need the you call yourself I think a reluctant radical so it's like we need we need reluctant or otherwise we need the people that sit outside of polite Society to also work their thing and so while there's always going to be friction between polite society and the radicals my whole mission in life is to get people to understand that you need to exist in Dynamic tension like you you don't want those two things to informed to each other I would not want poite Society to give up their sense of like this is how things should be and I would not want the radicals to conform to polite Society so they're there you need both of those things they they serve well only when they're in Ju position now getting specific about Alex Jones Okay so one thing that as I watch you you are very much a part of my sensemaking apparatus people can take that how they want but you Sam Harris is a part of my continued sensemaking apparatus and I know people have beef with him and my thing is like I'm not going to believe everything you say or he says or anybody says I think everybody's job is to take the best information they can get discard the stuff that they think whatever for whatever reason isn't bang on and then synthesize their own thing and if you can't think for yourself you already have a problem so when I think about okay for you is there knowing that you use this hypothesis thesis dichotomy is there a limit to what you think is a hypothesis that you will put out there do you have a governing Matrix Paradigm in your own thinking that says this hypothesis I will present publicly this one I won't which will then tie into whether going on Alex Jones may have been I haven't seen it so I have no idea if you were like the voice of reason in the room I think of him as somebody who has absolutely no Overton window he will talk about literally anything and so I would not want to see him censored because hey better let me sort the wheat from the CHF rather than that be a top- down decision however I put him in a very specific box because he has no seemingly no self-governance around what he will talk about so do you have a thing that governs what hypothesis you will and won't publicly explore that's a great question um and it's odd I don't exactly know the answer to it um let me tell you how I think about it though there are certain properties that have a paradoxical nature free speech is one of them we could waste the rest of both of our Lives parsing the various examples of where speech has had some implication and whether or not the effect was negative or positive at a net level but at the end of the day the right answer is speech needs to be essentially perfectly free and the net outcome of that is positive likewise I would say i' I've been engaged reluctantly in a battle with uh a person on Twitter who has been a very strong and I think uh not forthright advocate for the standard narrative on things like covid vaccines he wishes continued engagement I don't want to further engage him because I don't believe that he is actually working forward from evidence to a conclusion I believe he's working backwards from a conclusion and so I don't think it's an honest debate but my point would be this in an honest debate let's say that we have an honest debate over something that matters a great deal like whether or not these shots are safe enough to give to a human being do I say well either the shots are going to kill more people or not taking them is going to kill more people and if I have an argument with somebody about it and I'm I'm saying hey I think the shots are going to kill more people and it turns out that the shots save more people then we killed am I then responsible for those deaths absolutely not the way this works is anybody on either side of an honest exploration ation is contributing to us knowing more about where the dangers are and where the values are both sides get credit as long as they're doing it in good faith as soon as somebody steps out of the realm of good faith they no longer are in that uh that position they actually own the downsides of their argument if you're going to argue that I'm responsible for the deaths if I misunderstand something then the point is well if it turns out you're wrong you're responsible for those deaths because you chose that argument but if if you're willing to participate with me in exploring this and we can take up contrary positions and at the end of the day we both get credit for making the question clearer that's a world I'm I'm happy with so again is there a limit to what I will present well if there is a limit it is uh a threshold very different from most people and it has been I can trace it back at least to college in college taking an evolutionary biology course my final paper the course was taught by Bob drivers very famous and influential evolutionary biologist my final paper for the course was an exploration of the question of whether or not Hitler was in fact an insane Maniac or whether what he did could be understood in it's obviously as IM moral as you get but could it be understood in rational terms from an evolutionary perspective now that is something I've been told is a question we must not explore and worse I've been told that it can't possibly be true right people don't want it explored and they wish to Lodge an answer to the question without exploring it which I I can't respect but the fact that you know since I was in college in would have been 1991 I guess um I've been exploring questions like that tells you that I'm willing to go places others won't now I do so knowing that I do so carefully that I bring tools to the table and that I I have an obligation not to say things I believe are untrue and I am trusting in some sense that the reality that I will end up unearthing is a valuable thing to have awareness of if it is worth exploring the possibility that genocide is a rational objective immoral but a rational objective my belief is the likelihood that we will actually be able to prevent future genocides is increased if we understand that connection could I be wrong about that I could be but I'm a scientist to the core I believe that unearthing the truth is valuable in the end even if you know even if I die believing something that turns out to be reversed later on the process gets us there over time and it is uh it is it it does embolden uh our best values all right this is really interesting um I firmly believe that everybody has a world view it's What I Call Whole Life beer goggles so everyone sees the world through a distorted lens and we all get to distort that lens in whatever way we choose most people don't realize that so they're born with something they live in a value system they just adhere to whatever they grow up with uh but that the warping of that lens is a combination of what you believe your values and your genetics what I'm hearing is a mapped value system from you you uh that makes a prediction so you're willing to explore whether hit Hitler or anybody else that commits a genocide is acting rationally immorally you were very clear about that but rationally some people as you said are going to say that's beyond the pale because if you find out that the answer is yes the world gets a little worse because now I can't just Lop him off at the knees and say completely Beyond The Pale uh it's all bad it's only evil the second you see it evil react go crazy so the value that I think what you just said predicts is that truth and understanding Trump even grotesque detrimental results well it depends if I understand what You' just said um I am not saying that the value of knowing the truth is inherently greater than whatever harm uh might come of it but how will you know until you explore it I won't I could try to parse every instance of speech and figure out which can I do obviously the right to say anything is not the same thing as believing that you should say everything but the exploration of studable-winter but if I go wrong let me know okay this all started CU I'm trying to map the way that you think and uh what you said about Hitler exploring genocide as a potentially rational immoral but rational act uh was to I think explain the underlying value system that you make these decisions on because we were trying to figure out what hypotheses would you or would you not explore um okay so I said that truth and understanding Trump grotesque and detrimental results you said no that's not quite right because you said that exploring that thing does not outweigh the potential damaging effects of knowing said thing so if that's true then in the uh Hitler as potentially rational example you don't think that the knowledge of that um will create a negative outcome that is worth shutting down the exploration for okay I think I now am seeing this more clearly do you have further you wanted to go if I've already gone off track no you should bring no you haven't gone off track I have just completed Bobby Kennedy's new book on it's called the Wuhan coverup it is just like his last book uh the real Anthony fouchy it is mindblowing it's really shocking uh it's an encyclopedic exploration of a quest for bioweapons that I had almost no understanding of before reading this book the bioweapons question uh allows us to see the answer you're looking for because I would not argue that the simple fact that there are viruses in nature that could be enhanced in ways that might tell us something about possible human impacts on health from future uh pandemics um or that might be enhanced in ways that would tell us something about weapons we cannot continue down this road right the degree to which our expl exploration of those questions in the lab will result in massive human harm what if you never made the virus but you just explored gain a function theoretically well that's the question is my sense is a there is no mechanism by which you can prevent people from thinking about these questions nor should you because if you open the door to telling people what they can and cannot contemplate analytically open baby okay but my point is no analytically we have to be able to talk about these things just as I have to be able to talk about the actual evolutionary meaning of rape and genocide right doesn't make those conversations fun it doesn't mean you know could somebody hear a discussion of that and be inspired to go spread his genes I suppose but the value of understanding that pattern the value frankly for women understanding the pattern the degree to which it empowers them to make themselves safer from this Hazard is significant enough that one can't parse if you focus too much on the possible harms you will miss the fact that there is effectively a related rates problem that makes the benefit of understanding these things exceed the cost but I would not take that to the level of experiment right the level of experiment has all kinds of perils that we should not engage but the level of abstraction I believe we are simply better off becoming as informed as we possibly can on every topic that has implication for human well-being have you looked at the IQ literature uh a little what do you think about that that's another hyper fra purely ideological it's just a thought just an idea but man does it freak people out but here's okay but I wish I had a better example for this but when I was a kid there was a uh a children's book uh that we read in my family it was called The Monster at the End of This Book do you know the Monster at the End of This Book I don't but I can make a lot of guesses based on the title The the monster on at the End of This Book is a book in which Rover becomes afraid because the cover of the book tells you that there is a monster at the end of the book and he attempts to prevent the Turning of the pages because every page you turn brings you closer to what at the end of the book is going to be a monster and of course you turn all the pages of the book and the monster at the end of the book is Grover nothing to be worried about right now my point is we can look at all of these topics and we can spook ourselves about the danger that one of these topics is going to put us in some terrible circumstance we can't get out of and that we should try to imagine in advance without knowing what is at the end of the book we should try to imagine in advance which of these topics should be taboo because you don't want to go there but in so doing you are more or less saying oh I know what's probably there and we can't afford to know that in any factual way so that can't possibly be right because how do you know if you haven't gone down that road so here's the thing I'm not afraid of this IQ discussion I think I know about where it lands it could it could have been far worse than I believe the evidence actually suggests um and I'll tell you where I think it goes and uh there is a bitter pill but what is the net impact of understanding the implications of the IQ literature I believe it is actually liberating for all of us humans it is not going to be um the thing that people fear interesting um I don't know the lature so I can't speak to it but I know people well enough to know it will be a mixed bag and so it will be weaponized by some so the real foundational question though is what you're asking are some ideas too taboo to discuss I was explaining to somebody why I find you interesting even as you grow more and more