Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan expose USAID’s $27M Soros fund, $20M for Iraqi Sesame Street, and wasteful projects like Afghan infrastructure, framing it as a surveillance-propaganda racket. Weinstein critiques Darwinism’s oversimplified macroevolution claims while warning AI’s complexity risks catastrophic missteps—like Larry Ellison’s flawed cancer vaccine hubris—undermining human expertise. Skeptical of UFOs as extraterrestrial, he suggests optical illusions or lasers, but acknowledges evolution’s cosmic plausibility and life’s likely ubiquity. The episode underscores systemic deception, the limits of scientific dogma, and AI’s existential threats to biological oversight. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I have to say, in addition to being just overarchingly worried about what was going to happen to the Republic and to the globe, I was personally worried about what would happen to people like you and me if we lost.
And there's also, I have to say, I'm just, I'm upset at the general pattern of a failure to recognize how right those of us who hypothesized that there was a racket that had overtaken our entire governance structure, we turn out to be absolutely right about this and no one's going to mention it.
It's very strange that the media is ignoring it, especially the left-wing media.
It's just too big of a win for the right.
And so they're just ignoring it.
And then they're just highlighting the good things that USAID did, which I'm sure it probably did, probably had to do some good things to at least justify its existence while as a cover story.
Obviously, this was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn't vote on that don't make sense in light of our constitutional structure.
And I'm, you know, I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is it's a huge relief.
They gave $27 million to the George Soros Prosecutor Fund.
So our own government is funding this left-wing lunatic who is hiring the most insane prosecutors who are letting people out of jail who commit violent crimes.
And that's exactly how this racket worked is that the ability to tax the American public and then effectively get us to pay for being propagandized, for being surveilled, that's the game.
And I don't know what era we currently live in.
Obviously, there's a lot that's confusing about what the Trump administration is up to, but I don't think any reasonable person could be unhappy that we are exiting that era.
I'm going to read off some of the things that this guy, Kenakota the Great on Twitter, listed.
And this is off the Jesse Water Show.
USAID, $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, $11 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash, $27 million to give gift bags to illegals.
And, you know, USAID is, of course, riddled through whatever international madness it is that caused us to open our southern border and facilitate an invasion through the Darien Gap.
So, you know, seeing that structure laid bare is it almost feels like it can't be real.
It can't have been this close to the surface, and yet here we are.
But I have to say, as much as this is shocking, I wasn't surprised.
I thought that effectively our entire system had been turned into a racket and that we were basically being fed a cover story from it.
And it's weird to now have the evidence of this.
But I think it was apparent that whatever had taken over our system wasn't interested in the well-being of average people, that it was interested in the power of the state to take people's resources and redistribute them.
And that that really is what's been going on for most of our adult lives.
It is a psychological theory that our behavior changes when we know we're being watched.
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I think this is going to take years.
Chamoth said that it's going to be like I ran Contra on steroids.
That's what he said.
He said, when you get to the bottom of all this, it's going to be insane because they haven't even got to the Medicaid yet.
They haven't even got to the medical stuff.
There's so much they haven't even tapped into where they think the real mother load of fraud is.
And I must say that there's also another aspect to this which we have to be careful about, which is that the justifiable anger at discovering what it is that we've been dragged into as a nation is going to make it hard to see where the limits ought to be in terms of upending this stuff.
In other words, at the moment, I'm cheering for the wrecking ball.
They've built 61 at 15 stations since mid-August or through mid-August.
14,900 more are currently in some stage of development.
But that's where it goes into where they are, what they have to be done, and who's getting the money from them has to be done through a long process from each state.
How can pharma cloak the money that it's giving so that there's plausible deniability at the point that Elizabeth Warren is confronted or Bernie Sanders?
It's so nutty that this was all kind of like hidden until they started using software to try to figure out and map out where all the influence goes.
And the crazy thing about the NGOs, and this is one of the things that Mike Benz has gone like so deep into it, it's essentially like they contribute to the Democratic Party.
The government pays them.
It's all this weird sort of like circular money transfer thing that's out in the open.
Where we're headed is we're going to own Gaza somehow.
This is it.
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So, example, Black Voters Matter Funds, $4 million distribution network was invisible until quantum mapping revealed dozens of subsidiary organizations.
The unprecedented mapping reveals a previously hidden web of financial relationships.
The problem is, I, you know, sometimes when I see like a list of preposterous scientific projects that have gotten big grants, I read it and I think they all sound preposterous, but I don't know.
Some of these things are likely to have had a good explanation, and it just is not apparent in the soundbite.
And some of them are every bit as preposterous as they seem.
And so I can't look at a map like that and say what I would expect if the system was healthy.
So I'm cautious about it.
I don't think the system was healthy.
I think the system was a racket from one end to the other.
And I've been saying that we've been living in the era of malignant governance where there's basically no element of this you couldn't turn off and make us better.
But we have to be suspicious also of our understanding of how a properly functioning system would graph in something like that so that we don't overrun the train station when we get there.
