The Brink Of Collapse: "Liberals & The Government Has Become A Cancer To Society" | Bret Weinstein

What are the values and beliefs that you use to decide who you're going to vote for? It's a good question. Let me say that I find the idea of politics horrifying and I take no pleasure whatsoever in having to interact with that space at all. I feel like it's beneath all of us. That said, so much rests on what happens in that space that I don't feel that I really have a choice and at the moment, barring something like the discovery that I have a brain tumor that is distorting my perspective on the world, what is at stake in our current political environment is at an all-time high and therefore I feel like like it or not, we're all being forced in this direction. As to the specific answer to your question, I like the distinction between values and beliefs. That's also how I see the world. I have many beliefs that don't make me happy, but nonetheless it would be irresponsible, I think, to shed them because of that. Whether they're good or bad is has no implication about whether they're true. And I guess I live by a a set of guiding principles that that answer that question pretty well. One of them is that we are misled by our evolutionary wiring into being focused on ourselves and our own experience for reasons that are simply practical. And that causes us to have a distorted approach to the world in which we have the power to make things better, but also vastly worse that exceeds anything that our ancestors would have had at their disposal. And so, our responsibility is much greater, but our wiring doesn't necessarily detect that. And I would say that the the overarching principle that guides me is I believe that existing as a human being is a profound It is the profound opportunity that we know of in the universe. That it's one thing to live, that's amazing, and lots of creatures live, and presumably they feel rewarded when they do well and things like that, but our ability to understand where we are and what it implies and the consequences of our actions and for our actions to become consequential by virtue of our thinking through what they will be, that's a remarkable experience and it creates a life like no other that we're aware of. So, my sense is I'm obligated I believe all of us, if we saw this picture, would find ourselves morally obligated to provide that opportunity in as liberating a way as possible to as many humans as we can. That is to say, we're not entitled to take what we what we found on arrival and degrade it. Now, sometimes you have to degrade it a little bit. You don't have a choice. Or you have to degrade it a little bit in the present in order to preserve it in the long term. So, I'm I'm not a um I'm not unrealistic about the need to to bend the rules a little bit. But, in general, the long-term trajectory ought to be to make sure that the generations that follow us have at least as good an opportunity as we did, which means at least as intact a planet as we inherited. And the political dimension obviously has profound implications over how close we are to that. I believe we've been falling down on that job for generations. And it's time to turn the ship around. But, that's really what motivates me. And the fact is I have two children. I love them deeply. And thinking about their prospects in life makes it very easy for this to be a concrete question that tells me what direction I should go. All right. So, what I heard in that is obviously thinking about future um generations is incredibly important. Don't be selfish. Don't gobble everything up right now. Um but it also feels like and I've heard you say this before. So, I think I'm correct in hearing that you worry that right now, due to I would assume technology that we have for the first time, maybe ever, the opportunity for a true existential crisis, where we could end the human experience or just flat-out existence as we know it. Is that overstating it or is that actually what's driving your thinking in this moment? No, that's uh that's accurate. I would say we have something like a Russian doll of existential threats, where there are we have built a civilization that does remarkable things, but it is not the beneficiary of thousands of years of perturbations and breakages that would have made it wise and antifragile. It's in fact incredibly fragile. And at this point, even the dynamics of our galaxy threaten to turn our technology into a fatal flaw for our species. So, that's not entirely our fault. That's the fact that we built something under circumstances that were more hospitable than the ones we're about to face. And so, you know, I I think we should be focused on that. The fragility of our system is a problem and there is not a natural feedback that causes you to make your civilization less fragile while times are good. What is it about this particular election that has you on edge? What do you see in the system um that is making this worse than say growing up in the '80s when I legitimately was having conversations with my neighbors about, "Hey, mutually assured destruction means that they're never going to drop nuclear bombs." Like, it was a super tense time. Um What is it about right now? Um So, I'm I'm caught in a bind I find myself in all the time, which is there are things if I was a political animal, there are things that I should say right now to increase the likelihood of us going in a direction that I think is beneficial even though those things aren't exactly an overlap for one what I believe. Because I'm not a political animal, but I'm forced to engage the political sphere, I have to run the risk of being fully candid and hoping that people will infer the correct direction. So, to to put a little flesh on those bones, what makes this election profoundly different is the degree to which all of the most dangerous ideas have accumulated on one side of our artificially binary political structure. To me, what I call the blue team has accumulated all of the dangerous stuff or all of the most dangerous stuff. Now, a political animal would look past the faults of the other side in order to fend off the hazard, to usher the blue team out of power. And I can't really do that. What we have on the other side is some sort of a complex wild card that has the potential to do a tremendous amount of good. It also has the potential to renege on its commitments to us and to do something else or to be tangled in knots by those who would have just been ushered out of office. So, I'm not going to artificially pretty up what I see as a taking place under the red banner, but the it's simple for me because the combination of, let's say, the deep state, the neocons, the woke ideology, and the most dangerous corporate influences, including pharma, um all of those things accumulating in one place tells you that whatever the Democratic Party was, it isn't any longer, and that there's no rescuing it. There's no incremental rescue for a party that has simply taken up every bad idea simultaneously. Um you mentioned earlier that this is a uh nested Russian doll of crises, potential dangers. What What are the immediate things you're worried about? Is this uh nuclear war? Is it um a real pathogen getting loose that just ravages people? What What do we have to survive, exactly? One of them is you mentioned at the top of the podcast that mutually assured destruction is a remarkable thing to depend on. Nonetheless, it did work. It did create enough sobriety that despite the fact that we had all of these weapons and that we were pointing them at each other and that our systems for detecting, you know, missiles in flight are fallible and in fact failed many times, somehow we never launched them. Um so, that system, I would argue, was more functional as a younger civilization that had the proper sobriety around the danger of nuclear weapons. We are now becoming reckless and stupid because our civilization is senile and we are playing some sort of belligerent nuclear game in Ukraine against a ferociously armed traditional nuclear enemy. I can't imagine why we would do that. It seems to me that we are gambling everything. We are gambling humanity's future on some plan that has not been shared with us for reasons we can't understand, and my guess is they don't actually make any sense. Um so that's, you know, that's a senile person who has weaponry that should have been taken away from them the way we take cars away from people who can no longer operate them safely. So that's a major threat. It's an increasing threat because we don't have the uh wisdom and sobriety to manage that danger. As far as pathogens go, I don't think we run much