Warning On America's Collapse, Don Lemon vs Elon Musk, Racism, Hitler & Rising War | Bret Weinstein PT 2

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory

Episode: Warning On America's Collapse, Don Lemon vs Elon Musk, Racism, Hitler & Rising War | Bret Weinstein PT 2
Guest: Bret Weinstein
Date: April 17, 2024

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode of Impact Theory features evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein in a deep-dive conversation with host Tom Bilyeu. The focus: the unraveling social, political, and moral fabric of the United States and the West. Through topics stretching from censorship and free speech to border crises and great power competition, the pair grapple with the perils facing Western democracy and human rationality. With sharp critiques of current institutions and a willingness to explore taboos, the episode advances arguments about how societies can (or cannot) safeguard the “embers” of open inquiry and freedom in an era of mounting threats.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Fragility of Rationality and Open Inquiry

• Danger of Silencing Debate: Both speakers argue the greatest threat to progress is the suppression of reasoned discourse and truth seeking, especially on topics deemed too controversial.
  • [01:15] Tom: "If we're right now stopping people from talking about things, censoring people to death... how do we protect that little flame when it is under assault from so many different directions?"
• Rational Method’s Importance: Weinstein stresses the unique historical value of Western rationality/scientific method.
  • Replace it with utopian, untested systems, and society risks reverting to forms of dysfunction seen in history (e.g., Hitler as a “rational monster”).
  • [02:34] Bret: "Addressing the flaws of our system will always be better than scrapping it in favor of some system that hasn't shown any promise... There is a reason to talk about Hitler... A rational monster can be disincentivized."

2. Taboos, Morality, and Difficult Conversations

• Society’s Relationship to Taboo Topics: The necessity (and dilemma) of confronting dark subjects—rape, genocide, racism—to understand and prevent them.
  • [04:42] Bret: Uses rape as an analogy: only by understanding mechanisms and developing cultural disgust can a society reduce its incidence; the same logic applies, in more complex form, to genocide.
  • [08:29] Tom: "You're spreading the meme through the layer of culture... we have to bake into culture that this is absolutely abhorrent."
  • Oscillating taboo: Over-suppression can make society forget why the taboo exists, making bad behaviors resurface.
• Pornography vs Erotica: Extended dialogue on the line between art and harm, with profit motive singled out as the key divide in Weinstein’s definition.
  • [09:52] Bret: "If the thing that drove you to make it is profit, and it's erotic in nature, that's pornography."
  • [12:08] Bret: "The profit motive inherently drives you towards the end of the continuum that you instinctively are repelled by."
• Role of Courage and Understanding: Facing horrifying realities directly allows the identification of possible solutions.
  • Weinstein ties this back to modern society’s avoidance: “If we don’t face these subjects, we miss the leverage society has to reduce harm.”

3. Race, IQ, and the Landmines of Social Science

• Controversial Science as Double-Edged Sword: Exploration of IQ differences across populations is fraught because findings (regardless of truth) can be weaponized.
  • [17:02] Tom invoking Elon Musk: "If you want racism to go away, you have to stop talking about it all the time."
  • [19:10] Bret: “To say that IQs differ between populations is almost certainly true... That is not what most people hear when they hear a claim like that... The question... is what would you have to do to democratize the things that make us smarter?”
• Genetic vs Developmental Foundations: Weinstein argues that differences are much more likely due to development/environment than genetics; avoiding the topic may prevent solutions that help everyone.
  • [25:00] Bret: “Every population is undershooting the mark substantially... 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 brought the best out of their capabilities.”

4. Systemic Blinding, Power, and ‘Rent-seeking Elites’

• Censorship as Knowledge Hoarding: The podcast explores who benefits from societal “blindness”—and puts forward the “Time Traveling Money Printer” metaphor.
  • [30:10] Bret: “What they do have is enough control to render the truth-seeking capability of humanity lame… If they can privatize the knowledge of what is coming, it is like they have a time machine… That’s a why somebody would have engaged in blinding us.”
• Sabotage of Education: Modern confusion on basic truths (gender, math, morality) is seen as consequence of intentional or structural sabotage of education.
  • [35:24] Bret: "An institution that makes other people's kids smarter would be viewed hostilely by ruthless players who wished to take every advantage..."
  • Positions ‘moderation’ (as in content moderation) as a slippery slope toward censorship.