Right.
And I will just say I was talking to a friend of mine who runs an Alaska Native Corporation, which I don't know if we've talked about Alaska Native Corporations before, but this is a corporation.
It competes for federal contracts.
It has some advantages in the competition for federal contracts.
And all of the profits go to Alaska natives.
And it is finding itself in a very difficult-to-navigate battle because of all of the successes of Doge.
So the Alaska Native Corporation is utilizing something called the 8A program.
The 8A program is a program that gives advantages to disadvantaged people.
And at some point, that ability to use the 8A program was granted to Alaska Native corporations.
Well, the 8A program is now under attack by some large corporations, federal contractors, who do not like competition from things like Alaska Native corporations.
And it is being portrayed as if it was based on race, which it isn't.
Anybody can use it.
It's not a race-based program.
But because people are in a mood to dismantle all of this left-wing solution-making corruption, these megacorporations are finding it easy to target the 8A program, and they are persuading members of Congress that it doesn't belong.
And this is going to be a tragic loss if this program, which works well, is dismantled in the fervor to go after all of the stuff that should never have been.
And then after the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, the U.S. government realized that it could not afford to give the natives of Alaska sovereign land rights because it was going to need to do things like put a pipeline to transport oil.
So instead of giving them reservations and sovereign land rights, it gave them some abilities to compete for federal contracts as Alaska Native corporations.
So it's an interesting program that does a lot of good, but its connection to the 8A program now has the good that it does in jeopardy.
And I don't know how many stories there are like that.
But we need to be careful that our excitement about watching all of this nonsense torn apart doesn't cause us to tear apart things that actually are functioning well and don't suffer from the defects of the DEI madness.
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So this is a question, right?
The categories like veteran-owned, woman-owned, and minority-owned.
So I'm not in a position to answer detailed questions about 8A, but what I would say is there are quite a number of success stories that this is exactly what we want for disadvantaged people at least.
So anyway, we should be interested in maintaining those programs.
At the same time, we find the stuff that's actual nonsense and get rid of it as quickly as possible.
And that's going to be a delicate balance.
So far, we're early in this process, and you're going to have big wins like the revelations about USAID.
But the day will come soon enough when we're talking about discussions where we actually have to do a cost-benefit analysis on the programs that are targeted.
And that's like the problem when you like, if you want to, if you're a left-wing progressive person, like we both sort of identified with up until a while ago, and then all of a sudden the entire country takes a polar shift.
You don't want to lose your own ideas about what's important and what things that we should contribute to with our tax dollars.
Because I think we both agree that there's a lot of good in taking taxes and providing social safety nets, providing food for poor people and homeless people, helping people, welfare.
All these things are important to not have people starving on your fucking streets.
Like all that stuff is like if we were going to have a community, which is essentially what a country is supposed to be, an enormous community, we have to support the members of our community.
We just have to do it without grifters and do it without bullshit and do it without it being just a cleverly disguised ruse in order to gain political power.
Well, you may remember years ago I used to say that I want to live in a country so good that I get to be a conservative.
I'm a liberal because there's a lot of problems with the way our system works.
But the objective of all of that progressivism ought to be a system that doesn't require intervention in that way, in which everybody does have access to the market, and so people really can be responsible for lifting themselves out of whatever.
And instead of, you know, someone was describing this on Twitter, instead of a response time to any action Israel takes, taking days, it takes minutes.
Well, they were even more against it because they were protesting in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people, up until October 7th.
You know, that was one of the reasons apparently why they think they got their pants down or they had their, got caught with their pants down in October 7th is because they had so many troops that were around these protests.
So they had hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets because Netanyahu was trying to expand his powers.
And just to see all these politicians freaking out.
That is amazing, too.
It's really amazing.
It's amazing to watch.
It's amazing to watch all these left wing people suddenly Bernie Sanders making a post about how Donald Trump is trying to silence independent media was the wildest fucking gaslighting I think I've ever seen from a politician.
Independent media?
You mean fucking CBS?
You mean CBS that edited that Kamala Harris interview to make it look like she had a really good point?
Well, I mean, again, you know, I said a lot of stuff over the years about the fact that our civilization had become a racket.
Yeah.
And the fact that we were living in the era of malignant governance.
And that basically I'm concerned as somebody who believes in good governance that there's almost no component of this that you couldn't remove and create an improvement, that that's not a message you want.
I want a message in which we govern as lightly as possible, but we do it really, really well.
And an era in which you can cut off any limb and the patient gets healthier, that teaches the wrong lesson about governance.
It teaches the lessons that governance was a mistake to begin with, which it wasn't.
Well, let's be honest about what the conservatives had right from the get-go.
There are problems that only competition solves.
There are other problems that competition in something like a market is not well positioned to solve, but there are certain problems that there's just, there's no second best.
It's only competition that works.
And so when we talk about, well, you know, what are we going to do for fact-checking?
We're going to abandon the idea of fact-checking.