risk at all of a pathogen leaping out of nature. The idea of a zoonotic pathogen that is simultaneously uh so contagious and so devastating to the body that that it's a threat to humanity is quite preposterous, but I do believe we have a cryptic weapons program that keeps losing control of pathogens that it has engineered for reasons that have also not been shared with us, and that as we saw with COVID, the remedies are far worse than the disease, and that this actually does create a threat. So, you know, the uh mRNA gene therapy that was delivered as if it were a vaccine has created lots of negative health consequences, didn't apparently do any good that is detectable, and I believe that that's actually a a defensible statement if you look at the at the evidence. It certainly didn't do any net good, but the idea that it did any significant good is uh debatable at best. And we are now moving on for reasons that have also never been explained to new versions of this technology. We have now replicons in Japan. These are self-replicating vaccines being delivered for no discernible purpose. Being delivered almost just because we can. Maybe somebody has an nefarious purpose, but there's certainly no positive reason to be delivering some self-replicating and therefore much more difficult to control version of a gene therapy. Um and you know, here we have whoever decided to do that running a risk for humanity. Now, if the things behave as the brochure suggests they're supposed to, then the damage will be limited to those people who've taken it, but there is no reason to think that they're going to behave in the way that the brochure suggests they are supposed to any more than the original mRNA vaccines did. So, anyway, those kinds of threats the the threats of harm compounded by either wildly naive thinking about biology or malevolent forces that wish to deliver things into populations for their own reasons, that's a significant threat. And then lastly, I'll just say we are not paying attention to the hazard posed to us by the accelerating decrease in our electromagnetic field that is interfacing badly with the 11 year solar cycle. So, the sun poses a risk to us at all times. The risk is unacceptable under normal circumstances, but the risk is growing uh in large measure because the electromagnetic field of the planet is weakening. And this is something it's nobody's fault that the electromagnetic field is weakening, but it is certainly something we could be doing a lot more uh about in light of the decrease in the electromagnetic field. We could be hardening our grid and creating a more robust civilization so that if the sun throws something at us that we can't handle, which it will sooner or later, that we don't go into chaos just by virtue of the fact that we were unprepared. Yeah. Thank you for adding a new nightmare to my list. That That was not at all on my radar until this very minute. So, thank you. That's good fun. I had sort of heard off in the background that there was something going on with the electromagnetic field and that maybe we were in that period where the North Pole could end up flipping, but did not realize that there were other issues. Okay, that's super powerful. If I had to say the thing that worries me most and this clearly is simply perspective. I in no way, shape, or form know enough about some of the other things to say where this falls on a scale, but the thing that I worry most about is just tyranny. So, I look at the direction that the government is heading. Forget that. Government is downstream of culture. The The direction that culture is headed is this just absolute clamoring for safety over everything. Safety and simplicity if I really had to pin it down. Just tell me what to do. I don't want to think through these problems. I think there's something about the way that life is getting a lot more complicated. That people have some sort of intrinsic hunger for that safety and security. So, that one worries me a lot. Okay, now that that's out on the table, do you have guesses? Obviously, somebody that organizes a post-political event as you referred to it as Rescue the Republic has ideas on what that positive vision is. What is the way that we phoenix this knowing full well these are hypotheses probably more than theories, but I would love to hear some of what you're moving towards and not just what we're moving away from. Yeah, that's a good that's a good question. Um, in evolutionary biology we have a metaphor that we use to think about the transition between niches effectively. We call it the adaptive landscape and we envision opportunities, that is to say niches, as peaks and obstacles to getting from a lower peak to a higher peak as valleys. So, you have to cross through an adaptive valley to get between most sets of peaks. And the problem, one of the problems that threatens civilization, is that the skill set for crossing a valley is different than the skill set for ascending a peak. So, if you think about startup culture, there are certain people who are great under startup conditions, who are not very well adapted to the mature corporation that arises out of a successful startup. You know, they need to go do another startup. That's because the skill set's just not the same one. So, the problem is that we live in a niche that has been so fantastically productive over so many generations that the hill climbers have effectively killed off the valley crossers. Right? They see them as a threat. They see them as counterproductive to climbing the peaks. We now have to cross a valley and we have lost track of how you do it. So, I'm concerned about that. I do think there is something so utterly hopeful about what I'm calling the unity coalition because it contains all of the all of the folks who have integrity, courage, and think outside the box. So, these are the valley crossers. And the hill climbers downstream of the coup that they have staged are struggling to keep people from listening. Right? We are derided as if we are fringe nut cases. And, you know, I suppose that's comforting, you know, because if we're right about the danger we're in, then this is a perilous moment, and there's nothing that says that we're going to get out of it. But, of course, that's true. There are no guarantees. So, the question isn't, "Can you promise me that if we cross if we go into that valley that we'll get out the other side and it will be better?" No, nobody can promise you that. But, what I think I can promise you is that if we stay on this peak as it erodes we will perish. So, you know, it's a simple choice. It doesn't mean it's going to end well, but all of the scenarios in which this ends well involve us learning to do something that we don't yet know how to do. And I will tell you, as I think you must have experienced as well, that there is something hopeful about interacting with the ragtag fugitive fleet of quirky, insightful idiosyncratic folks who have uh found each other in the unity movement despite significant differences in our belief systems and sometimes even our values. So, that's how I think it's done is I don't imagine, in fact, Heather and I wrote into our book, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, that you can't blueprint your way out of a crisis like this. You have to prototype your way out or navigate your way out, that it's a process, it's not a plan. And what does that process looks like? It looks like people who have retained their capacity to think in spite of the very difficult circumstances in which we have to do it. Those people pooling their insights, holding each others feet to the fire, and proposing uh next steps so that we start moving in the right direction so that, you know, we are still around 100 years from now. Okay, so that I can orient myself, that's a really interesting idea that you have to prototype your way out. I don't think you said blueprint, but something along those lines. You can't just architect this thing ahead of time and go out and know that it's going to carry you across. Uh would you liken this moment to um the founding of the nation or is this something completely different? You know, I've long been a fan of the idea that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And this definitely rhymes with the founding of the nation. There are also ways in which it is profoundly different. The level of technology, and more to the point, the rate of technological change is simply so staggering that we have to build in light of it. Um I would say we have also there's been a process a a natural process in which humans have, as we've gotten good at certain things, become we've forgotten how to do things