5. Free Speech and Its Counterintuitive Value

• Why Resist Censorship Even in the Face of Harmful Speech?:
  • Drawing lines quickly leads to ever-stricter controls, so the default must be tolerance for even “bad” speech.
  • [40:21] Tom: "Being able to talk is the same as being able to think. If you really want to hobble people and keep them dumb... hard for them to clarify their own thoughts..."

6. AI, Hallucinogens, and the Reliability of Perception

• Cautious Adoption of AI: Weinstein’s family avoids AI for now, wary of “contacting” a technology with society-wide ramifications.
  • [44:14] Bret: likens the “hallucinogen in our water” (the confusion of our times) to the need for humility about our perceptions.
• Power Tools for Growth, Not Escapism: Advocacy for using powerful experiences (hallucinogens, sex, stories) for deep enrichment, not casual pleasure.
  • [46:36] Bret: “If it is something you should be doing, don’t do them recreationally... Enjoy them at their full depth. It's not entertainment.”

7. Migration Crisis and the U.S. Southern Border

• On-the-Ground Report in the Darien Gap: Bret explains what he saw in Panama—mass moves of migrants from across the globe, with unique concern about a predominantly young male, Chinese cohort.
  • [49:18] Bret: “The Darien Gap is a famously difficult stretch... there are currently thousands being beckoned across... the international community is facilitating this migration.”
  • [53:14] Bret: “There is another migration which is housed separately, which I found very surprising. It is a migration that is almost entirely Chinese, predominantly young men... the Chinese are housed separately by the Panamanians.”
  • Chinese migrants had a “hostile air,” unsettling to Weinstein, who posits the possibility of an “invasion cloaked by migration.”
• Hypotheses on Motive: Weinstein assigns a 60% likelihood that “the Chinese Communist Party is sending people across our southern border with the intent to do harm to the United States.”
  • [59:15] Bret: “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%.”
  • Extended discussion weighs espionage, diaspora, body language, and alternative explanations.

8. Historical/Evolutionary Context: China’s Demographics

• Surplus Males & War: Weinstein references his earlier writings linking China’s one-child policy and its resulting excess male population to the potential preparation for future conflict.
  • [77:57] Bret: “...there might be a reason to produce a generation with excess males if you were preparing for war... men who have no reproductive prospects at home, who are sexually frustrated, can be armed and sent abroad...”

9. The 2024 Election and Political Leadership

• Trump: Rational Monster or Not? Weinstein says Trump isn’t a “rational monster,” but remains a risky choice. He labels the current Democratic frontrunner (Biden) as unfit for office due to cognitive decline.
  • [84:52] Tom: "Many people think Trump is the rational monster. Is he?"
  • [84:52] Bret: "I don't think so... I don't want him to be president because... he doesn't have the temperament or team-building skills."
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Endorsement: Weinstein calls Kennedy the only plausible rational choice, citing his grasp of recent crises, legal background, and willingness to reform the system.
  • [86:03] Bret: "There is only one rational choice left to us in this election... Bobby Kennedy."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Addressing the flaws of our system will always be better than scrapping it in favor of some system that hasn't shown any promise in accomplishing what we've got.”
— Bret Weinstein [02:40]

"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."
— Bret Weinstein [03:00]

"We as a society ought to hold values that cause us to raise boys... so that rape is disgusting to them by the time they become adults."
— Bret Weinstein [06:40]

"If the thing that drove you to make it is profit, and it's erotic in nature, that's pornography."
— Bret Weinstein [09:52]

“The profit motive inherently drives you towards the end of the continuum that you instinctively are repelled by... all pornographers are selling the same thing, sex. So how do you compete?”
— Bret Weinstein [12:08]

"To say that IQs differ between populations is almost certainly true... That is not what most people hear when they hear a claim like that... but those distinctions were not based in genes, then the answer is, okay, well, can we level everybody up?”
— Bret Weinstein [19:10]

"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."
— Bret Weinstein [30:10]

“An institution that makes other people's kids smarter would be viewed hostilely by ruthless players...”
— Bret Weinstein [35:24]

“Being able to talk is the same as being able to think. If you really want to hobble people and keep them dumb... it's hard for them to clarify their own thoughts.”
— Tom Bilyeu [40:21]

“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.”
— Bret Weinstein [46:36]