What you want is a vibrant, independent journalist sector in which people who spot the story early and people who articulate the story in the most intuitive and accurate way out-compete those who do a worse job.
So that over time, what we get is journalism that you can't fool.
And that it reveals to us which government programs actually work, even if they don't sound reasonable at first glance.
Here's what's really going on behind the scenes in this program, right?
And then journalism that exposes any kind of fraud.
And I don't know about you, but as I was watching confirmation hearings, my sense was that the Elizabeth Warrens and the Bernie Sanders were dinosaurs who do not understand that the earth has just been hit from outer space and that they don't live in the world that they are so used to.
That their corruption was immediately apparent.
And they're not used to that.
They're used to having a whole phony journalistic layer that covers for them.
And now to see that same guy going after Bobby Kennedy and, you know, the feeble excuse, well, what if Bobby Kennedy becomes the head of HHS and people don't have access to prescription drugs?
And it's like, dude, I just lived through COVID.
It's not obvious to me that they wouldn't get healthier if they didn't have access to prescription drugs.
Do you realize how corrupt those companies are and how nonsensical their science is, the science that says that you actually get better if you take a statin based on some metric in your chart, right?
So I'm not arguing that there aren't good pharmaceuticals.
There undoubtedly are.
But what's the net effect of our pharmaceutical obsessed medical culture?
It's not obvious to me that it's positive.
I think it may well be negative.
And so anyway, again, I see Bernie Sanders and I see him reading from a script that is no longer relevant to the movie we're watching.
There's a bunch of stuff like that that really works.
There's a bunch of drugs that really help people.
There's a bunch of drugs that brilliant scientists have developed that definitely help people live longer and live healthier lives.
But also they're in the business of selling medicine, selling pharmaceutical drugs.
And so there's a lot of stuff that they sell that is not good, not good for you, overall net negative when you look at the amount of drugs that get pulled, that get endorsed and then supported by the FDA, and then they have to pull them.
We do not have, just as we don't have a journalistic layer that exposes people in Congress who are lying to us and aspects of the government that are corrupt, we don't have a university system that can properly do science and can be relied on to tell us what the impact of a drug or a food additive is, right?
Everything that is supposed to evaluate something like safety or efficacy or analyze net effects, anything like that, has been captured by the PR wing.
And so the consumer is in no position to navigate a world like that.
I mean, and we know that this encompasses everything.
You know, how many people's doctors are pharma-skeptical?
Well, I find that bad, but at least I know how to interpret that.
What I don't understand is what I'm supposed to do with the doctor who did recommend the shots has stopped recommending them and has not said something about the change in their perspective.
It is a test of integrity, and you wouldn't want to go to a doctor that didn't have high integrity at a moment like this.
Your doctor needs unusually high levels of integrity, and what we've seen is unusually low levels.
And the same thing with social media influencers, as you called them.
Anybody in the public sphere should go back and they should do an accounting of what they said, what they thought, how they got there, how that played out in the end, when they changed their mind, and what they said about it publicly.
I must say I'm constantly in a battle with the ultra-cynics who claim to have gotten everything right during COVID because basically they never believe anything.
It's fun because things are actually happening, which is very different than most of the time when people get elected.
Most of the time when people get elected, they claim all these things and they're running for president.
Then they get into office and not much changes.
And in fact, a lot of what they campaigned on, they don't practice at all.
Like a great example is the Obama administration.
The Hope and Change website had to be changed because there was a bunch of stuff in there about whistleblowers, protecting whistleblowers, which they didn't do at all.
They were some of the worst.
It was one of the worst administrations for whistleblowers.
Well, I think what we have seen over our, you and I are about the same age, what we have seen over our entire lifetime is that elections can change the jerseys, but they just swap.
You know, who's in power and who's out of power.
Well, the point is the system is in power and the people in the roles to deliver the speeches change, but they're just basically trading off.
And so I have the sense that you and I are now watching the outcome of the first genuine election since 1963.
One of them is just unfamiliar to us because we've been watching theater for our entire lives and being told that it was the transfer of power.
And the other is that there's a lot of pent-up need for change because you've effectively had a cryptic power structure that never gets displaced, that has gotten so entrenched that rooting it out takes, frankly, an extraordinary, in every sense of the word, person like Donald Trump.
Well, so, you know, Heather and I took a lot of flack after the assassination, the first assassination attempt of Trump, where we both perceived, I think we were actually perceiving this before, but the assassination attempt really kicked it off.
We perceived that this was a different person than the first administration's Trump.
That he had matured and he had been forged by all of the lawfare that had been deployed against him and that it had been good for him.
And in fact, I hate to say this because I have my doubts, of course, about the election of 2020, but I don't think what he is currently doing would have been possible if he had won and been inaugurated in 2020.
I think also the public wouldn't have supported it if they didn't see four years of the Biden administration, how crazy everything was.
And then having gone through COVID and watching the economy collapsed and watching hurricanes coming, he's like, the most important thing for a hurricane is to get vaccinated.