that we used to know how to do very well. The level of self-sufficiency of humans is at an all-time low. The degree to which we are simply depend I mean, even compared to when you and I were kids, the degree to which we are now dependent, even those of us who didn't grow up dependent on a cell phone, are now dependent on them because we haven't polished our skills for keeping track of where we are physically, for example. We haven't maintained a set of documents that would allow us to figure it out if the electricity went out. So, anyway, we're we're in a state of um of risk that is partly natural. Technology causes you to become dependent on it as it becomes a feature of your developmental environment, and partly unnatural where we've uh become we we've developed a kind of collective learned helplessness. And those are not good things. You know, to the extent that people used to have jobs in which they interacted with the physical uh laws of the universe on the regular, that was a world in which there was an awful lot of common sense. There might not have been as much sense about remote facts of the universe, but there was a lot of wisdom amongst people, even people who we would say were uneducated, because the fact is the world is a very educational place if you are forced to play in it. And how we deal with a world full of people who have become Uh you said at some point that people were easily manipulated. I believe we are artificially easily manipulated now because it's for people whose You know, if you think about what comes across a modern screen, what comes across a modern screen often masquerades as a just a remote capacity to see something. You You look at something that looks like a video of some event that happened, and sometimes it is. And often it's not. And because those two things don't look different, that screen sometimes educates you about things that can happen in the world and sometimes it mis-educates you and that combination results in a kind of at best a sort of agnosticism about what's true rather than an intuition that actually says, "You know what? Something's off here." And um we are going to have to overcome that by some mechanism. I would argue that really the only tool at our disposal is track record. That you don't necessarily know who understands what's going on based on how they sound, right? Unless they're in a territory that you know very well, somebody can bamboozle you and in fact I would argue that almost everybody educated or not got bamboozled by the you know, the COVID criminals because they didn't have any way of interpreting what they were being told about pathogens, about genomes, about cells. These things were a foreign language and so they people were easily suckered. But what you can do is you can look back and you can say, "Well, it doesn't matter whether I thought that sounded crazy at the time. How did this claim stand up over time?" And unfortunately, the part of our system that is not just demented but is actually actively parasitizing us is working overtime to make sure that we can't track people's track record. It is obscuring evidence. And uh if you wanted to fix one thing first, that might be the thing. The ability for us just to even know what happened and what we were told that turned out to be true and what we were told that turned out to be false. That's that's job one from the point of view of navigating intelligently off of this rapidly eroding peak hopefully to arrive at a better one. Yes, spoken like a true scientist, uh like a true entrepreneur. This is something that drives me crazy. All right, in this interview, having gone to Rescue the Republic and just some of the people that I know are involved in the Unity Coalition, I've jotted down here what I think are some of the core values that have been driving your thinking. And then with those in everybody's working memory, unless you think that I've gotten something wrong, I want to hear what you think the world is going to look like whether Trump wins or Kamala Harris wins. So here's what I've taken away. Uh the values that would be useful. Government efficiency. Talked a lot about that. Opposing the deep state. So just this connective tissue over time that basically can ignore the elected officials. Focus on health. This is something that I took from the Rescue the Republic event. Like coming back to the individual. And this is tied into a data feedback loop. So we have all these policies around human health. Have they worked? Absolutely not. They've moved us in the aggressive wrong direction. And then what you were just saying about track record, I would call it data feedback loop. So when you're trying to run a company, you're saying, "Hey, I have this hypothesis. We're going to turn it into a test. We're going to run that test. We're going to pre-say what we think the outcome is going to be so we know if our prediction engine is working or not. And then we're going to look at the data. Do we actually get the result that we thought? If we were right on, great. Prediction engine is working perfectly. If we were over or under, we were off. Obviously, we'd rather high perform than under perform, but we're never going to lie to ourselves. So we need to update our prediction engine. So now we know what is true. And then one thing that we actually haven't talked a lot about, but it's been sort of in the background of everything you've said, is liberty. You did touch on it very specifically once earlier in the talk, but that that is a huge part, certainly for me, and I think a a driving ethos Rescue the Republic and what you're trying to put forward. I think at one point you even said, "That's how you can judge the effectiveness of a system is how many people does it offer um um meaningful liberty?" I think is the way that you referred to it. I think that's really really smart. Okay. Uh I see nodding, so I'll assume we're at least directionally correct. So now with that hovering in the air as the thing that we're steering towards, what does the world look like if Trump wins? What does the world look like if Kamala Harris wins? Well, I'm profoundly concerned about what happens if Kamala Harris wins because I think the track record of the blue team Kamala Harris's absolute failure to protect us from a clearly demented president tells us that she's not really on our team. And so I take very seriously her uh statements that suggest she's interested in uh mandatory gun buybacks, censoring people that she doesn't like what they're having to say, price controls, what she calls equity, um all of these things, if you extrapolate out, are something the republic can't take four more years of an incremental move in these directions, much less some sort of step function where uh because we're now playing in end game dynamics, this thing is ratcheted up rapidly after the election. So, I don't think the uh success of the Harris campaign could be really any more frightening. It's about as bad as it could be, having nothing to do with Harris herself being a distinguished creature. I don't think she is. I don't think she's special, but I do think she is partnered with uh a parasitoid that literally embraces all of the worst ideas simultaneously, worst from our perspective as a people. As far as what happens if Trump is elected, we can hope that Trump is wiser than he was the last time he was elected, and that he realizes so a couple things have changed. One, he's been through an awful lot in the intervening time. He's been uh hounded with lawfare in the courts. He's been shot at. He's been He's been through a constant campaign to portray him as things other than he is. This may have created a wiser person. It could also cause a person to become deranged. I don't see the sign that he's deranged. So, I'm hopeful. But, the other thing that has changed is the unity coalition is now an entity. We now recognize each other, and lots of people have accepted the cost of admitting that they are going to vote for Trump, or thinking of voting for Trump, or open to voting for Trump. What that means is that if he wants to avail himself of it, he has this incredibly deep bench of highly skilled, courageous, patriotic people that he can put into positions to to figure out how we're going to prototype and navigate our way out of this cul-de-sac and to somewhere new. My greatest hope is that he is elected, and that's what he does. And the fact that he is partnering with Elon Musk, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with Tulsi Gabbard suggest that he is of this mindset. My greatest fear is that once elected, the utility of that partnership may not be as obvious to him and that he could be