"There is another migration which is housed separately... almost entirely Chinese, predominantly young men... the impression they left was one of hostility and mockery and it was decidedly disturbing."
— Bret Weinstein [53:22]

"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%."
— Bret Weinstein [59:15]

"I don't think [Trump] has the... temperament or the team-building skills to do the job that is necessary... There is only one rational choice left to us in this election and it is Bobby Kennedy."
— Bret Weinstein [84:52, 85:33]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:15] Protection of rationality and open dialogue under assault
• [02:34] The dangers of discarding the Western system for untested alternatives
• [04:42] The need to understand dark aspects of humanity to prevent them
• [09:52] The dividing line between erotica and pornography (profit motive)
• [17:02] Elon Musk’s view on racism and danger of endlessly discussing “dangerous” ideas
• [19:10] Race, IQ, developmental vs genetic differences
• [30:10] “Time Traveling Money Printer” and how elites benefit from blinding the public
• [35:24] Decline and sabotage of educational institutions
• [40:21] Free speech as fundamental to both thinking and societal health
• [44:14] Societal confusion likened to a hallucinogenic state; need for cognitive humility
• [49:18] Weinstein’s firsthand account of mass migration through the Darien Gap
• [53:22] Segregation, behavior, and implications of Chinese migrants
• [59:15] Weinstein gives a 60% likelihood to the “Chinese invasion” hypothesis
• [84:52, 85:33] Weinstein on Trump, Biden, and endorsing RFK Jr.

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Tone & Style

The conversation maintains a thoughtful, urgent, and cautiously combative tone. Both Tom Bilyeu and Bret Weinstein are deeply skeptical of mainstream institutional narratives and emphasize open inquiry and uncomfortable truths. The dialogue is rigorous, unsparing, and at times pushes the limits of taboo, while advocating for rational optimism, humility, and action.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode is a tour de force of critical and controversial thinking about the state of the West, blending evolutionary biology, political analysis, and philosophical argument. It stands as a call to confront difficult social problems openly and rationally. Weinstein’s personal experiences, such as reporting from the Darien Gap, lend urgency and specificity to often-abstract debates on migration and security. Listeners will leave with a sharpened sense of the stakes facing America and the West—a mix of hope (for solutions if honesty prevails) and fear (of what happens if the trend toward blindness and censorship continues).

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Transcript

[A]

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[C]

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 gonna see why we have to talk about genocide. Somebody has to open these topics if we are to get to past them and not have them haunt our future.

[A]

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 reason in order to get us where we want to go. So the scientific method you've talked really interestingly about. People need to deal with the physical world. You can't do everything at a social, intellectual level. 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. So we are living in a time where that very process of rationality is being hand waved away as somehow white supremacist or whatever, which is crazy town to me. Um, so how do we protect this little ember? So if we're right now stopping people from talking about things, censoring people to death. In fact, one thing I'd love to hear you talk about is Don Lemon and Elon Musk and Elon saying you want censorship so badly you can taste it. I thought that was a great line and really endemic of something far more than just Don Lemon. I think a lot of people want to moderate 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?

[C]

I mean, it's a great question, and I Think 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. To something other than phony utopian alternatives that have never been established to be possible. So anyway, 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 in accomplishing 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 happened, if you imagine the reason I engaged in that exploration when I was a college student was I was afraid that it was just too easy to dismiss him as nuts. If you dismiss Hitler as nuts, what? 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.

[A]

How do we decide who's an irrational monster?

[C]

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. 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 is Small 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 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 and 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. We said never again after the Holocaust, but how many genocides have we seen since 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 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? No, I'm, I'm terrified by them. And that's why I. I really think the route to preventing them comes in understanding them.

[A]

Interesting that we have to. So it. You're spreading the meme through the layer of culture, you're saying we have to bake into culture, that this is just absolutely abhorrent. 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 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 people force other people to stop talking about it so much that it becomes so taboo that suddenly it has to be reinforced. 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 disgust triggering for me. Yeah. Does not feel like that needs reinforcing.

[C]

Way, way, way, way, way.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

I think we're missing something though, because, I mean, I'm not into porn. I think porn is a. A terrible error. I'm not against erotica. It's not that erotic content throws me, but.

[A]

Interesting. You have a line, though. Oh, erotica, fine. Porn bad.

[C]

Yes, porn apocalyptically bad.