Like, I think if you had gone to 2018 and had a real conversation with most people in this country about the level of corruption, it would be a fraction of what they believe it to be now.
Explain that to people because one of the things, the difference between the new Twitter, thank God for Elon Musk, and the old Twitter, the old Twitter, you guys tried to put together a unity party where you would get the best representatives from the left and the right together for the good of the country.
That was a huge part of it because Kennedy had so many supporters.
Even in many states, he was like bordering like 25, 30%, which is really crazy for an independent.
And when he went over to Trump and then all those people like, oh my God, I have hope now.
People who are vaccine injured, people who are very skeptical about certain pharmaceutical drugs that may have caused them harm, people who knew Bobby's history of being an environmental attorney and all the amazing work that he did then.
Those people got on board with the Trump administration.
And I think that was huge.
And now with Tulsi, I think that's huge as well.
I think, you know, when Elon took over Doge, that was like the final Avenger.
Like having that team together is such a unique team where you have prominent former Democrats, former eight-time Democrat, for eight years, Democrat Congresswoman, who also served overseas in a medical unit twice.
Like this is, you know, you've got an extraordinary group of human beings.
Each of these people, you know, Kennedy, Musk, Tulsi, they knew that they were taking that risk.
And it was clear that they were motivated by patriotism, that they actually, I mean, this is what a soldier does, right?
You know that you're taking risks for something that matters more than you.
Yes.
And, you know, to watch Elon do it, I think also was just remarkable because, of course, in Elon's position, he could have done what Zuckerberg does, right?
And he could have played it safe and kept his options open and did what he was told and then, you know, apologized for it later, sort of, right?
That wasn't what Musk did.
He actually had the courage of his convictions.
A, as many people have noted, his liberation of X set the stage for this election to even happen.
That there wasn't anything you could put over on us that we couldn't unpack and, you know, crowdsource a better interpretation of on X. And even if most people weren't on X, it was enough that their narrative engine just didn't work.
And if you look at a viral post on X, a viral post about something that's very important, like that has to do with USAID, you will see 7 million, 8 million views, 10 million views.
There is nothing equivalent like that to mainstream media.
There's nothing even close.
There's nothing even close.
Maybe a very viral YouTube clip, but these are every day, all day long.
There's posts that have 7 million, 5 million, 3 million, and people are reposting them as well and sharing them and taking the information and posting them without credit.
There's a lot of that going on.
So the actual amount of the information that gets out is far more than it would have ever happened without Elon taking over Twitter.
It's probably changed the course of our civilization in a way that nothing else could have done.
Which, of course, you know, I usually say that zero is a special number, meaning in a world with no social media platforms where you can speak freely and reason with others, there's no pressure to start doing that.
But once you have one, any social media platform that doesn't allow you to speak freely is at a competitive disadvantage.
And so, you know, Elon freeing X actually liberated the others, and they were beginning to move in the right direction, which, frankly, is part of why this era just feels different.
The more information I get from all these people that have had UFO and alien encounters and experiences and whistleblowers, and the more I talk to them, the less I feel like I know.
I do not feel like it's and then on top of that, I'm in the middle of Jacques Valley's books, which are very wild.
Like Jacques Valley, I had him on the podcast a long time ago, and he's coming back on again.
But the first time I had him on, I only knew him as the French scientist that had the he that the character in Close Encounters of the First Kind was based on him.
Do you know the character, the French character that brings together the military to try to communicate with the aliens?
It's based on Jacques Valley, who's been studying UFOs for decades, like from the since the 50s and the 60s.
And boy, the more you read about his take on things, the more it's very confusing.
Because these fucking stories are the same stories that have been going on for hundreds of years.
They're not even modern.
You know, when we think of them, we think of like Kenneth Arnold seeing the flying saucers and coining the phrase in the 1950s.
Like, no.
No, these stories have been real similar for hundreds of years.
That there's some phenomenon that people occasionally encounter.
And it's real similar.
It has similar, like, it's similar enough from people that weren't aware of the narrative that you have to wonder what the fuck is actually going on.
I think there's a bunch of shit that doesn't involve anything extraterrestrial that's happening at the same time as a bunch of shit that we don't have explanations for.
If there was something to cover, you might decide instead of trying to keep it under wraps, you would bury it in so much low-quality bullshit that nobody would be able to find it.
It feels like to me that this is there's a lot of people that I think are trying to do the right thing, a lot of whistleblowers that are really trying to educate the American public, but I don't know who they really are doing the bidding of.
I don't know they even know.
I think if I was the government, let's pretend that I was some gigantic arm of the military industrial complex and I had some literal recovered flying saucers.
I would come up with the dumbest fucking stories and put them in binders and leave them on desks and hope that these people leak this shit.
And the more dumb shit they leak, the more the actual reality of what we possess.
Like, let's say if the government really did find a flying saucer in the 1940s, really did back-engineer the propulsion system, really did apply it to drones, and they really are flying them around, and they have them.