either led in a bad direction or might have an instinct to um to jettison those obligations and it could be terrible. So, anyway, I'm hoping that the unity movement will understand it's something it itself as something other than a uh a support force for Trump. The unity movement should support Trump if he is doing things that are in the interest of solving the nation's long-term problems and it should function to pressure him if he starts moving in some other direction. Um so, that's where I am. To me, it's very, very simple because the one side involves so much peril and the other side is a wild card, but the potential for greatness is there and I'm not sure that there's anything more one needs to know in order to figure out how to how to interact with that. What do you say to people that say, "Look, January 6th is just completely disqualifying. You cannot have a president that tried an insurrection on the government. You're you're begging for the tyranny that Tom says he's so worried about." Well, I don't think it was an insurrection. I think it's been painted that way at great cost. I think it was a terrible episode, but even the details of it. You had a a large number of people engaged in peaceful protest. You had a small number of people engaged in something violent. Um you have the implication of the FBI being involved. You have lawfare being wielded against people who weren't violent in the aftermath. So, anyway, I I don't think the story is the one we've been told that we must believe. But, I also think we are we have run off the normal tape of history here, right? Even if you believe some some official variant of that story, you also have a vice president who, according to Seymour Hersh, one of the last great journalists, forced the president out of the race on the basis that the 25th Amendment would be used to remove him from office if he did not agree, but then did not remove him from office even as we were playing belligerent nuclear games in Ukraine. So, even if you believe the standard version of January 6th, what you have is people who've done completely unacceptable things as the two viable choices in the election, and the question is which of these things is more frightening going forward. And even there, it's a slam dunk. Yeah, um that to me, the fact that he says Trump says that he won the election, the fact that he tried to get, I think, electorates uh like fake electorates to say that they were the ones that could certify or not certify, um that, man, that looms in the air for me. And one thing that I also worry about is um at least the people that I'm aware of, so many people came forward that worked with him in when he was president saying that it was just a terrible experience, that he's only out for himself, and so the thing that um I have deep concerns about is are people like Elon who are obviously very good for the campaign trail, are they going to find themselves 2 months in, 3 months in, just absolutely driven crazy and saying I'm a you really can't work with this guy. That that's the fear that I have. Believe me, I have all kinds of fears. I also have a good deal of hope based on a number of people who I now know who know the man personally and do not have this experience. So, I'm hopeful that he is uh wiser than he was and that he sees that he has a historic opportunity. I fear what might unfold, but I think we have this incredibly powerful force in the unity movement that simply needs to figure out what happens post-election and exert the right kind of pressure. If Trump is moving in the direction of rescuing us from uh the peril that we find ourselves in, then the unity movement is an incredible tool that he should be able to utilize to to do that well, because no president understands all of the issues that are downstream of their decision-making. So, seating the right people is obviously the way a great president is going to function. On the other hand, if he dispenses with you know, Elon and Bobby and Tulsi and the rest of us, then this force is the most useful check you're going to have because frankly we retain our ability to speak on behalf of frankly not just the American people, but the world has such a stake in our election and most people do not have the privilege of being able to uh to signal their consent or lack thereof. So, the world is really depending on us to uh to rein in the out-of-control forces that have taken over our ferociously powerful system. And I I really see the unity movement as well positioned either way. What do you make of the way that the political parties have flipped? Is there um is there a game being played? Is this just sort of a natural ebb and flow? Um because it Seeing Trump in a McDonald's is just for somebody that was a you know, growing up in the 1980s like that was not the vision of the Republicans. Republicans were Gordon Gekko and the Democrats would have been in McDonald's. So, what what has happened? Yeah, I actually did a pretty good job, I think, on the last Darkhorse podcast of describing the dynamics that led us here. So, I'll I'll do a quick version. What I think happened is the Republicans were the corrupt corporate party. They effectively represented management and in the world that you and I grew up in, the Democratic Party represented labor, which was not without its corruption. Labor was a corrupt force, too, but roughly speaking the red team was management, the blue team was labor. The blue team was powerful because labor always outnumbers management by a huge margin, but management has a power advantage based on the concentration of wealth. And these two things were uh battling in our political landscape. Clinton, whatever it is that he may have been thinking, changed the Democratic Party. He effectively cut labor loose and made the Democratic Party into a second corrupt corporate party. Which was superficially coherent because the way that some corporations want the body politic corrupted is in conflict with the way other corporate entities might want it corrupted, right? Do you want a workforce that you are entitled to make sick with bad drugs or do you want a workforce that you're entitled to exploit by virtue of you know, uh their ability to generate wealth and be frozen out of the product of it. Those are two competing corruptions. So, we had two corrupt parties. Labor was completely cut adrift. Anybody who wanted to get out of the corruption racket could have embraced the now politically homeless labor force. But, it never happened and it was prevented from happening through the wielding of the idea of what I call the lesser evil paradox. Anybody who tries to walk into this two corrupt corporate party system with a party that just simply addresses the needs of average people is accused of electing the greater evil and so nobody survives that accusation. Okay. So, you've got two corrupt corporate parties. Labor is unable to find a representative because the first past the post voting in our system creates a two-party system and if they've both import embraced corporate greed, there's nobody to speak for the people. And then you get a hugely unusual creature like Donald Trump. And what Donald Trump did was he effectively collected a large fraction of this now politically homeless labor movement and he brought them over to the Republican Party. So, he was not a traditional Republican in any way and he's not an obvious working class hero, but because he's politically adept in the way that he is, he was able to capture this energy that existed in these uh now betrayed uh laborers and to create MAGA and to bring them over to the Republican Party and the Republican Party now had a choice, which was to accept this and become a powerful political force at a substantial cost to their uh corrupt owners. Now, that of course played out. And what's happening now is that as this uh as the Republican Party now becomes a home for this homeless force of labor, um it is driving all of the concentrated corruption and which is no longer just corporate, right? This now does involve the deep state and the neocons and these are not inherently corporate corruptions. These are other kinds of corruptions, but it's driving all of those things onto the one team. So, you now have you know, Dick Cheney embracing the Democrats signaling that this is really a a pole flip in the political landscape. And now the question is, will the Republicans embrace their new role as a populist party and you know, jettison the last of their corporate corruptors, which would make the transition complete? I would also point out though, the final thing here is that originally when MAGA uh was captured and named and brought over to the