[A]

Can you draw a line?

[C]

I can. I can't operationalize the line, but I can tell you exactly where the line is.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

The line is, was the motivation for the production of the content. Profit.

[A]

Interesting. Okay.

[C]

You could make great art and get paid for it. In fact, I think you aspire to this.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

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.

[A]

Interesting.

[C]

Which isn't to say that every item in porn is harmful.

[A]

Hold on.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

If I make hardcore bondage, super dominant, aggressive, almost rape like porn. But I'm not doing it for money. I just think it's beautiful art. Sincerely.

[C]

Yep. No, I get it.

[A]

That would be. Okay.

[C]

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 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.

[A]

That seems like a really weird line to draw with the profit thing. I would. So just as one guy speaking from experience, the loop I would worry about is volume, initial age of contact, given how brains develop, and then the type. So if it were like super vanilla, it's, 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. Now I'm very worried about what they will imbue. But. But even if that shit 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.

[C]

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 make any argument you want. But let's look at the case. You've drawn a continuum between plain vanilla stuff that's erotic for the most basic human reasons up through super extreme stuff. Here's my point about the profit motive. The profit motive inherently drives you towards the end of the continuum 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 things that we understand, or in some cases we might understand them. But the idea that 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 operationalize the line between 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, engaged in an elevated activ rather than, you know, a base activity, Is that the distortion of history and the fact that our civilization has grown so crass that 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 with it. And I would argue against anybody who 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 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 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 near impossible. 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 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.

[A]

Elon Musk has said 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.

[C]

No, no, no, no. I, I would, I would instantiate the principle that I'm elucidating differently. And in fact this is why I thought the question of IQ 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 it didn't have to be a good answer, but I believe it is a good answer when

[A]

you say it's a good answer. So here's what I imagine happens and I do want to get back to the context we started this in, which is what is happening, happening to western civilization. But just to take the IQ thing so it doesn't keep coming back up, I think there are two hyper dangerous things that if solidified can create real problems. I. Whatever's 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. 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 black people have a slightly lower iq, then that 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's true is true. But God damn, like those are the landmines that people are trying to avoid. And given that I think ideas really do run the things, they run the cultural currents, that there are some ideas I just don't want to spend a lot of time with.

[C]

I get it, but I think 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, 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 that'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. If you knew that there were important distinctions between populations, but that those distinctions were not based in genes, then the answer is, okay, 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 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 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 on the basketball court and the hockey rink and the long jump pit and all of that. It's a bad analogy. And 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 frickin 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 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 Inuit 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 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 the humans differ across all of these physical capabilities is, 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 we're Going to compete. And I'll tell you which right there is no better. It's all about 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 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. 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 out competed those with less capacity. So that did happen. It is possible. But the question that we are left with, the one that we are avoiding because of what we see on the basketball court and because of what we see on the soccer field, the question that we are avoiding is what would you have to do to democratize the things that make us smarter? My feeling is every population is undershooting the mark substantially. Right. We have not properly studied the question of what developing 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 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? Eight minutes? Eight minutes. And what I've said is there is a very strong chance that by avoiding the question 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. If the quality of your developmental environment didn't have an influence on how smart you ended up?

[A]

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 intelligence is inheritable to a hyper distressing degree now 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, 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, now people are tearing it apart. I saw a video the other day where that the guy was like, 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. Given how much ground we've just traversed, can you put a button on why blind us? Why are they so worried about what we see and say?

[C]

Yeah, let me flesh out the concept I started with and then let me.

[A]

As long as the punchline is why they are doing this, I'm here for it.

[C]

Yeah, well, I mean the problem is who are they and how specific can we be about why they're doing it. But if we put those 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. And the Time Traveling Money Printer is based on the idea that we all have 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, when you

[B]

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[C]

I'm concerned that some rent seeking elites

[A]

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.

[C]

I would describe it differently. I would say it's people who make a profit through activity that is not productive.

[A]

The dictionary disagrees with you.

[C]

Oh God. Yeah, well, I'd be willing to hash this out in a fight to the death with a dictionary.