Well, what I would do, I would make up some crazy shit about, you know, a mothership that's 47 years away and it's coming, and it's as big as a planet.
And I would come up with the wackiest stuff possible and, like, get it all out there.
Put it all out there.
We have 57 different species all in a fucking freezer somewhere and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
And I just like ramp up the bullshit in as many ways as possible.
You know, they've controlled all our nuclear test codes and they hover over our facilities.
We're powerless to control them.
I would say everything as wacky and crazy as possible so I could keep flying around these gravity propulsion vehicles that we've developed.
I'm having a deja vu moment here, or we've discussed this before.
I don't know which it is, but the basic rubric is physical stuff displaces air, which means it makes noise when it moves.
And I don't quite see the logic behind suppressing that fully.
I don't see the capacity to suppress it fully.
Who knows what I don't know?
But my guess is if you had actual craft moving around in the ways that people who have observed these things think they've seen it, that noise would be an inherent part of the phenomenon.
So this is exactly my problem, is there's two realms.
There's a realm in which I understand the physics of the universe enough that I can evaluate that claim, and then I can say, well, it's not obvious to me how you go through the water.
The water has to be displaced.
And water is denser than air in terms of how much matter there is, how many particles there are, and therefore it ought to be harder to move through than air.
I would expect noise in the air.
I would expect something similar in the water.
And the fact that these things behave in a couple of different ways.
One, they're silent.
Two, they turn in ways that would challenge a biological critter profoundly.
Three, they move at speeds that are improbable in light of what we understand.
Now, I'm not saying there can't be lots of stuff we don't understand, but what I'm saying is all of those things have a simplest explanation, which is that that craft isn't matter.
Yeah, and I don't think, you know, one of the things that many of us came to understand during COVID about proposals is that very often the proposal comes after the experiments have already begun, right?
You propose an experiment that you've already done, and then recoup your investment when the grant is given.
So anyway, I believe that there's been some experimentation with releasing particles.
I think it's an insane experiment to run.
It's diabolical, frankly.
You have no right to alter the Earth's atmosphere without us at least having a global public discussion about the consequences.
I believe this is an informed consent violation and that I take those things very seriously.
Those were hanging offenses at the end of World War II.
But nonetheless, if you drop particles into the atmosphere, those particles are largely not visible, right?
They have impacts.
But could they be used to project a craft that wasn't onto a substrate you can't quite see?
Or is there a potential technology that would allow you to project something into the just actual air, clear blue sky, a physical thing, something that looks like a physical thing?
So let's just say, first of all, this is where I would want a robust university system and a robust journalistic system to dig.
Because there's a lot you need to know that you could figure out that would tell us whether or not what we're looking at are really distant craft moving at tremendous speeds or it's an optical illusion.
So a 3D display in mid-air using laser plasma technology.
So if you were somewhere and you encountered these things, you would absolutely think these are alien craft from another dimension that's come here to communicate with you.
You wouldn't necessarily know how far away the object was, and therefore you wouldn't necessarily know how fast it was moving.
You'd misjudge it.
And to give everybody an example that they will have familiarity with, I was driving down the highway at one point, rainstorm, but the sun was shining, and I saw a rainbow.
And I've thought a lot about rainbows.
They're pretty interesting.
And I realized that I could tell that although the rainbow looked to be 10 miles from me or something like that, it was actually feet from me.
And I could tell that because the rainbow came down onto the road and I could see it in front of the guardrail.
Continuous rainbow where the parts up here look like they're closer to the mountains in the distance.
But when I see where it's continued down into the spray off the road, it's actually 10 feet away.
So the mind is building a model of stuff.
And if you give it the wrong cues, it'll totally misunderstand the distance that it's looking at.
I mean, to the extent that a rainbow is at a distance, right?
So you had a robust journalistic apparatus, what it would want to do is figure out, well, if person A was standing in location X and they saw a craft moving at what appeared to be 200 miles an hour at a distance of five miles, then the question is, well, who else would have seen it?
And if we go and we ask people who were standing in those locations, did they see it at all?
Because if they didn't, then maybe the thing was inches away from the person being projected locally, right?
And they only felt like they saw something at a great distance.
So what is your take when you keep hearing all these congressional whistleblowers and people coming and talking about that we've been in contact and we have in our possession multiple craft that are not of this world?
Well, I'm going to share credit with Ben Davidson for this, but the basic point is psyop until proven otherwise.
And psyop until proven otherwise, I think, is a very functional way to approach this because depending upon what kind of program we're looking at, and there obviously is governmental involvement in whatever it is, either concealing real stuff or pretending that it has real stuff that it's pretending to conceal or whatever it's doing.
There is every possibility that there are sort of layers of awareness.
And at the bottom layer, there may not be anything alien at all.
But it may be that people fairly close to the center have been shown something.
I mean, I don't understand what the purpose of any of this stuff is.