Republican Party by Donald Trump, it was largely a white movement. It is now, because of various forces, increasingly picking up a wide diversity of people, and it's welcoming to them. So, um you what I'm really describing is that there are game theoretic dynamics in our system which will actually, through relatively natural processes, including corruption, cause this inversion of the parties. And it's not the first time that we've seen it. I mean, don't forget the Republican Party was uh born under Abraham Lincoln in a fight against slavery. Right? So, the party that fought slavery uh was dragging its heels during the Civil Rights Movement. You know, party inversions happen, and this is this is uh we're watching it happen in real time by a mechanism that I think is surprising, but uh relatively straightforward. All right. Great explanation. Knowing that we're about to go through this um adaptive valley, what is your pithiest um I know you're apolitical, so I won't say argument, but what's your pithiest uh appeal for people to vote in a way that will see us through this adaptive valley? Yeah. Um well, I think they've done us a favor by making this simple. Dick Cheney is nature's way of telling us that that's not the Democratic Party we remember. And the diversity in every meaningful way of what's taking place under the red banner does not tell us that the the Republican Party is going to become something honorable, but at least it opens the possibility of our moving forward in some way that uh is consistent with our um open embrace of people across all sorts of democra- demographic lines. So, the concentrated evil on the one side makes the uncertainties on the other side unimportant. We should move forward in the one direction that can be defended, and then we should do everything in our power to make sure that it behaves as well uh as it can. Um we should be realistic. We can't hold it to standards that it can't meet, but we should we should offer our help, and we should pressure it to move in a direction that actually matches the values that all reasonable people actually share, which was really part of the message of Rescue the Republic was that when you get right down to it, we're told we can't get along with each other, but the amount that we agree on so completely dwarfs the part we disagree on that um it makes things simpler than we are allowed to to understand. All right. At the Rescue the Republic event, you talked about the um need to phoenix out of this, and you made a pretty um interesting parallel to what happens to organisms as they age. They collect all this damage, which I think we would liken to the deep state, whatever is driving the neocon thinking of just wars everywhere, same with woke ideology, corporate influence, all that. You can look at those as um damage to the DNA structure of the organism that is the state. Uh but the way that humans have solved it is not the way that the state is going to be able to solve it. So, if you don't mind, walk us through how does a biological organism deal with all of these assaults, and what can we learn from that? And what is the path out when you're talking about a state? Sure. Let me just say, um, I'm speaking for myself as I was at Rescue the Republic. Um, Rescue the Republic is a non-political entity. Um, it serves an educational purpose and it gathers what I've called the unity movement, which are people who are essentially post-political and non-ideological and recognize a hazard that is posed to civilization. So, anyway, I don't want people to conflate what is clearly um, a political dimension to what I'm saying with with Rescue the Republic. But, I'm going to offer one correction, which I will return to after I've answered the question you've asked me. I don't believe that the deep state and pharma corruption are a reflection of senescence. I believe they are a consequence of the senescence of our civilization. So, let me outline why our why civilization senesces in the same sense that a biological organism does, and then I'll make the case for what has happened that has brought in all of these factors that what I'm saying are all the all the worst ideas accumulated in one place. So, the story of why creatures grow feeble and inefficient with age. Most people would say why we age. I would say why we senesce, which is more than a fact of time simply passing. It's a question of us biologically degrading as we are all familiar with. That's a process that starts not at birth, but it starts at the usual age of first reproduction for a species. So, basically, sexual maturity is the moment at which senescence begins, which is in and in and of itself an indicator of what is driving this process. The theory, which is as close as we ever get in science to a fact, the theory that explains why creatures like us senesce and why certain other creatures either don't senesce or senesce in a different way is something written by somebody I had the privilege of knowing, a guy named George C. Williams, who was one of the great 20th century evolutionary biologists. And his hypothesis that he offered in 1947 was something called antagonistic pleiotropy. And what it said was that it was building on a an earlier piece of work by a guy named Peter Medawar, a British biologist, Nobel Prize winner, the guy who discovered the evolutionary and physiological reason that we reject a graft from somebody who has the same blood type. If you, you know, put somebody else's tissue into your body, your immune system rejects it because the compatibility goes well beyond blood type. Anyway, so Peter Medawar um made an argument that natural selection sees what happens to us in early life with much greater clarity than it sees what happens in late life. And the reason for that, according to Medawar, was that lots of stuff that happens to you late in life that might be a consequence of a genetic vulnerability happens to so few individuals that there's not a mechanism for selection to see it very well. Um and most reproduction is done by the time selection has any opportunity to see it at all. So, something that has a profound impact on your health in your 90s, actually most people don't live to their 90s, so it's very cheap in evolutionary terms. What George Williams added to that was he said, "Look, that may well explain the process that happens at the very end of life when selection becomes very weak in its ability to see these defects. It does not explain why we have measurable senescence early in our reproductive lives, in fact beginning at the dawn of our reproductive lives." His argument was the the human body or any animal body is a terrifically complex entity that is set in motion by a genome that is much less complex. In fact, you can argue that the genome at the informational level is really complicated. It's not complex. What that means is that in order for a genome that has, let's say, 20,000 active genes, each of which has an average of five different edits, so 100,000 genes, that set in motion a human that as an adult will have some 30 trillion cells that is self-assembling, self-repairing, and maintaining, that that requires that small number of genes to do multiple things. And we know this is true. Genes do multiple things. In fact, even saying that the average gene has five different edits is an indicator that genes are all doing multiple jobs. When you have something like a gene that does multiple jobs, it will often be the case that a gene will do something that's beneficial early and will have a harm late. And Williams' point was, "Anytime that happens, the tendency is for selection to view the early life benefit very positively and to look past the late life cost. So, we ought to accumulate these genes that do two things. That's a pleiotropy. And we ought to then have the benefit of all of the early life features of these genes when we are young and the cost ought to be the degradation of our capacity to maintain and protect ourselves as we grow older. So, when I started studying uh in graduate school, it was well known that this hypothesis that Williams had offered was true. We could tell that because many of the predictions that that that hypothesis made had been tested in the wild, but nobody knew of any genes that matched his description, which was a curious fact. I in graduate school happened on something that met all of the criteria and seemed to explain a lot. It wasn't exactly a gene, but it was good enough. It met Williams in 1947 didn't know enough about the way the genome worked because our understanding of the genome was crude at the time. So, he didn't draw his hypothesis as broadly as he might, but once you've sort of fixed it