controversial and you give you are giving the world even in this conversation more and more threads to pull on if they have a bone to pick with you however the way I would invite everybody to see everybody else self included anybody that's popping off and putting ideas out into the world uh dip in see what they have to say on a particular topic by all means if you think that they're a lunatic on something ignore that one and move on to the next you have to be able to synthesize your own ideas you have to be able to think for yourself and no one has gotten very far if all they're doing is following somebody Jordan Peterson had a riff on this years ago that I thought was brilliant and has really kept me in check as a podcaster and he said uh if you read a book and you memorize the things that person said in the book those ideas aren't yours yet you don't understand it all you can do is follow and repeat you have to go learn the literature you have to understand the thought process driving all of this and then you can begin to master the literature think for yourself come up with hypotheses that make predictions test those predictions so on and so forth and I thought woo it's a tall bar but that is the right way to approach it and so I like that I don't put you in the uh Alex Jones Camp you guys feel like very different flavors to me uh I like that you exist I like that you're out there looking at things that other people I I think I understand why you're tripping so many people um but I like that you exist and you're not afraid to do these things to look at these ideas and so when I want a well one wellth thought out look at this thing however crazy or Untouchable it may be I like that you will have explored some of those ideas whether again I agree or not now the thing that I think you're doing that trips people is I think we have a uh moralistic in our brain that says this thing is bad don't it's like a disgust mechanism and if you trip it then people just inherently push back they may not even know why they're pushing back they may even be able to give you very in fact I'd love to see you and um Coleman Hughes debate the IQ thing I don't know if his thinking has evolved but I heard him talk about it at one point I I thought his take was really brilliant and it was um I don't see a world in which the answer to these questions makes the world better and I was like yeah word like I get it I'm with you so now I don't believe in top down authoritarian rule so if people want to explore it I think they should be able to but um I'm with him on I don't see how it makes a world a better place I know you have an angle on it um but so yeah I think you're tripping this disgust mechanism that people have and they just they're not it's no longer a rational feeling it's a purely emotive one yeah um I think I think part of the problem is I don't think I make a great villain and there's lots look I get it because I've accidentally found myself on the other side of this thing when Bobby Kennedy Jr emerged back into the public Consciousness I believed him to be a dangerous person because I thought I understood what his perspective was on vaccines and it was diametrically opposed to my position I could not see how a an intelligent reasonable person could possibly be saying the irresponsible things that I believed him to be saying what would have made them irresponsible with your value system that they were unlikely to be true and were almost certain to influence people in a direction that would harm them got it okay so the going back to your definition of a hypothesis is something that is plausible uh and you thought his were just outright manipulations or did you think him too dumb to understand the truth um I didn't have a detailed understanding because if I had if I had spent enough time to just know the style of his thinking and his presentation style none of it was consistent with what I thought I knew about him so I then fell down the same rabbit hole that he fell down and so now people think of me what I thought of him and I'm capable of seeing this as somebody who has woken up to the uh despicable destruction of his reputation um and I'm I can now watch it happening to me and I can think well I know how to prevent that but I wouldn't think very much of myself if I did Silence sure oh absolutely yeah just keep it to yourself keep it you're allowed to think what you want polite Society will tell you that you're allowed to think what you want but be careful what you say in any case um but I think the problem the reason that that I keep getting this message it is that disgust that you're talking about um is that humans are very sensitive to being ostracized they're very sensitive to being ostracized for a powerful reason that is no longer um consistent with the way we live but it wasn't terribly long ago that being ostracized from your lineage was a death sentence and so we have a sensitivity when other Apes start making no noises that suggest that we're about to be shoved out we Panic like a drowning person panics that they're not going to be able to take their next breath and that has made us manipulable in a terrible way and it is part of the amplifying force that you were talking about on social media you know as the group starts to make noises and those noises may not be organic to begin with they may be seeded into that millu by something that doesn't want certain things discussed right the idea of antivaxer for example what does that even mean given what we've just been through right we were told that the people who didn't think that these shots were reasonable were antivaxers and that means that they're either stupid or selfish or both right that's what that term meant to me I now know better but the drive to get certain ideas not discussed because the conventional narrative will not withstand that discussion is very powerful and so I see it as actually my obligation to go where others can't that does not mean that every place is fruitful but to the extent that I discover that there is something we need to be talking about that we can't talk about because it's not allowed I do see it is my obligation to figure out how to talk about it and I'm ready to go and talk about IQ if you want and then you're going to see why we have to talk about genocide and the fact is do I do I want topics like that to dominate my life absolutely not I'm like everybody else I don't I don't want to be obsessed with these things but somebody has to open these topics if we are to get past them and not have them haunt our future which is what they're going to do okay uh I have a feeling that some some people are running an algorithm that says thinkers are obligated in the same way that doctors are obligated to First Do no harm do you think that thinkers ought to be held to the standard of Do no harm it's a great question and it's a fascinating moment to ask it I I you know once a week I think about the question of what the hell happened to our doctors right this is one of the few professions where you actually have an oath an oath and the medical profession just violated that oath on mass it's in constant violation of the obligation to provide informed consent a principle so important that the Allies literally hung seven doctors in the aftermath of World War II for violating informed consent even though that requirement had not yet been formalized so where are we so yes there is a question about first Do no harm but I would point out if you think carefully about what that means it doesn't mean what we think it means right you can't tell a surgeon first Do no harm and then micromanage each move right the first thing the surgeon has to do in order to save you from the tumor is to harm you right they have to cut you open and they have to do so in a way that your body can repair that that damage over time we need them to harm you in order not to net harm you so first Do no harm is not a principle that is designed to to micromanage each move it is a general overarching principle and I've already told you I think what how this sits in my mind which is the exploration of of reality with robust tools with epistemic humility that exploration is what say aves Us in the end right what I need to be true in order to be morally comfortable with myself is to have contributed to that process in a way that moved it forward and what I've just told you does not require me to be right about anything it requires me to forthrightly participate in a process that advances the human ball now I do believe I've been right about a tremendous amount of stuff and that anybody who's looking at the things that I say that cause to think whoa that one can't be right should go back to that track record they should recognize that I'm I'm not telling stories there's lots of stuff I've gotten wrong but what I do what I do very well is I track my own predictive power and where I'm wrong I correct it I am not kept by embarrassment from correcting my errors I correct them they go away my model gets better over time if we all did that we'd be in a whole different place so I think I am living up to the principle as I would apply it to a doctor the first Do no harm I am I am engaged in something that does the opposite of harm it does not mean no harm will be done along the way it will be but the net impact is positive would you rather be known for constantly updating your positions when you get something wrong yep I got that wrong here's my updated thinking or would you rather be known for getting a lot of stuff right depends what you mean I I think the way that you do get things right is you update your positions and the real question that I think you're asking is publicly right you could do all of that work privately and then it creates a very wrong impression about how we get smarter and this is one of my complaints about the The Narrative that we deliver students when we try to teach them how to do great science is we give them a narrative that is overly focused on the things that worked out so they don't have any realistic sense of the process that causes those things to happen right my favorite process is prototyping right I know your first prototype may it may waste aund times as much effort as it saves but it's a proof of concept it tells you that you can save effort if you can refine this thing and get it to work well right that may be 10 Pro 10 prototypes down the road I mean look you're you're asking me a lot of questions that are causing me to say a lot of stuff about how I view myself and uh I do think I'm My Own Worst critic but that that's part of how you clear that stuff away right you can't stand certain evaluations of yourself and so you stop doing the stuff that forces you to make them and what I'm telling you is that the result of that process is not what people imagine right it it's a person I I don't I don't care really how wrong you start out if your process actually takes things that you had that were incorrect flips them so that they are correct and moves forward on that basis if that's all you do it almost doesn't matter how wrong you start out you will end up lapping other people who don't have that process running even if they start out far rer so you know I'm advocating for it I'm using it I'm also trying to model it and um there is every great idea starts with a minority of one that implies something a lot of people can see the logic of that it kind of logically has to be true but what that means is that when you have a great idea the first thing you will hear is that nobody agrees with it right you have to be able to get through that phase and not think oh well God if nobody agrees it can't be right right if you do that then you're you're you're setting your own limit as to how much you can accomplish if you say actually doesn't mean anything right if plate tectonics was a a batshit crazy idea before it became you know textbook gospel then a batched the fact that an idea is batched crazy is not an argument against it in and of itself the question is does it provide you predictive power that's always the question yeah that that is what I'm trying to get people obsessed with you know your closest to the truth when your mental model of the world makes accurate predictions if it doesn't make accurate predictions then you have a problem which is just something I got from business um but yeah it's distressing how rare people apply that to the world going back to um nesting this in people can feel something is wrong uh they meme it as America's collapsing what are what are the elements of the western value set enlightened value set however you want to Enlighten mint value set however you want to think about it that are being chipped away um and I'm assuming they're doing it by closing the Overton window by censoring people um by having that de discussed reflex and pushing back people shouldn't even be talking about that icing people out um what are they what are they actually chipping away at ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see your name contact info social security number home address all being sold to the highest biders online that's why I recommend you take back control of your personal data with delete me their experts search and eliminate your personal data from more than 40 data Brokers and people search sites and then they monitor those sites to keep removing your data if it's ever