[A]

But,

[C]

but in any case, let's imagine that we have some folks who have got some, 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 or something 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. Cruise ships are a bad bet. You should short, you know, the cruise ship industry, airlines. I would go big on home deliveries of this, that and the other. So you could 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 happened. And actually there's a tremendous amount of evidence, much of it is laid out in Bobby Kennedy's book on Wuhan that there were incredibly prescient 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 happened 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. And why is obvious because for the same reason that people rob a bank, you know, this is safer and much more lucrative to place bets in the world based on private information. It's a good gig. And so, anyway, 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?

[A]

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 pressure 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 that probably plays out something like, somebody needs to be the adult in the room. The thing that he kept saying in the interview with Elon Musk was, 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, if it doesn't violate the law or our policies, we don't take it down. We just don't promote it. And he just kept going, you need to moderate this stuff. What do you think about that? Is. Is moderation propaganda for censorship, as Elon says, or is it the flagrant embrace of hate speech that Don Lemon sees it as?

[C]

Well, I know very little about Don Lemon, except that the six times he has risen to my awareness, he's been impressively foolish. 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. But let's put it this way. You've got a vacuum of comprehension based on the sabotage of our educational institutions.

[A]

So people are intentional sabotage.

[C]

I don't Know, I assume, I assume the same. Think about it this way. An institution that makes other people's kids smarter would be viewed hostilely 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 completely incapable of figuring out whether two plus two equals four or whether men can become women. That confusion is serving somebody. At what level was this? A bunch of industries that decided that they needed to disrupt the discovery of inconvenient things? Was it more systematic than that? I can't say. I think there probably is a certain amount of systematic sabotage, but how would I know? 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 truth itself. 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 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 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 competitors 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? Two plus two equals four. Yep. The symbols are arbitrary, but the concept is not the least bit arbitrary. It 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. And 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. That's in part because the vacuum of understanding and the sabotage of education is opening the door to us just simply dusting off concepts that we had gotten past. But it's. But the other thing is, when somebody is advocating for censorship, what probably happened is they find themselves in a temporarily advantaged position and they would like somebody to hard code 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 gonna have to tolerate some bad speech.

[A]

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 is that being able to talk is the same as being able to think. And so if you really wanna hobble people and keep them dumb and keep them under your th, 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. 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 milieu is just all the foundations are gone. And that unmortis in ways that Nietzsche 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.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And now broader thing. You've got all this crazy going on in the government, including 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 confuse things to make us not be able to even trust our own eyes to. 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?

[C]

We have been avoiding it, and I think this is an open question because avoiding it is concerning. You don't want to get left behind. 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 believe what we are doing here, what we do on dark horse, the world of people hashing these questions out is not entertainment. I believe we're hashing this stuff out 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. 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'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 while

[A]

you're hallucinating or you're saying when you come back.

[C]

Well, presumably that's what you realize.

[A]

Yeah, but.

[C]

But here's the thing. As society has gone nuts and it's advocating for a bizarre 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 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. 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.

[A]

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 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, 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 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.

[C]

Totally agree with you. Totally agree with you. Which is part of the. And I will tell you, I, in an effort to become the world's biggest buzzkill, I have taken up arms against the idea of entertainment or recreation.

[A]

Both of them, full stop.

[C]

Kind of. It's a lot like my position about pornography versus erotica.

[A]

Interesting. What are you worried it's doing to your mind?

[C]

Wasting it, really. Yeah, but look, here's my point. 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 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 sex, frankly. This is a power tool. It's very important. Right. If somebody gave you a Ferrari, going and 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 like. Well, I mean, there are a lot of drugs that I don't think are interesting. Drugs that can trigger a sense of 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.

[A]

All right. Well, speaking of something that one should take at 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. That one's out of left field.

[C]

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 miss. It's a mystery. Why would anybody allow this to happen? 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 my son and I, Zach, went to Panama and we traveled to the province of Darien, to the edge of the Darien Gap. Actually, we went into the Darien Gap, but we traveled by car to the edge of it. The Darien Gap is a broken. It's a section of the Pan American highway that has never been built. The Pan American highway runs from Prudhoe 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, what is there is a wilderness. 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 Darien Gap, largely by the international community, which is facilitating this massive migration. Some of the people who are migrating are South Americans. There's a lot of people from Venezuela fleeing economic collapse there, but there are a lot of people coming from around the world. They fly into Quito, 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 into Colombia, and they can cross the Darien 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 massive migration. Lots of South Americans, lots of people from elsewhere in the world. From the Middle East, Yemen, people from Haiti. They are housed in encampments that are built in settlements that exist in Darien 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 their habitat, but they have no control over it.