for a modern understanding of the way information is stored in the genome, uh it became clear to me that there was a system that would explain in terms that fit Williams' hypothesis exactly this pattern across tissue after tissue. So, I won't delay us there, but that system is one that protects us from tumors when we're young and uh at the risk of getting myself in hot water here, tumors have traditionally been very rare in youth. They've become much more common as a result of various distortions that we have introduced into our environment, but the the traditional pattern, the evolutionary pattern, is that you should have essentially no risk from tumors except in a couple of unusual tissues, you know, until you're 50s or 60s, you know, at which point the pattern starts to accelerate. But, um the cost of protecting ourselves from tumors is a an absolute limit on the number of times that most cells can replace themselves and therefore the maintenance that we do of the body. All right. Now, I've dragged you into a very um a fairly detailed explanation of why creatures senesce and why, in the case of something like a mammal, a human, um this has to do with the protection against tumors. The argument I made at Rescue the Republic was that civilizations have the identical selective defect as the one that makes creatures evolve so they grow feeble and inefficient with age. And that is a bias towards short-term solution making irrespective of the delayed cost. So, if you think about what a politician um what they are uh rewarded for doing, they are rewarded for doing things that cause people to think that their life has been enhanced. And by the time, you know, if if we do something, if we make some expenditure and it makes people's life better, but it's unsustainable, then when the late life cost is due, A, people may not even connect it to the change that brought about that late life cost. And B, the politician is long since out of office, so they are not penalized. So, politicians are rewarded for finding these short-term solutions that cause people to think that they're being well governed, but the consequence is that our system has accumulated all of these hazards with a delayed effect. And my claim is uh civilizations will do this. Our civilization is especially prone to it because of the democratic features of our system and the market-based features of our system. The market tends to reward things that are profitable in the short term. And so, both of these things have caused the accumulation of all of these characteristics that have now made our civilization utterly fragile. It literally is demented. We are doing preposterous things that don't make any sense or virtually impossible to defend in any sort of logical terms. And we can't stop ourselves just like you know, an old person maybe can't stop themselves from falling down the stairs. All right, we all know what what senescence looks like as somebody gets old just cuz we've been around it. What are the characteristics that you see right now that are these accumulated tumors or whatever word you want to use? Um I would say two are obvious. We could probably find a dozen more if we went looking, but the two that are obvious are a complete failure of the immunities of our system. And that is what I was going to argue all of the stuff that's accumulated over under the the blue banner in our election. That looks to me like a collapse of our resistance to what most people would think of as parasites. I would be tempted to call them parasitoids. A parasitoid is a parasite that kills you. Um and so what we have is the concentration of all of these betrayals of our long-term well-being under one banner, not because those things are themselves the product of senescence, but because our vulnerability to them has allowed them, you know, to to come through the door. Um the other thing is a kind of literal dementia. You know, one thing I'm sure you will have noticed is just that in talking to people, you know, good-hearted, intelligent people trying to think about where we are in history, everybody is confused. The systems that are supposed to allow us to process just simple information about where we are, what it implies, and what we might do differently that would increase our chances of being around 500 years from now, those conversations have become increasingly meaningless as every system that you would use to perceive the world or to process the information is collapsing. So, we're all confused, even those of us who are spending almost every waking hour trying to understand where we are are having to contemplate uh a huge range of possibilities just because our uh our stream of evidence is increasingly noisy. All right, when I try to break this down, I often will think in terms of the um the constitutional amendments, what they were trying to protect against. So, in this, I'm hearing so you're you didn't use the words sense-making apparatus, but there's this thing that we normally rely on people to be able to come out, debate ideas, say this is what I think is happening. No, you're out of your mind, this is what's happening. Uh that that's being clamped down on. So, you have a degradation of the First Amendment for sure. Um do you think that the distortions that we see actually map to amendments? Is that an overly simplistic way to look at it? Can we begin like sort of going through that and saying, "Okay, this is how we're breaking uh this immune response number one. This is how we break immune number two." Or is it more nebulous than that? Um I tend to think of it in terms of a an evolutionary novelty problem. So, the founders wrote a document and they wrote their reasoning into other auxiliary documents. And I have a hard time imagining that they could have done better given what they understood about where they were in history and what they were. But, these were people these are pre-Darwinian people. They did not understand evolutionary dynamics and therefore couldn't take the concept of evolution that applies to creatures and species and understand that there was an analogy to civilizations and that they needed to be mindful of evolutionary dynamics that would create challenges that they could not envision. So, they were aware of technological change, obviously, but they were not aware of evolutionary dynamics and that means that given what they knew, they did wonderfully. I think they nailed the values uh as well as could be hoped. But, the structures were of course going to run into profound challenges just based on the fact that the threats that that the founders perceived uh are no longer recognizably like the ones that we face. So, the degree to which government was the greatest threat to the free exchange of ideas is just it's not true anymore. We now have these quasi-governmental um, monopolistic forces that are in a position to technically allow you to speak and prevent anybody from hearing you. All these things are just simply not well addressed by a First Amendment that is focused on governmental threats to speech. So, I think they nailed the values. It is not surprising, it should not surprise us that the document is does not anticipate modern increasingly technological threats to civil liberties. They, of course, didn't complete the job at the time. You know, they left slavery intact in order to get the the colonies to to confederate. Um, so, what we are left with is how do we recover their vision of a world in which we are freed from constraints to innovate, to be productive, to partner. Um, how do we rescue that from the increasingly archaic understanding of the threats to liberty uh, that we can now see in the present. So, I'm a big fan of the Constitution given when it was written. I'm not a huge fan of the idea, hey, let's open it up and have a constitutional convention because I worry that we could make things worse very easily, but I also don't believe the Constitution is up to the challenge at the moment absent uh a visionary um set of interpreters of that document which we're not going to get in a political environment like the one we have. Mhm. All right, let me give you a a slightly alternate take. I agree with you I think literally up until you say government is not the biggest threat anymore. Uh you paint a very compelling picture of what's really happening which is the corporations are coming in, they're creating these incredible technical tools that become the public square, they themselves are now creating the inability for people to speak, but I think even that is an echo of the fundamental problem which is that the government does become the way in which the uh parasite begins overtaking the organism