reposted pay control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for delete me now at a special discount for our listeners today get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to join delet me.com impact be sure to use promo code impact to checkout the only way to get 20% off right now is to go to join delete me.com impact and enter code impact at checkout that's Jo i n d lem.com impact I've done a lot of thinking about the west and I think of myself as a patriot of the United States but even more so a patriot of the West and I believe that although the antecedence of the West can be traced back all the way to ancient Greece that the West was really founded by the American founding fathers and it was founded almost by accident that in order to get the colonies to Confederate they built a system that leveled playing fields in a way that hadn't been done before and I don't think they knew what problem they actually solved and I don't mean to take anything away from them I'm I'm a huge fan of the founding fathers and I think they did as well as they could possibly have done from their place in history what did they think they were doing and what did they actually do well I mean consent of the governed is a radical idea and you know there are again antecedents of it but the idea that you're going to have uh broadscale voting to figure out the direction of a society is a radical departure but once you decide that that may be a better way of navigating getting people to agree to it because they do not see the fix as being in that's the trick the idea of the West is that we shouldn't you know it's basically uh a an application of the rosian veil of ignorance before it existed so you should want to make rules that you'd be as happy to live on the other side of right the your desire for a rule should not be contingent on your position in society we should want courts that can adjudicate questions of fact and questions of law without asking who that law is being applied to it shouldn't matter that's what they did and in building that system they actually solved an evolutionary puzzle before anybody knew what an evolutionary puzzle was so we evolutionists have done a poor job of exploring what I call lineage we have proper language and have since mid 20th century for understanding how kin relationships affect Behavior right we understand why uh a mother may run into a burning building to save her Offspring because that Offspring is the conduit through which her genes will reach the future but we evolutionists lost track of the fact that the logic that explains that when it's your Offspring or your cousin continues to explain that at much larger scales for which we don't have precise terminology that says exactly how many genes are shared a lineage is an evolutionary entity lineages carry our genes through time and by acting in ways that benefit our lineage at the expense of other lineages we can advance our genetic interests why do you avoid the word race for a very particular reason um lineage is the responsible version of the concept race is a racist bastardization of the legitimate concept right the idea that you switch C categories based on one drop of blood from some other group that is a self-serving racist notion and so by saying lineage I'm telling you what level of rigor I'm demanding from the concept is America one lineage no absolutely not in fact that's the amazing thing about it okay so where if it isn't um I mean the one drop thing just feels like gray area to an otherwise serviceable concept of race but uh if it isn't breaking a long race and it isn't breaking a long Nation what is a lineage well no no um lineages are the rigorous version of what we sloppily call Race now I can Define it precisely and you can extrapolate from it a lineage is any individual and all of their descendants okay okay now what will not be immediately obvious is that that becomes an absolute power tool of a concept because it is scale independent if you have no children you are a lineage you and all of your children and grandchildren if you have them are a lineage but so too is is your species a lineage there was a most recent common ancestor and all of its descendants that's a lineage Melia is a lineage the idea that these things are in play evolutionarily is very important it has profound implications the idea that the way the Dynamics in a room play out based on the lineage relationships that are represented there is only something you can comprehend if you've looked at that fractal and you realize that the Frenchmen and the Irishmen May view each other as uh competing lineages um until the Japanese person walks through the door right that the these these Dynamics play out in ways we're all familiar with and we don't understand that we're looking at an evolutionary story but back to the founders in order to Federate the states the founders built a crude set of Level Playing Fields now they weren't perfectly level and there were some major flaws in those formulations but nonetheless what they had to do to get the signatories to agree was figure out how to level them enough that people's fears were put to rest but here's where the rubber meets the road on this one there are two evolutionary bases for cooperation one of them is genes shared genes that's what is flowing through lineages and that is why lineages more naturally collaborate against other lineages than at random but there's another basis which is reciprocal altruism reciprocity can take two individuals that look very different and cause them to collaborate because it's profitable to do so and this is if you squinted it correctly the reason that uh an orchid flower and a hummingbird collaborate right those are very distinct lineages I mean one's an animal and one's a plant that's pretty widely separated they collaborate not because of their shared genes of which they do have some they collaborate because it is profitable for each of them to do so now in leveling the playing fields the founders created an environment in which people who did come from many different lineages had a basy for collaborating with other individuals irrespective of their lineage background irrespective of race now that is lightning in a bottle and the reason that it's lightning in a bottle is that if you imagine that there's a lot of productivity to to be uh discovered through collaboration well if you decide only to collaborate with people who look like you how far you're going to get is going to be limited because some of the best people to collaborate probably don't look like you so to the extent that you build a system in which people collaborate with whoever else brings the right stuff to the table you do a lot better and all of the amazing list of innovations that are American in origin I believe is Downstream of this very thing that the founders created an environment in which people collaborated with others now did they tell you know racial jokes behind each other's backs yeah they did they mocked each other and mimicked each other's accents and all that stuff but the point is at the end of the day there was an awful lot of collaboration that was indifferent to what you look like and who your ancestors were and once other population saw how productive that was they wanted in so it was a contagious idea this is why the West is bigger than the United States is that there's just no argument for behaving in another way once you've seen how good this is in good times but the problem is it only works when you are in a period of growth and we have been in an amazing period of growth when the growth runs out blood is thicker than water and what happens is we go back to our corners and that's what's happening now that's why the West is collapsing that's why our blindness to where we are is going to result in a massive loss for all of humanity is that it is not going to allow us to avoid that Pitfall we're going to go back to doing what we have done genocide is going to become more common and more unavoidable and anybody who sees that connection would do virtually anything to prevent it from happening because it's such a terrible loss to humanity we seem to be doing the exact opposite though it's very much under attack like even if you widen that definition out and say that part of the way that we collaborate Beyond lineage is through specialization so you're good at a thing and we're both going to use um reason in order to get us where we want to go so the scientific method uh you've talked really interestingly about people need to deal with the physical world you can't do everything at a social intellectual level uh go make a car run like you know nobody has to tell you whether it worked or not either the car turned on and it runs or it didn't and having that kind of very tactile relationship with something either works or it doesn't becomes really really important um so we are living in a time where that very process of rationality is being handwaved away as somehow white supremacist or whatever uh which is crazy town to me um so how do we protect this little Ember so if we're right now um stopping people from talking about things uh censoring people to death in fact one thing I'd love to hear you talk about is um Don Lemon and Elon Musk and Elon saying you want censorship so badly you can taste it uh I thought that was a great line and really endemic of something far more than just Don Lemon I think a lot of people uh want to moderate uh and and make sure that some things just can't be talked about so anyway how do we protect that little flame when it is under assault from so many different directions I mean it's a great question and I think it's it's what we've been getting at for this whole discussion I may be wrong about how we protect it but in my opinion the thing to do is to understand it to understand what it's doing for us to understand what the likelihood is of whatever replaces the system exceeding it in this capability I think the chances are almost nil if you destroyed this system what will replace it it will look a lot like history and it will be a lot worse which is not to say that we should ignore any of the glaring defects of our system but we should at least compare it to uh to something other than uh phony utopian Alternatives that have never been established to be possible um so anyway I'm I'm trying to do it I'm trying to explain why we've got it pretty good why addressing the flaws of our system will always be better than scrapping it in favor of some system that hasn't shown any promise and accomplishment in what we've got and I think also exploring you know why history looked the way it did right there is a reason to talk about Hitler and my term for Hitler is rational monster right I don't diminish the horror of what he did obviously in fact I'm more familiar with it than most but understanding why that would have happen if you imagine the the reason I engaged in that uh exploration when I was a college student was I was afraid that it was just too easy to dismiss them as nuts if you dismiss Hitler as nuts well then there is nothing to be done to prevent the next one right you can't prevent radical dysfunction somebody's going to be radically dysfunctional if that's it it's just there's nothing to be said on the other hand a rational monster can be disincentivized from doing what they do you can prevent Hitler from emerging by making it irrational to do what he did how do we decide who's an irrational monster we don't have to we don't have to okay so this is actually bringing back a bunch of threads let's take the case of rape right and let's remember that the reason that rape is on the table here as a topic is that it's the the shallow end of the pool with respect to how knowledge helps us prevent something that we that all reasonable people agree is is terrible mhm a rapist can pass their genes into the future by raping civilization can prevent men from doing this by driving the cost up so high that it's not worth it that the profit that can be made by doing this uh is uh small or or negative but even more importantly let's just notice that rape is essentially impossible for many men to commit and the reason is because it's not a turn on right in order to rape you have to be turned on by the process so why is it that so many men are really incapable of it is that genetic difference no it's a developmental difference we have the power to make rape disgusting and if we do rape make rape disgusting then it becomes vanishingly rare by virtue of the fact that it's just off the table for most of the people who are physically equipped to do it that is an important leverage point we as a society ought to hold values that cause us to raise Boys in such a way that rape is disgusting to them by the time they become adults and that's readily possible so if you didn't have the discussion if you said well look I don't want to hear any discussion of why rape happens because you're going to legitimize it then you never get to the point of realizing oh well actually we have a tool at our disposal it's not a simple one it's not you can't snap your fingers and make it go away but you can say well three generations from now would we like rape to be a historical consideration and not a modern consideration of course you would right The Leverage Point exists in understanding it but you have to have the courage to get