[A]

How's that possible?

[C]

Well, the Panamanian border is supposed to be controlled by the Senna Front, which is the Panamanian Border Authority. It's a.

[A]

Is it a separate entity?

[C]

Yeah, it's a military police entity that is charged with controlling the frontier.

[A]

And they don't answer to the Panamanian government.

[C]

No, they do. Oh, they absolutely do.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

They're part of the Panamanian government.

[A]

Got it. So then Panama could stop this?

[C]

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.

[A]

How much of Panama's stance is public or. And how are you inferring?

[C]

That is a good question. Let us put it this way. The discussion of the migration is not nearly as 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 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 clear. 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, which are terrifying. Almost all of them had been robbed. Young women were routinely raped. People walk out of the jungle without their children. Children walk out of the jungle without their God. Oh, it's a humanitarian disaster. Yeah. The Darien Gap is 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 the gap with no understanding of how to equip themselves or what they're actually going to face there. And, 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. So it takes accidents and greatly enhances their lethality. 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 the basis on which they are crossing our southern border. But there is another migration which is housed separately, which I found very surprising. 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 are housed separately by the Panamanians, they're housed in places that are not towns. Interestingly, they're housed There's a camp called San Vicente, which Secretary Mayorkas visited when he was in Panama right before it was expanded greatly. But the Chinese who are moving through the San Vicente 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 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 if word got back, you would not get a hostile sense. You would get a sense that they were 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. And it 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 migrate. 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 an international competitor taking advantage of our open border

[A]

to

[C]

arrange some kind of harm that will be more easily orchestrated that way than it would be on a battlefield.

[A]

Okay. I know you tell your kids that when they have a hypothesis, they need to assign a percentage likelihood that it's accurate. What percentage likelihood of accuracy do you give? The invasion hypothesis.

[C]

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. Now, there are lots of other possibilities. You know, does spying fall under that hypothesis? No, I don't think that is specifically to do harm. So.

[A]

So you think it's more than spying. So there's the 60% is like proper harm.

[C]

You know, here's the thing. I know how crazy that sounds.

[A]

And my. My final question will be around that, like. So one of the early questions I asked you was, is there ever a hypothesis that's so far out that it's better not to even float it out? We've already had that conversation. 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. But what I want to know is this is such a high degree of certainty from somebody I consider so cautious in their thinking, 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.

[C]

Well, first of all, let me say this is part of why I decided I had to go in person, because.

[A]

Had you already been hearing this?

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah. The. The folks who. Who showed Zach and me this migration had been sending materials 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 it was hard to justify going. It's not an especially safe place to go. 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. Approach that the migrants in the Chinese 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 convey that to you in a way that you would have 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. But here's the other question. We have a southern border that is effectively open.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

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.

[D]

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[A]

Yes. So I find the hypothesis compelling, but I thought you were going to say like 7 to 10%. 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 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, governments are going to do what they can to get a leg up. We are in a pure competitor relationship with China. China has every reason to want to know more about what we're doing is 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 firsthand 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 at you, spitting, I don't know, but that'd be pretty tough to misread. But if it were more of just a body language, refusal to interact, scowling, that kind of thing, then, well, well, beyond that. Okay, give me the craziest thing they did.

[C]

Well, I don't know that any of it was crazy, but we attempted to interact with several different groups at the San Vicente camp. One gentleman attempted to mislead us into believing that he was Korean, and Michael Yan, who took us to Darien, who has spent time in China, tripped him up and revealed that this was a deception. At which point there was laughter amongst the group who 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 some naive foreigners and that that broke the ice. Right. This was a deception that was exposed and it led nowhere. I also believe that we were 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 a normal behavior for somebody who is, you know, involved in a major migration to a new homeland.

[A]

It still feels qualitative, though. So we have qualitative feedback because I can. So you don't know this about me, but my background's 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 because I do not want you to be cued 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 inside of China they say about America, they 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 at once. I think we're gonna have problems. But like, I still like the vibe of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, weak, huddled masses. Like, I love that vibe. Anyway, 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 non sinister, non spy 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. But it feels to me, with qualitative data, that it warrants a more cautious percentage.

[C]

Well, the question is, what would you think if you had been there?

[A]

And I might be way more hardcore than you. I might be 90%, don't know.