and if we were to actually go back and look at the founding documents in there are all of the answers. So, you have a government founded on the idea that governments tend towards the tyrannical and so you have to put in all of these things in place of that. Now, to your point about the way the systems evolve, there's no way that they could have predicted the way in which the um tyranny was going to evolve and so what ends up happening, what I see when I look out at the world today is you have this marriage of a government that is just absolutely mind-bendingly obsessed with uh size, power, control as an organism will want to do and just to keep the biological metaphors, anybody that understands how tumors work, they do all kinds of things to hide from the immune system to make sure that they get the blood supply, that the nutrients are going to them and so they I I'll just be very blunt. I think that's where the government has gotten to. It's just drawing in all of the resources it wants to grow. It's putting out jobs reports that, "Hey, everybody, jobs are amazing." And yet, more than 50% I think it might be more than 70% of the jobs created in the most recent job report were governmental jobs. So, you have a a what could be a thriving bit of tissue that has become cancerous in the sense it does not know when to stop replicating. And so, it is just sucking in resources and trying to bamboozle people in in the sense of, "Hey, vote for me. You want a bigger government. We're going to take care of more things for you and it's going to be wonderful." Okay, so that's the tumor playbook. And then, what you have is corporations that go, "Ooh, this is actually really advantageous to me through something called regulatory capture. So, I what I want to do as the growing corporation is, yeah, go ahead and come to me back channel, tell me to silence certain people, and I will do that because and I doubt that all of this is said out loud, but there becomes this sort of quiet quid pro quo of I'm going to do that for you and what I need is for you to help me create this moat around me that makes it hard for incumbents to come in because when I look at the ways to solve these problems, like when I see the increased rhetoric around greedy corporations are gouging you and we're going to have to deal with that in order to get the prices down at the grocery store. I I will just tell you right now, if you start relieving regulations, you will get new companies that will enter the space and the best way to innovate is price and speed. And so, if you can do something cheaper or faster or ideally both, you will absolutely clobber the incumbents. But, the incumbents are using the tumorous government in order to help them protect against that sort of flourishing thing. So, to me, it still all comes down to if you go back to the founding documents and you see their absolute fear of that getting too big, too tyrannical, that if you go back to that idea and say, "How do we start reducing the size of government? How do we start relieving some of the regulatory burdens so that we can save the ultimate patient, which is the average person?" Uh it's great analysis. I think we have to bring these two things together because I think you're seeing something with great clarity and it might be obscuring something else. So, the distinction between a tumor and a parasite or by my argument, a parasitoid is that a tumor in general, mind you, 20 years from now, I believe we will find that this story is less true than the way I'm going to tell it, but in general, we believe tumors are a failure of regulation. A tumor dies with the patient. Most of them do not have a way of transmitting anything to someone else. So, the genes inside the tumor actually have an interest in the tumor being reined in and sometimes that fails for reasons we could go into if we wanted, but the point is the tumor is not doing its own bidding because there's some reason for it to do that. A parasite or a parasitoid is. A parasite has reasons. It is its own evolutionary entity and it has interests that are contrary to that of the host. In the case of most parasites, they have to walk a delicate balance because a parasite that kills the host often dies with it. So, most parasites steal, but they have an interest in minimizing the harm to keep the creature that they're parasitizing profitable. A parasitoid has evolved a different life cycle where it can actually survive on its own in one way or another. And the key to seeing that is I So, I'm not arguing that we don't have that phenomenon that you're talking about where government starts growing of its own accord even though it's bad for the body politic. That does happen, and in fact, it's a natural part of institutions, and Elon Musk demonstrated that it had happened inside of X, and anybody who's been paying attention to tech circles knows that it's happened inside of all of the tech giants, that there's a huge number of people who are not positively contributing, and it's a cryptic, you know, welfare program at some level. There are lots of people who can go, and it doesn't damage the organism at all. In fact, it makes it more efficient. But, the what I've increasingly begun to focus on are the entities that are not even in principle under the control of the governmental apparatus. So, I draw a distinction between out of control entities, some department that has taken on a life of its own and started uh governing based on internal beliefs without respect to the consent of the governed. That obviously happens, but there's no functional part of the government as described by our founding documents for which you cannot turn off the budget. What has happened is that many things have now innovated a mechanism to fuel themselves. They have created black budgets that are not under anyone's control. Uh and they've done this in many different ways, you know, we have the deep state itself which has the ability to generate money in various different ways. It can either drain money out of the treasury through mechanisms that do not show up under the correct line item, or it can generate resources by committing crimes that are easier to commit if you're part of the intelligence apparatus than if you're outside of it, or by having superior information on historical events and using that to transfer wealth in the market. These mechanisms mean that there is no uh control that one could exert from inside of government to turn off the deep state. This is the thing that makes the deep state different. We have to figure out what to do about that. It's not envisioned in the Constitution. And it it's just simply a new kind of challenge. Now, the last thing I'll say here is that when I first started thinking about the necessary relationship between the ability to fuel operations outside of governmental budgets and what we call the deep state, it was narrow. And then I started to realize that there were lots of governmental structures and quasi-governmental structures that have parallel um mechanisms operating in and around them. So, for example, discovering that the FDA is in large measure fueled by private money, right? Where pharma is in fact delivering a huge fraction of the resource that makes the entity run, this may have the same implication even though it functions very differently than, for example, the CIA trafficking drugs into the US because it has license to commit crimes in the course of doing business. Yeah, uh you have your finger on very real things, but when I step back and go um okay, we there are multiple problems happening inside the body, just to um keep with one metaphor here. Uh and I think now it becomes a question of what what is going to end up killing you. So, I've heard you make a really um compelling argument that part of the reason that uh the mRNA um protocol, technology, whatever you want to refer to it as, is so dangerous is there are parts of the body that it can get into, namely the heart, where it's now going to take you down. But if it got into the liver or the deltoid tissue, it's less of a problem. And so, I want to focus in on the liver and the heart for a second. Uh because this gets to I think the difference, even though you and I both think the patient is very sick. Um I'm going to make the case that your focus is on the liver and I'm focused on the heart. Uh so, what I think is happening, if you just want to sum up the derangement and what you would have to do to unwind all of this, it is very simply speaking to this idea of a black budget. I'm not saying that's not a problem, but I am saying it is absolutely dwarfed by the thing that they do in plain sight, which is they print