to the end of the book before you realize that you have that tool at your disposal now the question is rape is Loosely analogous to genocide rape is the individual version genocide is the lineage level version do we have a tool that takes genocide off the table if we are capable of understanding why the idea keeps reemerging right we said never again after the Holocaust but how many genocides have we seen sense never again didn't work so if you really believe in never again then the question is well what tool gets us to never again and I would argue I don't know what the tool is but I will uh tell you the most likely place to find it is with an unflinching investigation of genocides their causes and any instances in which they've been averted through wisdom or the altering of incentives or whatever it may be so why am I going down that road is it because there's something perverse about me am I fascinated by Despicable historical patterns um no I'm I'm terrified by them and that's why I I really think the the route to preventing them comes and understanding them uh interesting that we have to so it you're spreading the meme through the layer of culture you're saying uh we have to bake into culture that this is just absolutely abor I think what people are going to well people may or may not hear but as you were saying it this was the first thing that I thought is that this idea ends up becoming so identified with being disgusting that it trips the disgust filter which then makes people want you to stop talking about it and so there's a potential fascinating oscillating Loop of um people Force other people to stop talking about it so much that it becomes so taboo that suddenly it has to be reinforced uh it's possible that we're living through a moment like that with certain things though I would I'm either old school but rape is still pretty uh disgust triggering for me yeah um does not feel like that needs reinforcing wait wait wait wait wait yep I think we're missing something though because I mean I'm not into porn I I think porn is a uh a terrible error I'm not against erotica it's not that erotic content throws me me but interesting you have a line though erotica fine porn bad yes porn apocalyptically bad can you draw a line I can I can't operationalize the line but I can tell you exactly where the line is okay the line is was the motivation for the production of the content profit interesting okay you could make great art and get paid for it in fact I think you aspire to this yes um so the fact that you get paid for it the fact that you did profit doesn't tell us whether that's what drove you to make it but if the thing that drove you to make it is profit and it's erotic in nature that's pornography interesting which isn't to say that every item in porn is harmful hold on yeah if I make hardcore bondage super dominant aggressive almost rap likee porn but I'm not doing for money I just think it's beautiful art sincerely yep no I get it that would be okay well it's okay the line I'm drawing I my feeling is a wise person and unfortunately young people are never wise they can be wise beyond their years but they're not wise because there's no way for them to be that but uh for a young person I would say you draw this line in an absolute fashion you do not let anything that is likely to be pornography right you maybe you don't know for sure why they made it but if you think that somebody made that thing for profit you do not let that into your sexual mind it's terrible for you and it's terrible for your future partner that seems like a really weird line to draw with a profit thing I would so just as one guy speaking from experience uh the loop I would worry about is volume initial age of contact given how brains develop and then um the type so if it were like super vanilla it's um you know like wedding night missionary like really simple loving awkward I'm less concerned if it's an Ever escalating Loop of like freak show that starts at age 11 uh now I'm very worried about what they will imbue but even if that [ __ ] was art from top to bottom and the person making it was just like I just want to give to the world I'd still be like don't do it well look I'm not arguing that everything that would fall under the category of erotica is inherently defensible just as I believe in free speech but I don't believe that you should say everything I believe you know you should choose very carefully what to say and most speech is probably bad even though you should be entitled to or make any argument you want um but let's look at the case you you know you've you've drawn a Continuum between plain vanilla stuff that's erotic for the most basic human reasons uh up through super extreme stuff here here's my point about the profit motive the profit motive inherently drives you towards the end of the Continuum that you ex that you instinctively are repelled by and the reason for that is because all pornographers are selling the same thing sex so how do you compete in a world where all of your competitors have the same thing for sale and the answer is through an escalating battle over extremeness that inevitably eventually goes to Taboo now I believe that those taboos presumably all of them evolved for a reason those reasons may not be think that we understand or in some cases we might understand them but the idea that you because you can sell people something because they haven't seen it before because it's taboo that you should do that that's insane right those taboos this is a chesterton's fence issue you don't know why something is has been off limits but the fact that the market will drive people to explore it tells you that that motive is suspect and so anyway again I'm not telling you I know how to to operationalize the line between uh porn for profit and erotica that's made for other reasons and I'm not telling you that all erotica is good but I am telling you there's no defense necessary for human beings producing sexual content or gravitating to it I mean I do look at you know marvelous sculptures of naked women and I wonder you know is is that the porn of the day right and is it is the fact that I'm looking at such a sculpture in a museum and that I appear to be you know uh engaged in an elevated activity rather than you know a base activity is that the Distortion of history and the fact that our civilization has grown so crass that uh we we miss what's going on and I don't know the answer to the question but human beings make erotica they always have and there's nothing wrong wrong with it and I would argue against anybody who uh said that we shouldn't because I don't know what role it has played but pornography for profit is dangerous precisely because it leads in the direction of uh exploring Realms that are bad most especially violence this is one of the things that I again I don't think this is an abstract discuss discussion at all the if you want to see rape eliminated then the one thing we mustn't do is eroticize it which is what we're doing because the market can't help but explore that Niche so I mean I think this is a great test case right does it make sense to explore all of these things that people don't want talked about well I don't know I feel like I just presented I'm not saying that we will embrace it but I feel like I've just presented a map for how if Society decided it was serious about eliminating the scourge of rape it would go about doing it not eroticizing rape would be a great start because to the extent that rape is not erotic it becomes uh near impossible um and I believe the same thing is true for genocide it's just a more complicated puzzle so and to go back to an earlier point I don't think anybody out there has a valid argument that says you will not find the solution to those puzzles by understanding them I think that argument is suspect on its face I think we we are likely to find the solutions to these puzzles by understanding the puzzles and if we don't the likelihood that we will make them worse I think is vanishingly small Elon Musk has said uh multiple times and I actually think he's right if you want racism to go away you have to stop talking about it all the time that flies in the face of what you're saying right now which is we need to talk about it make it taboo keep it in a certain box no no no no I I would I would instantiate the principle that I'm uh elucidating differently and in fact this is why uh I thought the question of IQ is is another good test case what do we find if we actually go down that road well I don't think most people are ready for it but I think if we did go down that road what we would find actually uh it didn't have to be a good answer but I believe it is a good answer when you say it's a good answer so here's what I uh imagine happens and I do want to get back to the context we started this in which is what is happening to Western civilization but just to take the IQ thing so it doesn't keep coming back up uh I think there are two hyper dangerous things that if solidified can create real problems um whatever is true is true I think the truth is an absolute defense I am not saying people should not look at this I'm just saying I get why you're not going to find me running to have this conversation uh if you find that Jews really do have a higher IQ that's not going to go good like people are going to have a real [ __ ] hard time with that that that is going to be weaponized yep and if you find that uh black people have a slightly lower IQ then that is is going to be weaponized and both of those things are horrific and they will there's no good that comes out of it now again the truth is an absolute defense whatever is true is true um but godamn like those are the landmines that people are trying to avoid and given that I think ideas really do run the things uh they run the cultural currents that there are some ideas I just don't want to spend a lot of time with um I get it but I think uh I get it really well because I do think that if the truth were as simple as what you just outlined and the implication were the one that you didn't state but was carried in what you said um that would be a disaster for Humanity and it's possible I'm not interested in that answer I'm relieved that I don't believe it's true but here's the thing that was missing from your description your hypothetical description of a bad answer that would do harm to humans to explore it to say that IQs differ between populations is almost certainly true and substantially so true that is not what most people hear when they hear a claim like that is that that must mean that the genes produce those differences it's not what it means and the difference between distinctions in cognitive capacity that are the result of genetic differences between populations and the significant distinctions in cognitive capacity that are the result of things that are developmental is all the difference in the world right if you knew knew that there were important distinctions between populations but that those distinctions were not based in genes then the answer is oh well can we level everybody up is part of the game the reason that people are blinding each other about keeping your competitors in the dark this is obviously an undercurrent for um the cryptic Warfare between populations and so my feeling is look I don't believe here's what I think people imagine and here's what I think uh underlies the the hypothetical you put on the table people look at sport and they they think they know what must be going on with the brain right because it seems like it should be analogous right we all understand that the capacity to engage in different sports is not evenly distributed between populations it's radically unevenly distributed and somebody who hasn't thought deeply about this may say well seems like there should be every analogy between cognitive capacity and physical capacity and so I think we know the truth about the differences between races because we've seen it you know on the basketball court and the hockey rank and the long jump pit and all of that it's a bad analogy the reason it's a bad analogy is that there's a very good reason that human populations radically differ in their athletic capability across different sports there's a very good reason and it's because they came from different habitats so you find Ethiopians are absolutely dominant in Marathon running why oh because Ethiopia is really freaking hot and the key skill if you're an Ethiopian at a physiological level is the shedding of excess heat right the ability to build up too much heat is lethal and so they become lanky and lean right they they are shaped in such a way that maximizes their surface area to volume ratio so they can shed heat it's the exact inverse of what an innuit has why are Inuits round well Inuits are round because it's freaking cold and you want to shed as little heat as possible so you you want to minimize the surface to volume ratio if you're an Inuit and so why are the Inuits not dominating Marathon running because they come from the Arctic so the reason that humans differ across all of these physical capabilities is that different habitats select for different things you would expect them to differ because is it better to be round or lanky well tell me where where we're going to compete and I'll tell you which right there is no better it's all about without adaptation