Either talk to us about the aliens and when they started to visit and what it is they seem to want and whether they're still here and whether they're going to be back and whatever we know, that's what I would do.
any excuse that says the public can't handle it I think is just nonsense.
But isn't the problem if you've been, let's pretend that there is a real crash retrieval program and there are real aliens.
If we've been hiding it for so long, then it's very difficult to not hide it anymore.
It's almost like kind of like being in the closet.
Like even though there's no reason to be in the closet in 2025, there's a lot of people that are still in the closet.
And I think part of the reason why they're in the closet is because they were in the closet 20 years ago and they've been lying forever and they don't want to come out.
So that's just a person with social consequences.
Now imagine a government.
So how were you funding these things?
Were you lying to Congress?
You have a crash retrieval program?
How is that funded?
Like, let me see your budget.
Let me see where did you allocate the money?
This is fraud.
Okay.
Now you're getting into a situation where people can go to jail.
There's perjury.
There's people that have lied on the witness stand.
So like if that's the case, then I understand why you would continue for your own personal benefit, just for your own personal protection, your own personal interest to keep things secret from the American people.
Then there's also the attitude that government does have.
There's the infantilization of our people by the government.
That's always been like they decide that malinformation is a thing.
So what that is, is information that's true, but it could fuck you up.
So we're going to say it's bad.
It's bad information, even though it's accurate information.
So this is like, you're a baby.
You can't handle the truth.
That's basically what that is.
It's the government's version of it.
Now, if that sort of attitude, which clearly persists throughout the entire federal government, wouldn't you apply that sort of thinking to something as powerful as an actual alien contact that we have been experiencing for decades?
Well, as long as we're just sort of fantasizing about wild stuff here.
Imagine that Donald Trump were to be elected president for a second time and he was pissed off and he was to nominate Tulsi Gabbard for the director of national intelligence and then she was only hours or at most days away from being confirmed by the Senate.
Then when she gets in, presumably she wouldn't have investment in all of those years of lying about this and she might feel obligated to tell us in the public what the hell's going on.
Also, you know, we've got Elon on a separate track.
He's going through the books and finding all of the nonsense.
And so presumably the effort to hide whatever it is, either to manufacture the impression of UFOs or to hide what we know about them, that's going to have a budget somewhere.
But it's also, I always assume that when something hits the zeitgeist and is like prominently out in the newspapers and media and websites, and I always assume that they're covering something else and that this thing is the big distraction.
And that's what I was thinking while the UFO thing was happening over New Jersey.
I was like, okay, what are they distracting from?
What's the big distraction?
Because it seems like that's what that was.
That just seemed so forced and so obvious.
And then the Trump administration says, oh, they were ours.
So there is the question of what they were trying to distract us from, if that was their purpose.
But I also find, and this is, again, become a kind of theme in my life.
This is also a violation of informed consent.
If those were our drones and they were nightly traumatizing the residents of New Jersey and pretending they didn't know what it was, that's a de facto experiment that they were running on the citizens of the country.
Yeah, especially like lying about it and not telling us what you're doing and then just keeping everybody in the dark for weeks where people were really panicking.
So they authorize the use of propaganda on American citizens.
So the CIA, instead of turning its propaganda wing on the whole world, they're allowed to use it under the guise, of course, of national defense and national security.
Aaron Trevor Barrett, well, that is, in fact, exactly what we have discovered.
And why it was so hard to convince people of this before the evidence for it emerged, I don't know.
But all you needed to realize was that some rogue element had decided that it had the right to engage in the same kind of regime change bullshit domestically that it was already feeling entitled to engage in globally.
And the rest makes perfect sense.
And of course, you would get an entrenched cabal that would come up with a justification for fending off a challenge at the ballot box that it could portray as somehow a threat to American democracy.
Of course it would do that.
It has to be forbidden to do that.
And the penalties have to be extreme for attempting it or it will happen.
So the argument against that is not the argument using it in America, but the argument is you need organizations like that to do that worldwide to counteract the fact that other countries are doing that worldwide and that there is some sort of a psychological game that's going on.
It's a propaganda game that's going on with all countries as well as, you know, they're doing it against us.
We're doing it against them.
We need to be sophisticated in how we employ these things.
Otherwise, we're going to lose very important parts of the world.
It's key to the national security of the United States.
We have to have things like that in place.
But when they start using it on us and they say, oh, well, we have to start using it on us because Russia is using it on us.
Or we have to use it on us to counteract what China's doing.
Well, yes, but I also am not sure that I buy the international rationale either.
And I think as much as I understand it, right, we have to be mature about what's possible in the world and what implications it has for the Republic.
On the other hand, to the extent that we believe in self-determination, where exactly does our right to interfere with other people's self-determination come from?
Further, I do think that there's a kind of end state for the governance structures of Earth.
That what we have in the West, an agreement on a level playing field, an agreement to compete with each other by attempting to produce better stuff rather than by interfering with our competitors' ability to get to the market.
That view of the West is superior and it is also contagious.