money. So, they rack up all this extraordinary debt, which is why um the agencies can just keep getting larger and larger to your point about there's no way to turn off that spigot. The reason is they've actually convinced the public that you can print money forever. And the thing that I'm watching is yes, the heart can absorb some damage, but it's not the liver, which will actually regenerate itself. The heart is very different. And when you start messing with the currency, this is what happens. The reason they print money is because they don't have to get the govern's consent. It is a way around that whole idea of the consent of the governed. So, uh they can spend money on anything and they don't have to ask you for it because they're just going to print additional money, and people do not understand that as they print money, it's robbing you of your buying power. So, they are quite literally stealing from you even though you have the same amount of money in the bank. So, if I'm the government and I have this impulse to grow and get bigger, and I have a mechanism by which I can steal in two ways, and this is another thing that people do not fully understand. Way number one is I just print the money. We talked about that. Way number two is technology is a deflationary thing. So, as things are deflating in cost, I as the person printing the money know there won't be a one-to-one relationship between the amount that I inflate the currency and inflation. So, hey, you're if you were really able to run the math between how much has technology lowered the cost so that my cost compared to 1965 should be lower, not higher, and in reality, they're obscenely higher. That delta is what the government has been able to capture through money printing. And so, I look at that and I go, there's no way back from that. This is a one-way thing. Now, the part that I can't wrap my head around, and coming back to what you were saying at Rescue the Republic, is this idea of how do we re-phoenix out of this? Because history tells us that the way that you re-phoenix out of this is you go to war, a whole bunch of people die, it is so painful for everyone involved that typically uh you lose your status as a reserve currency. So, you don't even have to have this hyper inflate away. You just lose your status as a reserve currency. You're so tired of fighting. You just upend everybody's debts. You do a debt jubilee. Now, the people that were owed money are no longer owed anything, which is devastating in its own right. And the people that owed people money, that goes away, which is hey, it's a big win. But everybody's just too tired, too depleted to fight it. But that is such a gnarly way where you literally it's like the the old version of the country dies and usually something lesser than steps out of that and sort of transmits the power and you could say at this point that the parasite moves from that host, which it was perfectly happy to let die, and then because it's an idea pathogen, it moves over to a new country that looks like we did in the 1940s. And the cycle begins again. But it's always a cycle of debt. And that's the part that people just other than Ray Dalio, who's screaming at the top of his lungs, uh people just do not seem to queue in on. Okay, but you get it. I get it. Now, slowly. Took me a lot of years to get here. All right, but you're you're one guy working on uh presumably not privileged information. So, you're able to get there. I'm able to get there. I know lots of people who've gotten there. Do you think the people who are running this system don't see this? I think it is a mixture of truly sinister people who understand it and do it and people that they really don't understand it. They they actually don't have the intellectual capability to wrap their head around it. Yeah, I agree. I agree actually that both of those things are true. But all I need for my point is that there is a collection of people in a position to effectively make policy who do understand that this is a fatal trajectory. So, my point is that's the parasitoid, not the cancer. And maybe the way to think about this is there are cancers that are contagious. The thing I alluded to earlier is that my guess is we're going to discover there are more of them than we knew. Um but we do have examples of these things. For example, the the cancer that is killing Tasmanian devils in uh in Australia uh is a contagious cancer that they get from each other when they battle. So, what you've got is a decent model for something governmental and inept in which many of the people who are participating in it do not understand that they are actually killing the goose that lays the golden golden eggs, but there's also an element that does understand very well what it's doing. All right? That it is acting in a strategic way and that it will escape the dying body. That's where I believe we are. So, I'm not disagreeing about the existence of tumor-like processes in this story. I'm saying there's another element, which is something that does not care that it is killing the thing on which you and I and our families and friends are all depending. And so, that's why I'm focused there. I both problems are potentially fatal in their own right. The argument I made at Rescue the Republic was that nature for creatures like us that do have this profound pattern of senescence has come up with a beautifully elegant solution that we do not understand intuitively, but nonetheless it is essentially a perfect solution. And that we do not have access to it with civilizations. That we would have had to build a different mechanism in so that at the point that a civilization becomes decrepit, that there is a mechanism for it to give birth to a civilization that profits from the wisdom that has accumulated and jettisons that which is no longer relevant or turned out not to be true and creates a civilization, you know, effectively a process of the creation of new civilizations that become better over time, the way selection makes creatures better adapted to their environments over time. So, the solution for creatures is let's do it for humans. The solution is kids. And the thing about kids, and you don't need to have kids of your own for this solution to work, but we humans are unique in the degree to which what is adaptive about us is not housed in our genomes. We have genomes full of adaptations, but the genome has offloaded the heavy lifting of evolution to our cognitive layer and our cultural layer. And so much of what it is to be a human is actually passed outside of the genome from parent to offspring, sometimes passed horizontally across civilization. Those elements are much more evolutionarily capable than the underlying genome because they evolve faster. And so this is what accounts for human beings having evolved to do so many different things on Earth over our history and across space. And the way it works is you produce a child. That child is not a blank slate, but they're the blankest slate that nature has ever created. And they pick up that fraction of which you know that is still apparently highly relevant, and they jettison that fraction that is not. And so they become a version of you that is updated either because they live in different circumstances than you did or because time has progressed. So, what we have is a creature that can keep up with a rapidly changing environment. Um because we don't have that process in civilizations, we are facing senescence without having produced any offspring that might do what we're doing better than we're doing it, you know, in light of modern technology. And so the argument that I was making was that we have to figure out an alternative to civilizations giving birth to each other in some sort of regular way, and my claim was that very often wisdom about subtle phenomena is captured and transmitted culturally in the form of myths. And the myth that I invoked was the phoenix, which is a bird that instead of reproducing rises from the ashes of its own nest, and that we have to do something like this for our civilization to survive, for it to be effectively reborn not as a uh uh child, but as a a new bird. So, that that I think is where we are. How you do that is a difficult question. I think we have to survive the immediate peril in order to create a process that does this. Um but nonetheless, that was my argument. 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. This is what I would hope would happen. I would hope that you would consider that there are these core foundational ideas that make our country the coolest country on the planet. Um in so far as in the United States you can I think you can be the best