to particular habitats this is not true cognitively there's no habitat that selects for stupidity what's more the ability for genes to alter your physical structure right the ratio of one bone to another is tremendous but that's not how the mind forms there aren't enough genes to build a mind by blueprint the mind is the result of a very very basic process that is set in motion that then is exposed to all of these developmental influences so here's the bitter pill of IQ populations differ in their cognitive capacity as adults that does not say that those differences came from the genome and here's another bitter pill there have to have been in evolutionary history significant differences in cognitive capacity between populations that did come from the genome in order for our brains to have gotten as large as they did those with more capacity had to have outcompeted those with less capacity so that did happen it is possible but the question that we are left with the one the one that we are avoiding because of what we see on the basketball court and because of what we see you know on the soccer field the question that we are avoiding uh is what would you have to do to democratize the things that make us smarter my feeling is every population is under shooting the mark substantially right we have not properly studied the question of what development developmental environment actually makes you smarter right and we are not doing well I think it could be done much better and you would find every single population on Earth would rise radically if we actually put kids in an environment that that uh brought the best out of their capabilities but what I don't see is a substantial reason to think that within a species with lots of interbreeding that we have these genetically based cognitive differences that reside in one population and not another it doesn't make sense that they would so what was that 8 minutes 8 minutes and what I've said is there is a very strong chance that by avoiding the question of of how cognitive capacity is distributed by lineage that you are avoiding the remedy that might make us all radically smarter and neutralize the differences do we really want to avoid that question I think the solution lies down the road of understanding what the distinctions are and frankly I think we all believe in the distinctions why would anybody fight for better schools if how the quality of your developmental environment didn't have an influence on how smart you ended up I think there's a lot of assumptions in the things that you're saying I'm not familiar with the literature I have certainly heard that um intelligence is inheritable to a hyper distressing degree um now a across lineages I have no idea I think I made my reasons for not even wanting to look at it pretty clear so I'll leave that alone but yeah I think you've explained it perfectly it unfortunately brings me back full circle to but the moment we're in now in the west is despite all the incredible things that it has rained upon us the absolute just embarrassment of riches that it is to be born into the Western Democratic world uh now people are tearing it apart I saw a video the other day where that the guy was like uh oh I'm at this March because I want to end America he was like all of us do and I was like what so you've got at the ground level people are trying to tear the West apart you've got just absolute weird things happening at the government level clearly power grabs you've got censorship going on left right and Center um given how much ground we've just traversed can you put a button on um why blind us why are they so worried about what we see and say yeah let me flesh out the concept I started with and then let me uh as long as the punchline is why they are doing this I'm here for it yeah well I mean the problem is who are they and how specific can we be about why they're doing it um but if we put those uh nuances aside and then I will return to the question of where there might be hope given all of the reasons that you've just outlined for despair I've come up with a concept called the time traveling money printer the time traveling money printer is based on the idea that we all been through the thought exercise of what would you do if you had a time machine right well if you had a time machine that could go forward in time you could go figure out what's going to happen and you could come back to the present and place your bets in the market and make tons of money right if you had a time machine that went backwards you could go back and you could buy apple and Microsoft and Amazon make tons of money so we all get that a time machine is a money maker but there are no time machines as far as we know I'm concerned that some rent seeking Elites have rent seeking for those that don't know because I always have to look this up is people that manipulate the political system to their personal gain I would describe it differently I would say it's people who uh make a profit through activity that is not productive the dictionary disagrees with you oh God yes well uh I'd be willing to Hash this out in a fight to the death with a dictionary but um but in any case uh let's imagine that we have some folks who have got some uh some unearned power who wish to have more power and control and don't wish to be upended by competitors who are more clever than they are something like that well they don't have a time machine but what they do have is enough control to render the truth seeking capability of humanity lame they have the ability to pollute what we are able to deduce and therefore if they can privatize the knowledge of what is coming it is like they have a time machine right let's take an example strong evidence suggests that the covid pandemic whatever its nature was already happening in China in September October of 2019 and that Elites knew this did they immediately run to the public and tell us or did they make some phone calls and say Here's what's coming down the pike um cruise ships are a bad bet you should short you know the cruise ship industry Airlines uh I would go big on uh home deliveries of this that and the other so you can just imagine it's as good as a time machine if you privately hold the information about what history is about to do and the public is unaware of it the opportunity to make money is Limitless so that's a why somebody would have engaged in blinding us because the Blinder we are the more powerful their money printer is and I believe that this happen and actually there's a tremendous amount of evidence much of it is uh laid out in Bobby Kennedy's book on Wuhan um that uh there were incredibly precient Investments made by Bill Gates and others in companies that you would have no reason to think were about to have a spectacular rise that just so happen to have the the goods for producing mRNA vaccines that would just so happen to take over the world this sort of thing so anyway I don't know exactly who we know some of the players Gates appears to be an important player who seems to know what's going to happen in the future before the rest of us do um and why is obvious because for the same reason that people rob a bank you know this is safer and uh much more uh lucrative to place bets in the world based on private information it's uh it's a good gig um and so anyway that's what I that's what I think is happening we're being systematically blinded because there are some people who are sophisticated in their own diabolical way who think well why the hell would I share useful information about reality if I could use it to my own Advantage instead what do you think about somebody like Don Lemon who really does seem to want to censor he's not I really don't think he's doing it because he's going to make some pre bets and he wants to keep everybody dumb I think he represents the person who's like yeah you've tripped a moral thing in him uh that probably plays out something like somebody needs to be the adult in the room um the thing that he kept saying in the interview with Elon Musk was um you you need to moderate this hate speech like hate speech has gone up what are you doing you need to take this stuff off your platform and no matter how many times Elon said uh if it doesn't violate the law or our policies we don't take it down uh we just don't promote it and he just kept going you need to moderate this stuff um what do you think about that is is moderation propaganda for censorship as Elon says or um is it the flagrant um Embrace of hate speech that Don Lemon sees it as well I know very little about Don Lemon except that the six times he has risen to my awareness uh he's been impressively foolish um so I don't know what that is I don't know that he's organic or not organic I don't know I don't know what his role in the universe is um but let's put it this way you've got a vacuum of comprehension based on the sabotage of our educational institutions so people are Dum intentional sabotage I don't know I assume I assume uh the same think about it this way an institution that makes other people's kids smarter would be viewed hostile by ruthless players who wished to take every Advantage they have and parlay it into wealth and power so I don't think it's an accident that our universities are uh completely incapable of figuring out whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 whether men can become women uh that confusion is serving somebody at what level was this a bunch of industries that decided that they needed to uh disrupt the discovery of inconvenient things uh was it more systematic than that I can't say I think they're probably is a certain amount of systematic sabotage but I how would I know um but in any case in a world where you just don't have those truth seeking mechanisms they don't work in fact they are more likely to spit out the inverse of the truth than than the truth itself um there's an awful lot of room for various bad thought processes to take over and one of the things that you should absolutely expect is that where our forefathers have discovered a counterintuitive truth it's going to get uninvented free speech it's not obvious most speech is probably pointless and of the speech that has an impact a huge fraction of it is just bad so of course somebody with a childlike view of the universe would think well why don't we just get rid of the bad speech and certainly there are some things that are so obviously bad speech let's just start with that right but as soon as you get there you realize oh somebody's going to have to draw a line and they're going to come up with all kinds of utilitarian reasons that they have to draw the line farther and farther and farther and so the point is no actually you can't do any of that don't do any of that because it's if you step on that slippery slope it's a disaster so it's counterintuitive likewise the um standard and burden of proof in a court is also counterintuitive most of the people that we charge with a crime are probably guilty so why would we force the state to prove that Beyond A Reasonable Doubt why wouldn't we just say well if the evidence suggests that the person committed the crime they probably did and you know how often is that going to go wrong no Founders they had a counterintuitive understanding which is the power of the state is too ferocious and that you have to hobble the state in order to give a person a Fighting Chance because even if on the average day a person where the evidence points to their having committed the crime probably did if anything causes the government to take a dim view of political compass s or whatever the government needs to be hobbled in its capacity to rob you of your freedoms right that's counterintuitive so anyway my point would be we have lost sight of all of the things that we used to understand right there are men and there are women we used to understand that now it's that's some crazy battle right 2 plus 2 equals 4 yep the symbols are arbitrary but the concept is not the least bit arbitrary it's doesn't need discussion right but it's now up for discussion you know is pedophilia bad yeah we used to know that pedophilia was really bad there was no reason to you know play Devil's Advocate over this and yet suddenly this topic is back on the table so we are losing sight of all the things that we understood all of the Bedrock that Civilization is built on um that's in part because the vacuum of understanding and the sabotage of education is uh opening the door to us just simply uh dusting off Concepts that we had gotten past but it you know the other thing is that when somebody is advocating for censorship what probably happened is they find themselves in a temporarily advantaged position and they would like somebody to hardcode the biases that favor them in the moment so that they continue to and they don't understand that they are very likely to end up on the wrong end of those very same principles and therefore the wise position is no we don't do that we don't do that it means you're going to have to tolerate some bad speech yeah yeah I think that's exactly what that boils down to is people not being able to project out where that ends up how that comes back to bite them in the ass and one thing that we haven't talked about um is that being able to talk is the same as being able to think and so if you really want to Hopple people and keep them dumb