That it makes for a safer, more rewarding, fairer, less warlike system, and therefore there's a very good reason for people to want to adopt it.
That sounds great, though, but doesn't that, isn't that slightly naive when you take into consideration the amount of espionage that we know exists in American corporations and in American educational institutions?
Well, I'm not arguing that you just go and live your values.
What I'm arguing is that those values are superior, that they are sticky and contagious when they take hold, and that anything you do where you compromise on the idea that that's the objective, is to get Western values to catch on across the world, anytime you decide you have a right to do something else, you're dragging us onto a slippery slope.
You will disrupt other people's self-determination.
You have no basic right to do it, and it will eventually come home and be done to us.
So I don't know what the sophisticated way to make it maximally likely that other societies take on those values is, but I know that it was happening organically without us having to do terribly much.
And so the real question is, how do we make that a winner so that it organically catches on, and how do we reinforce it when it does?
I am loosely paying attention to the AI competition.
I'm conflicted about it.
I don't think there's anything we can do to regulate AI competition that doesn't make matters worse.
I'm very concerned about the outgrowth of this transformative technology.
I think even the most mundane disruptions that will come from it, things like disruptions to the job market, are going to be a profound challenge to our society, and we're going to have to come up with an approach that allows us to tolerate the disruption.
I used to think the approach was universal basic income, but now I'm conflicted because now I just take into account human nature.
And, you know, unfortunately, I don't think it's good for people to just give them free money.
Even though you need to.
Even though you need to, I think it's ultimately bad for them to be dependent upon it.
And that's what scares me about automation and AI in general, that if it does get to the point where there's so many people that are displaced from the job market that we have to provide them like a real meaningful wage, and what incentives do they have to break free from that system?
And do they just decide to live inside the means of whatever that is forever?
And does that limit the growth and potential that those people possess?
Because people really don't accomplish anything unless they're driven or unless they have to, right?
That's what really gets people going.
That's why it's so difficult for people that were trust fund babies to ever get anything going.
I mean, we all know the trust fund kids that are just, they just do drugs and party and they're materialists and they're really lost.
That's really common.
Like more common than not, right?
Very difficult to navigate that water.
So what would we do to incentivize people to do things, like to have this healthy, thriving, artistic, creative, innovative economy that we have right now?
Like how does that continue if so many people are displaced from the job market?
Or is there a way where you can say, you know what, we are so concerned about basic goods, needs food, shelter, things like that.
If you just provide people with the basics so nobody ever has to worry about food or shelter, would it organically arise that some people would compete outside of that and then say, now that I have basic food and shelter, let me pursue my dreams.
Let me do what I want to do.
Let me provide, let me create a business that AI can't make.
Let me make fine cabinetry.
Let me paint.
Let me do things that's going to provide a real value that I can get money from, that it can be an actual viable business.
And maybe the way to incentivize people to do that is to never take away their universal basic income.
So it's not like welfare, where one of the things, like my family was on welfare when we were young.
And when they got off welfare, it was like a nice thing to know that we're providing for ourselves now, you know, but you have to do that.
You have to break off the system and then you don't get the checks anymore.
But what if the people just keep getting universal basic income and you and we just rewire the way we think about food and shelter?
We think about food and shelter is just something that everybody should have.
Not like tons of money, not exposable, indispensable income where you can disposable income where you could just buy fucking junk food and garbage and do cocaine all day, but have enough where you can live and then have people pursue a life that is more meaningful.
But you have to give people incentives.
They have to be somehow or another either personally motivated to do that, encouraged by the culture to do that.
It has to be something where people develop this desire to do more.
Well, let's talk about the ultimate source of this problem.
Our ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, even our farming ancestors, lived in a world where the world itself provided the incentive structure, right?
If you didn't work hard enough as a hunter-gatherer, it manifested as hunger and jeopardy.
So people were naturally incentivized to invest in the right kind of stuff.
And the right kind of stuff is hard work in some cases, where you pursue the materials that make your hut better, that procure more food for your family.
Or it could be insight, where you figure out some way to do something better so you make more with what you've already figured out how to get.
That's a very natural structure, and it's what we neurologically are built for.
The economy has some of that characteristic.
The economy rewards hard work somewhat, and it rewards insight somewhat.
But it also rewards cheating, and it rewards lots of unproductive behavior that actually destroys wealth but creates a profit.
Yeah, for example, it rewards gambling, it rewards interference, competition, all sorts of stuff.
You know, destroying wealth is actually a big part of our economy.
And the way the mythology of free market capitalism works, you're getting paid for producing stuff that enhances us all.
But what fraction of the economy is actually dedicated to activities that destroy wealth?
You know, the production of porn, for example.
In my opinion, that is highly likely to destroy vastly more wealth than it produces.
But it's a very rich industry for a reason.
So what I'm getting at is we have a new problem with the AI component.
Maybe it's taken the magnitude of the problem that we had and it's multiplied it by 10.
But it's not a new problem.