[C]

Nobody has any trouble accepting that 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 idea is 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.

[A]

Do you have an estimate of how many Chinese have crossed?

[C]

I believe it's tens of thousands.

[A]

Whoa.

[C]

It's a lot.

[A]

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, which I'm not loving. But let's finish the thought experiment. I get your friend hates that. But do you think we have a reckoning coming with a potential problem where the call came from inside the house?

[C]

I don't understand why this is even tough.

[A]

Because it seems self evident that an enemy would want to do this.

[C]

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? I mean, and the absurdity of 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. It's a whole different situation. You will have scrutiny exerted in your case and in another case there's no scrutiny. 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 play. 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?

[A]

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 so saying I think this has happened. But I, it certainly fits the incentive model.

[C]

I think that the thing that. What 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. But 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 Darien. I don't know why the Chinese are housed separately. I don't know why the Chinese appear to be facilitated in their migration by their government. Oh, but 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 Darien, when the Chinese one child policy was in full force, I wrote 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 Fisher. Ronald Fisher 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 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 would be a very effective mechanism for picking up territory. The same process I described to you when we were talking about genocide, that if you wanted to.

[A]

That seemed. No, like it would be a. It's the thing you do when you find yourself with surplus males. It isn't the thing you set out to do.

[C]

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 far sighted as the Chinese have been.

[A]

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's 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 financially invested so that everybody owes us one, but we don't want to take them over. We don't want to run their countries. 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. Now I want to have girls because this balance is all out of whack, but because they end up nipping that in the bud, 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.

[C]

But yeah, I mean, I, I hear what you're Saying and the problem is that the current governance of China is a departure from the historical true. 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 that even if the society viewed male children in a particular way, that you could calculate that for your own lineage, the chances of your child finding a mate 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 what looks like an invasion from what looks like one of our principal. I don't like the term enemy, but looks like a competitor. Competitor antagonist abroad.

[A]

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 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 he from Russia, he was actually East German but anyway gets 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. So I could see them being like no authoritarian rule, no social credit score. I'm here for it. Let's go.

[C]

Well, I will say the scenario you laid out does fit. If, if the scenario you laid out was right, then my 60% estimate is includes it. Right, an opportunistic invasion. But I also wanted to point out that the Chinese, as much as they have a multi millennium history of effectively being insular, is engaged in what is called the Belt and Road initiative, which is an expansive plan that looks, you know, like a modern imperial.

[A]

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 shit is messy. But boy, oh boy, do I want to control your infrastructure. Do I want you to have relationships with me.

[C]

Trade deal, want to control the flow of resources and labor to facilitate, facilitate a Sino centric future. I'm not faulting all the good with

[A]

having to govern you, right.

[C]

I'm not faulting the Chinese for advocating for their own well being. 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 to the Chinese people. But nonetheless, if there is any, I don't fault the Chinese for viewing the world in competitive terms. That's, that's the adult way to, to recognize how things work. But I do think we are being naive, not at least publicly entertaining the possibility that our antagonists abroad would take advantage of our lack of security. Our famous lack of security on our southern border and the international community's facilit of massive migration would be the perfect cover for something that was not collaborative.

[A]

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?

[C]

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, 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. That said, I believe there is only one rational choice left to us in this election and it is Bobby Kennedy

[A]

Jr. You don't think that'll split the vote?

[C]

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 disengage it from governance so that we can go back to being a Democratic Republican. I also, I personally know him. I like him a great deal. I trust him. And I believe that his legal knowledge and his wisdom, the fact that this is somebody in 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 renewed phase of American strength, to restore the consent of the governed, seems to me like the obvious 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? Those tropes make no sense in an era where the DNC is fielding Joe Biden in his state of disrepair. It's inconsistent with it. This is an emergency, and 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 I really hope people will rethink their reflexive embrace of what amounts to a jersey color over reason.

[A]

It's a great place then, Brett, where can people follow you?

[C]

They can come find us at the Dark Horse Podcast. Look for us on Rumble. They can find us on locals. I'm on Twitter, Rhett Weinstein. Brett has one T. There is a Bret Weinstein with two T's, and he gets way too much of my correspondence. You can check out Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century.

[A]

It's awesome. I've read it.

[C]

It's a good book and highly germane to many of the topics we've talked about. Maybe that's it. I like it.

[A]

All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[C]

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[B]

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