and keep them under your thumb uh just make it hard for them to clarify their own thoughts and to put ideas out into the marketplace and see what comes back it's very interesting uh we've got the people trying to Grapple with the current situation which isn't just we're being blinded that's certainly part of it but part of the milu is just all the foundations are gone and that unored Us in ways that nii warned us about and now that those chickens are actually coming to roost quite some time later but it's really playing out people are trying to re-embrace the traditional okay and now broader thing you've got all this crazy [ __ ] going on in the government including uh whatever the hell the migration crisis is feels like we're being bombarded from every angle and oh just in time we've got AI to uh confuse things to make us not be able to even trust our own eyes to uh I just don't even want to think about what it's going to do in the 2024 election but it feels like that while I'm very optimistic about where AI takes us I worry about this Valley that we're going to have to cross in order to get to the other side and it feels like it's just like another one of these things that gets lumped on top of us do you have like a family rule about AI is it embrace it as fast as you can is it be wary of it what do you how do you think about it uh we have been avoiding it and I I think this is an open question because avoiding it is um concerning you don't want to get left behind if the if the skill of the future is wielding that tool better than others you don't want to be left behind but I'm concerned about contacting it I I believe what we are doing here what we do on Darkhorse the the world of people hashing these questions out is not entertainment I believe we're hashing this stuff out for for a reason and whether we think of it in these terms or not we are attempting to build up a toolkit in a population of people that maybe they participate in some podcasts maybe they watch podcasts whatever they do but if you and I are having a conversation we stand in for an audience that is in some way involved in this conversation maybe it's we imagine them listening and try to phrase things so that they follow it but we're advocating for a set of values we're advocating for some beliefs things that seem certain enough that you could put your weight on the ice um and I think we are building up capacity for an increase in the dosage of the hallucinogen that is effectively in our water right and I will say there there's a part of me I've done some hallucinogens didn't do a ton of them but enough to have really thought carefully about what the impact was and one of the things that I am grateful for is to have experienced those states of mind and then returned to a normal State of Mind allows you to be skeptical of your own thought process at a high level right you see things that aren't true and then while you're hallucinating or you're saying when you come back well presumably both that's what you realize yeah but but here's the thing as Society has gone nuts and it's advocating for a bizarre U portrayal of the facts and I have a sense of what I think is true there is a part of me that knows what it is like to believe false things as if they are transparent realities in front of your eyes and so I think that would be a useful experience for people to have so that at the point that they are arguing uh vociferously for some perspective some part of them is aware that they could be convinced of this and it be absolutely false that is a uh an experience that we all need to have had given what we are living now and what is certain to get worse in the near future it's interesting I've not looked at this closely enough to know how people respond but from the little bit that I've seen it seems most people take away the exact opposite which is oh my God there's a door and you just open it now I'm in this totally real thing that shows me that there's more to life that God is real and dimensions and aliens and uh cue the comments people will say Tom's never done DMT so he doesn't understand that of course we all visit the same alien or whatever the thing is uh which I agree I have not and so it is entirely possible that I walk away from that but I have a worldview that tells me I will walk away saying it felt like right I encountered an alien but what I know about my mind is that uh it works in a certain way that it has an Essence and if all human Minds have the same Essence and that thing unlocks this sense of presence or whatever that it probably has a lot more to do with that than it does that I actually ended up meeting something totally agree with you um totally agree with you which is part of the the and I will tell you I uh in an effort to become the world's biggest buzz kill I have uh taken up arms against the idea of entertainment or Recreation both of them um full stop kind of tell it's a it's a lot um it's a lot like my position about pornography versus erotica interesting what do you worried it's doing to your mind uh wasting it really yeah but look here's my point if if hallucinogens aren't your thing if it's not something you should be doing don't do them if it is something you should be doing don't do them recreationally now what I'm saying is not don't enjoy yourself I hope you have I hope you laugh the whole time because of all of the insights that you take away from it and then I hope you reflect on what those insights were and how they looked from that state and how they look from back down here on Earth right what I don't think you should do is be casual about it it's such a powerful tool that to squander it on something foolish doesn't make any sense make use of it and I believe this about I believe this about sex frankly this is a power tool it's very important right if somebody gave you a Ferrari going in doing donuts in the parking lot is probably not the way to treat it right every now and then well sure I mean on a snowy day but but the point is look there are all of these things that create this tremendous reward and that reward is built into them for a reason an evolutionary reason to use them just to trigger the reward without accomplishing whatever it is that's supposed to make you feel good is is like well I mean there are a lot of drugs that I don't think are interesting drugs that can trigger a sense of uh overwhelming excitement without having done anything well you are supposed to experience overwhelming excitement in life when you've accomplished something great if you can chemically trigger it what have you just done to your motivational structure right so what I'm saying is not don't enjoy these things but enjoy them at their full depth right it's not entertainment it's not Recreation right read a great story not because it entertains you it passes the time but because it enriches you because it makes you into something you weren't before you started the story it's that good it Alters your values or your understanding of yourself or the universe or something right I don't see that as entertainment um all right well speaking of something that uh one should take it its full depth that is definitely not entertainment but makes me feel like I'm on hallucinogens talk to me about what's going on at the border that is uh that one's out of left field it's pretty wild it's pretty wild and the fact that it is simultaneously an undeniable fact I mean you could go visit it right and you could see it and it's a m it's a mystery why would anybody allow this to happen it it it violates all sorts of things that we all thought were Beyond even needing to be discussed right the nation has to control its borders that's part of anyway you asked what's taking place you want me just to describe what I saw so um my son and I Zach went uh to Panama and we traveled to the province of Darion to the edge of the Darian Gap actually we went into the Darian Gap um but we traveled by car to the edge it uh the Darian Gap is a broken it's a section of the Pan-American Highway that has never been built the Pan-American Highway runs from prudo Bay Alaska to the southern tip of South America whoa you can drive the whole way except for the 60- Mile Stretch at the border between Colombia and Panama um what is there is a Wilderness um there's a national park and it is a extremely a famously difficult stretch of land to cross there are currently thousands of people thousands a day being beckoned across the Daran Gap largely by the International Community which is facilitating this massive migration MH um some of the people who are migrating are South Americans there's a lot of people from Venezuela a fleeing uh economic collapse there um but there are a lot of people coming from around the world they fly into keto Ecuador the reason they fly into Ecuador is that there's no Visa requirement so they can land in Ecuador without a Visa they can move Overland uh into Colombia and they can cross the Daran Gap into Panama so what we saw was on the Panama side we saw what I came to understand as two distinct phenomena there's one won massive migration lots of South Americans lots of people from elsewhere in the world from the Middle East uh Yemen um people from Haiti uh the they are housed in encampments that are um built in settlements that exist in Darian already so people are walking out of the Jungle they are walking into these little towns that exist on the edge of the Jungle these towns have had refugee camps built up by the International Community so the panamanians aren't happy to have this massive migration moving through uh their habitat but they have no control over it how's that possible well the Panamanian border is supposed to be controlled by the ca front which is the Panamanian border Authority it's a is it a separate entity yeah it's a military police entity that is charged with controlling the frontier and they don't answer to the paninian government no they do oh they absolutely do they're part of the Panamanian government got it so then Panama could stop this well see this is the thing we as little people don't understand international relations could Panama technically stop it yes they could technically stop it but what would happen to Panama if they did presumably explains why they don't so the panamanians are not in a position to override whatever it is that wants this migration to happen how much of Panama's stance is public or and how are you inferring um that is a good question let us put it this way the discussion of the migration is not nearly as uh substantial as you would expect and in large measure what is happening is the migrants are being shunted North as quickly as possible that from Panama's perspective the best thing to do is to get these people on their way where they don't become a burden to Panama and so they are being they are being shuttled through Panama into Costa Rica and through all of the countries up into North America all of the Central American countries are participating in facilitating this migration for reasons that are not not clear um but I said that I come to understand this as two separate phenomena one of them is this migration of people who when you talk to them and we found many migrants were forthcoming about both the trials that they had suffered in the jungle uh which are terrifying almost all of them had been robbed uh young women were uh routinely raped um people walk out of the Jungle without their children children walk out of the Jungle without their parents oh it's a humanitarian disaster yeah the Daran Gap is um a very difficult piece of habitat to Traverse if you know what you're doing these people do not they've been induced to try to cross uh the Gap with no understanding of how to equip themselves or what they're actually going to space there and uh you know it's the kind of habitat where you can slide down a muddy Hill and break your leg and that can kill you because it prevents you from getting out um so it it takes accidents and greatly enhances their lethality um but you've got this migration all of the migrants who will speak to us are economic migrants they're all very clear about this which means they're not eligible for political asylum in the us though that is uh the basis on which they are crossing our Southern border but there is another migration which is housed separately which I found very surprising um it is a migration that is almost entirely Chinese is predominantly young men whether the fact that they are of military age is Meaningful or not is impossible to say but what I can say is that unlike all of the other migrants that we encountered who were surprisingly open about talking about what they were doing and where they were headed and what had motivated them to go the Chinese migrants who were housed separately by the panamanians they're housed in places that are not towns interestingly they're housed there's a camp called s vente which secretary my orcus visited when he was in Panama right before it was expanded greatly um but the Chinese who are moving through the San vente Camp are unwilling to talk they give off a hostile air and it's not clear to me why this should be the case if they were for example fleeing oppression at the hands of the Chinese Communist party you would expect them to be at least curious about citizens of of this country that they were apparently going to start a new life in that would be a natural thing and even if they were afraid to talk because they were afraid of what might happen uh if word got back you would not get a hostile sense you would get a sense that they were uh conflicted or trapped and couldn't couldn't talk but that was not at all the impression they left the impression they left was one of hostility and mockery and it was was decidedly disturbing so I began to think of this as an invasion moving in parallel and being cloaked by a migration the migration is real the migration is alarming in its own right it is a humanitarian disaster at the level of what is happening to the people doing the migrating and it is very definitely being encouraged and facilitated by the international Community which appears to have the idea that migration is inherently a good thing now I don't know how anyone could possibly be that confused but this is visible if you look at the web pages of the organizations that are doing the facilitating they say this that Migra it is their mission to induce migration they believe that migration is positive but that migration is cloaking something else I can't say exactly what that something else is but it would be irresponsible not to consider the possibility that it is um an international competitor taking advantage of our open border uh to arrange some kind of harm that will be more easily orchestrated that way than it would be on a battlefield okay I know you tell your kids that um when they have a hypothesis they need to assign a percentage likelihood that it's accurate M what percentage likelihood of accuracy do you give the invasion hypothesis so let's be clear on what that hypothesis is if that hypothesis is that the Chinese Communist party is sending people across our Southern border with the intent to do harm to the United States I would say 60% whoa okay um now there are lots of other possibilities uh you know does spying fall under that hypothesis no I don't think that is specifically to do harm so so you think it's more than spying so there's the 60% is like proper harm you know here's the thing I know how crazy that sounds and my my final question will be around that like so one of the early questions I asked you was is there ever hypothesis so far out that it's better not to even floated out we've already had that conversation um the what I want to understand though with this is what happened that gave you that much confidence because I agree with you that this is on the table as one of the things that it very well could be and I don't think you just said this but I've heard you say this before which is really powerful if you believe that there is some element of financial corruption in our system which I think everybody agrees there's a lot of money in our system whether we call it corruption or not is almost a moot point that there's a ton of money in our politics money moves the needle here if people know that from the outside would they not leverage that to get what they want so that could be paying a ton of money to ensure that the migrants are allowed in the country um but what I want to know is this is such a high degree of certainty from somebody I consider so cautious in their thinking um but this falls into that bucket that you're playing with more and more as you got battered through the covid situation it felt to me like you got I don't know if frustrated or angry but you started like making Bolder claims Bolder claims and this one is the one help me understand what are the building blocks that make it up so we know they had their own migration going in they didn't act in the way that you expected them to act they were hostile well first of all let me say this is part of why I decided I had to go in person because had you already been hearing this before yeah the the folks who um who showed Zach and me this migration had been sending material s for better part of a year so I was quite aware of what I was likely to see but it made no sense and frankly I talked almost not at all about it because I did not want to find myself broadcasting things that turned out not to be what had been represented to me I was very cautious about it and I you know it was hard to justify going it's not an especially safe place to go um what was I going to see that I couldn't deduce from a video but I was very glad that I did go because the physical relationship between these two different migrations and most importantly the the approach that the migrants in the Chinese C uh Camp had to us was unmistakable it was hostile now why was it hostile it's hard to so part of the reason that you find that number as high as you find it is that given what I saw it is hard to come up with other explanations for it right were these people fleeing oppression that was inconsistent with the way they dealt with us it did not feel right now can I I convey that to you in a way that you would have uh a degree of certainty about it not really you know I don't think you know me well enough to know what it would take to trigger that circuit for me um but here's the other question we have a southern border that is effectively open yep we are not doing even the most basic due diligence with respect to establishing who is crossing that border and why given that do you believe that our antagonists abroad will take advantage of that fact I find that almost certain yes so um I find the hypothesis compelling but I thought you were going to say like 7 to 10% um so let me lay out the part where you and I agree and then as the person that's just armchair quarterbacking it I'll give you sort of my take knowing I haven't been there and so I really I'm just pulling the [ __ ] out of my ass but uh so I have heard from enough analysts of China that the Chinese diaspora is a very meaningful thing and that some percentage of the people in the Chinese diaspora really view themselves still as Chinese regardless of where they live now this is just analysts that I've heard speak this is not me forming a firsthand account so I know that this is part of my distortion on my lenses this is not I don't trust this but in terms of hypothesis being very unsure but it's an interesting guess that warrants exploration so to your point uh governments are going to do what they can to get a leg up we are in a pure competitor relationship with China uh China has every reason to want to know more about what we're doing as we have every reason to want to know what China's doing now breaking from that I will say it is very possible that China is in a pretty rough economic situation right now if the housing issue there is as big as some pundits are making it out to be again no firstand knowledge don't know but certainly interesting I could see not being of that culture missing cues misreading cues so that they seem hostile or whatever again they could be throwing things you spitting I don't know but uh that'd be pretty tough to misread but if it were more of just a a body language refusal to interact scowling that kind of thing um then well well beyond that okay okay um give me the craziest thing they did well I don't know that any of it was crazy but uh we attempted to interact with several different groups at the San vente Camp uh one gentleman attempted to mislead us into believing that he was Korean and uh Mike Leon who took to Daran who has spent time in China um tripped him up and revealed that this was a deception at which point there was laughter amongst the group who uh had witnessed this attempted deception and then following that there was no willingness to talk about the reality it wasn't that this had been a practical joke on you know some naive Foreigner and that that broke the ice right this was a deception that was exposed and it led nowhere I also believe that we were um monitored in the camp so there was a particular guy I was watching who repositioned himself as we moved to different places in order to witness what was taking place there and I believe he was keeping tabs on us I don't know why that would be didn't strike me as uh a normal behavior for somebody who is you know involved in a major migration to a new Homeland it still feels qualitative though so we have qualitative feedback because I can so you don't know this about me but my background is actually writing so I often ask myself If This Were a character and I were writing them what would have to be true for them to act this way one could be I'm here as a spy for sure or I'm here to do harm but honestly if I'm coming to [ __ ] you up the last thing I'm going to do is be openly antagonistic I'm going to be super friendly cuz I do not want you to be queued into what I'm really doing but if I have a dim view of Americans and I've got some sense of I'm going to America because I want to bring my culture to another great place and I want to spread the Chinese diaspora and I have no idea what uh inside of China they say about America they could say lovely things I have no idea but I know that like across Europe it hasn't been a I came to England because I want to embrace English values it is in many cases I've come to England and I plan to stake my values and I'm trying to bring as many people over as I can so that we can really have our own at least Pockets where our culture is the culture and given that America hopefully still has that Vibe of like yeah we want diaspora people we want people to come here and make this a cooler place now I think that we have to reckon with that because I don't think you can bring this many people over over at once I think we're going to have problems but like I still like the vibe of the Statue of Liberty give me your tired we huddled masses like I [ __ ] love that Vibe anyway uh I can write a bunch of backstories for these guys where yes they're clowning on the idiot Americans even though they're trying to get to America now whether they're fleeing China because China with my archetype is not the kind of place I would want to be or they're coming over as an invasion I don't know the only thing I would say is I can paint a lot of scenarios where they are probably still problematic from a whole host of very nons Sinister nons spyy reasons but it could also be exactly what you're saying I just would have again I have not been there so I've not seen the things that you see so I'm in the DMT position again of I haven't met the little guy uh but it feels to me with qualitative data that it w orence a more cautious percentage well the question is what would you think if you had been there and I might be way more hardcore than you I might be 90% don't know nobody has any trouble accepting that uh China's building weaponry and so the point is it's not beyond our thought process to imagine that somebody might be preparing for war with us but for some reason this bargain hey their southern border is open can we do anything with that is it worth sending in you know maybe maybe the decision to utilize them hasn't been made but the ideas it would be a shame not to take advantage of that open border while it's still open and who knows how long it will be do you have an estimate of how many Chinese have crossed I believe it's tens of thousands whoa It's a lot okay for a second let's just pretend that the dark scenario is the true scenario which you've 60% I'm like 7% but whatever do you think that we're going to have a reckoning like if you send tens of thousands of people that still have allegiance to the Homeland and the Homeland wants to do you dirty I don't even like thinking like this this is interesting this is triggering some World War II Vibes in me uh which I'm not loving but let's finish the thought experiment I get your friend hates that but uh do you think we have a reckoning coming with a potential problem where the call came from inside the house I don't understand why this is even tough because it seems self-evident that an enemy would want to do this given a manifestly open Southern border you don't think anybody's going to notice that they can send people over it and utilize I mean how many years did we spend taking off our shoes in airports right I mean and the the the absurdity of you know if you come across the border if you come home from Central America you will be monitored they will know exactly who's crossing the border at exactly what moment you're doing it right it's a whole different situation you will have scrutiny exerted in your case and in another case there's no scrutiny that that is a mystery to me how did that happen when I ask obvious questions like we have a corrupt political system it's pay for playay what is to have stopped our antagonists abroad from having purchased influence with which to get us to harm ourselves isn't that the obvious bargain if they can do it well in a way where I don't realize that's what the money's for I think it's something good yeah I could for sure I see a lot of really bad ideas get a lot of energy not saying I think this has happened but I it certainly fits the incentive model I I think the the thing that I don't understand is that we apparently spend I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars on the intelligence Community to think way outside of the box and figure out how a very clever enemy could possibly get inside our system and compromise us and we've left the most obvious mechanisms wide open and to talk about the what my assessment is that the most obvious loopholes are being utilized you know is like well do you have the evidence for that the evidence that we have antagonists abroad and that we have people who never sleep because they're concerned that those enemies might get the jump on us that evidence exists I don't know what the reason is that the southern border is as open as it is I don't know why the International Community is encouraging migrants into the Darion I don't know why the Chinese are housed separate I don't know why the Chinese appear to be facilitated in their Migration by their government oh but there there's one other thing I wanted to mention to you and again this goes back quite a number of years in fact this is goes back enough years that I had in fact forgotten it and it did not come back up as I was looking at this Chinese migration phenomenon in Darion when the Chinese one child policy was in full force I wrote a an essay I was not a public figure I don't know that anybody read the essay but I wrote an essay about a paradox there is a principle in evolutionary biology that goes back to Ronald fiser Ronald fiser realized something important about sex ratios he wasn't thinking about humans and what he realized was that although males and females differ tremendously in how many offspring they can produce in a lifetime that on average given uh some very basic assumptions on average they produce the same number of Offspring and there is therefore no advantage to producing males over females or vice versa that is to say a male might produce a thousand times as many offspring as a female in a given case but on average they produce the same number so if there are too many males you should produce females and if there are too many females you should produce males because you tend to succeed better evolutionarily if you produce the rare sex now that logic should apply to people and it should have applied to China if you were a Chinese person and you were going to only be able to have one child and they were going to grow up in a nation with an abundance of males you should want to produce a female a male might well not find a mate a female would not only be all but certain to find a mate but she would have her choice because females would be in high demand so why I wondered all of these years ago did that not cause the Embrace of the production of females why did the Chinese continue to produce excess males and what I came up with was the sobering realization that there was another evolutionary force that might well be in play which is that in a world of lineage versus lineage competition that there might be a reason to produce a generation with excess males if you were preparing for war that excess males actually are the perfect substrate for lineage against lineage violence because men who have no reproductive prospects at home who are sexually frustrated can be armed and sent abroad with a desire to come back a hero and that that would be a very effective mechanism for picking up territory the same process I described you when we were talking about genocide that if you want doesn't that seem though like it would be a it's the thing you do when you find yourself a surplus males it isn't the thing you set set out to do well I don't see I agree with you that it would be a natural if you happen to end up with Surplus males but I don't see any reason that you wouldn't have an evolutionary tendency to especially in a culture that is as farsighted as the Chinese have been it's interesting I will say that there might be other hypotheses that don't require them to be so calculated which seems tough to get your whole culture like all you're doing is applying the pressure you can only have one child and the nation Builds an army for you strikes me as well not impossible strikes me as very unlikely I also have a base assumption that could be wrong but it's a base assumption in my operating system that China is not very imperialist so I think that people will confuse their desire to get Taiwan back with a and we want to go get more like they're pretty like let the world do what the world's going to do like yes we want to be fin finially invested so that everybody owes us one but we don't want to take them over we don't want to run their countries um but they they want Taiwan back because that's part of the original Vision so anyway if you've got a nation that is not Imperial in nature and they were literally worried about people starving to death which is why they said ah you can only have one kid and so then you'll get a brief burst of we want a male because the that's how you pass the lineage on that's how you pass the cash on like just give me a boy that's all I want I have a feeling that if it had kept going on they would have gone oh that was a really dumb strategy I now I want to have girls because this balance is all out of whack but because they end up nipping that in the butt I think in the 90s so it only runs for like 20 years so you really only have like one generation to be like oh terrible idea now so if it had gone on longer and they kept like making sure that they were only having guys then I might be a little bit more like okay maybe but yeah I mean I hear what you're saying um and the problem is that the current governance of China is a departure from the historical true uh so anyway I find it interesting that you have a violation of a known evolutionary principle The Balancing of sex ratios seems to me that this would have been obvious to an individual um that even if the society viewed uh male children in a particular way that you could calculate that your own lineage the chances of your child finding a mate uh suggested that actually it would be clever to have girls so I don't know to me it's an open question and the fact that we have uh what looks like an invasion uh from what looks like one of our principal I I don't like the term enemy but looks like competitor competitor antagonist abroad well one thing that could be interesting again hypothesis that I have no real reason to believe is actually happening but is worthy of exploration would be that this is more of a Viking model where oh I find myself with excess males intentionally or otherwise and oh my primary rival has an open Southern border and uh the Chinese diaspora is real so I know they will still feel a pretty strong allegiance to the Homeland let me send them over which probably isn't a hateful idea oh man I can't remember there was a guy that was made a spy and uh he from Russia uh he was actually East German but anyway gets um recruited to be a spy in the west and he was like oh the thought of like living in America he's like they didn't have to convince me I was totally here for it um so I could see them being like no authoritarian rule no uh social credit score I'm here for it let's go well I will say the scenario you laid out does fit uh if if the scenario you laid out was right then my 60% uh estimate is includes it right an opportunistic invasion that does fit um but I also wanted to point out that the Chinese as much as they have a multi- millennium history of effectively being insular uh is engaged in what is called the belt and Road initiative which is uh and expansive plan that uh looks you know like a modern Imperial you think that looks Imperial I think it looks like I want you to owe me one I don't want to be Imperial I do not want to have to rule over you guys because that [ __ ] is messy but boy oh boy do I want to control your infrastructure do I want you to have relationships with me trade deals want to control the flow of resources and labor to facilitate a Soo Centric future I'm not faulting all the good without Chinese having to govern you right I'm not faulting the Chinese for advocating for their own wellbeing I do view much as I view our government as not synonymous with our population I see our government is in large measure hostile to the well-being of the citizens and I feel the same way about the relationship of the Chinese government the Chinese people but nonetheless if there is any I don't fault the Chinese for uh viewing the world in competitive terms that's that's the adult way to to recognize how things work um but I do think we are being naive not at least publicly entertaining the possibility that our antagonists abroad would take advantage of our uh lack of security our famous lack of security uh on our Southern border and the international community's facilitation of massive migration would be the perfect cover for something that was not collaborative all right I have a nasty question I want to ask about the 2024 election many people think Trump is the rational monster is he I don't think so I I don't I don't want him to be president because I don't think he has the uh the time the temperament or the team building skills to do the job that is necessary but I do believe he is at least a departure from the ruling cabal which is clearly hostile to the well-being of average people um that said I believe there is only one rational choice left to us in this election and it is Bobby Kennedy Jr you don't think that'll split the vote I don't even know what to think about that question the Democratic party appears to be Fielding a candidate who was too mentally decrepit four years ago to be elected to the presidency running him again is so Preposterous that it's not obvious to me how any American can in good conscience vote for Biden it is inconsistent with our constitutional republic that we have a decrepit figurehead who is standing in for a cabal whose names we don't know people who are unelected cannot be called in front of Congress and questioned if we are attacked in the night who takes the phone call and decides whether we launch the nukes you cannot have a person as far gone as Joe Biden in that office that is a different country so my feeling is the Democratic party has an obligation to field a reasonable candidate before there is any vote to split in the absence of that every single rational American should be fleeing the Democratic party in favor of whatever makes the most sense and again in my opinion there's really only one plausible candidate for the job running for the office how the one plausible candidate running for the office is a long shot I have not figured out but here you have a guy who has an encyclopedic knowledge of what has just happened to us over the course of the covid crisis he's the one guy who's in a position to sort out the implications of what took place so that we can get a proper Reckoning and make sure that doesn't happen again what's more you have a guy who has a deep understanding of the deep State and is obviously willing to risk his life over the question of how to uh disengage it from governance so that we can go back to being a Democratic Republic I also I personally know him I like him a great deal I trust him and I believe that um his legal knowledge and his uh his wisdom the fact that this is somebody I mean his personal familial story is tied up in the exact trauma that our nation has lived under since 1963 right to have the possibility of putting him in that office to finally move us past that chapter into some uh renewed phase of American strength to restore the consent of the Govern seems to me like the OB vious thing to do we are lucky that we have that option on the table and I can't believe that we would in the face of that be embracing tired tropes like spoiler and the lesser of two evils right you those tropes make no sense in an era where the DNC is Fielding Joe Biden in his state of of uh disrepair it just it's incon consistent with it we this is an emergency and we we have somebody that we can vote for who makes perfect sense could inhabit the office has the skills has the temperament would likely have eight years in which to get the job done all of those things are powerful arguments in favor of this person and um I really hope people will rethink their reflexive Embrace of what amounts to a a jersey color over reason it's a great place to end Brett work can people follow you they can come find us at the Darkhorse podcast look for us on Rumble they can find us on locals uh I'm on Twitter Brett Weinstein Brett has one te there is a Brett Weinstein with two T's and he gets way too much of my correspondence um you can check out uh hunter gatherers Guide to the 21st century it's awesome I've read it uh it's a good book and highly gerine to many of the topics we've talked about um maybe that's it I like it all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more war is a test a Wills Israel is very determined to completely eradicate Hamas it's going to cause years and years of strategic problems people are going to seek revenge on them if I was an enemy

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 579,919

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Dr. Bret Weinstein, Impact Theory, interview show, podcast, mindset, success, motivation, personal development, empowerment, transformation, growth mindset, self improvement, leadership, Chinese diaspora, San Vicente camp, foreign influence, national security, political systems, polite society, free speech, controversial topics, genocide, truth-seeking, censorship, social media, political discourse, Middle East conflict, governance, consent of the governed, self-determination

Id: jLmF1FBpuIM

Length: 199min 48sec (11988 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024