We are still trying to figure out what to do with the fact that you're taking an animal out of the habitat that properly inherently incentivizes it and putting it into an environment in which the incentives aren't really well built.
And I agree with you.
Whatever sympathy I may have had for the idea of universal basic income is gone because I do think it would produce at best a kind of learned helplessness that's unproductive.
So what we really want is a system in which whatever the new opportunities are going to be in the world where AI is available everywhere and very sophisticated, we want people to figure out how to leverage it on our behalf.
And mind you, we could have the same conversation before the World Wide Web, and we could talk about, well, what's it going to be like when you can source information from anywhere?
What kinds of opportunities is that going to create?
And can we incentivize people to figure out what those opportunities are?
Yada, yada, yada.
So the AI version is the same problem, but at a different order of magnitude.
So I don't know what the solution is about how you create that proper incentive structure, but we are going to be living in a world in which meaning and wealth are of a fundamentally different nature.
And what we want is for people to have the tools and the incentive to explore that world productively so that when they do it well, they end up economically enhanced.
And when they do it poorly, they suffer a challenge so that they are naturally led by that world to find stuff that creates wealth for all of us.
Maybe you have to incentivize people to pursue their dreams instead of just to try to find a job.
Because this is the way the education system is scheduled now or is set up now.
It's basically you go back to the Rockefellers, right?
You're basically trying to make factory workers.
You're trying to make people that obey.
The earlier you can get them into school, the better, because the more you can indoctrinate them into the way the system works.
You get them accustomed.
You get these kids that are filled with fucking energy and they're excited about the world.
They just want to play all the time.
And you make them just sit down all day.
And when they don't, you say that little fellow's got ADD.
He's not paying attention.
We need to give him some riddling.
And the little fucker is just sitting there jacked out of his mind on riddling now.
And this is what we've done.
And instead of having an education system that educates people that way, have an education system that excites people about learning things they're actually interested in.
But again, this is another version where it's not like AI is a bad fit for the education system.
It certainly is, but the education system has been garbage.
My whole life existed with an education system that was almost totally worthless and in some cases was counterproductive, which is, I think, why some of us folks with learning disabilities actually turn out to have an advantage.
It's not that there's something good about having a learning disability, but if it breaks your relationship to school so school has less of an easy time programming you to be a cog, then you at least retain the potential to be something other than a cog.
I don't think I had a learning disability, but I was a latchkey kid, right?
So I didn't have a lot of guidance when I was young and I wasn't used to people telling me what to do and I didn't enjoy it.
And also I had a lot of energy and it was very difficult for me to pay attention to boring things by uninspired teachers.
But then again, every now and then I'd have an inspired teacher and I'd go, okay, maybe I'm not stupid.
Like maybe I'm just bored, you know, and then I'd get really interested in something and then I'd learn a lot about it.
And then I'd be able to like tell people about it.
I'd talk to my friends.
You know what I learned today?
And then we'd have these conversations about it.
I'm like, okay, it's not that I'm not curious or interested.
It's that I'm not being inspired.
Now, why is that?
Is it because I'm 10?
You know, and this is just hard to be inspired by things when you're 10 because you're just a little fucking dork and you're running around reading comic books and paying attention to other things and you don't really care about math or you don't care about history.
What is it?
But whatever it is, the system's not working for you.
You have to find some sort of inspiration outside of it.
And I've been educated almost entirely outside of schools.
Almost all of what I know, I know from books that I read because I was interested or I listened to audio books or listened to podcasts or I had conversations with people like you.
That's how I learned things.
And it wasn't that I wasn't interested.
It wasn't that I wasn't smart.
It was that I was not inspired.
I had other, I didn't know that I wasn't a loser until I got really good at other things.
And I'm like, I can get good at things.
Okay, so if I can get good at things, it's not that I'm a loser.
It's just like I can't work a job.
I can't just show up every day and do something that's not exciting to me.
But that doesn't mean I'm useless.
It just means I'm useless for that.
I don't have the personality to just sit there and go over paperwork.
It doesn't, I can't.
I'll go crazy.
But that go crazy part is also what lets you have the courage or the motivation to go and try a path that seems unlikely for success.
And to have the courage to say, well, some people succeed.
Why don't I fucking try it?
And just, I can't do this.
Fuck it.
Let's give it a go.
And then that's how you become a stand-up comedian.
Nobody thinks it's a good path.
Like out of 100 stand-up comedians that do open mic night, maybe one, maybe one will have some sort of a career in comedy.
Well, I'm really glad you're telling me this because back when I was a college professor before 2017, I used to be, since I was a terrible student myself, I was fascinated by the students who had really high potential but were just not a good fit for school.
So I was really interested in what made people smart, especially when it had nothing to do with school or happened in spite of school.
And your story fits perfectly here.
In fact, what you describe is sort of the equivalent of a learning disability, right?
Like suspicion that your teachers aren't all that and maybe you're not so thrilled at sitting there listening to them.
You know, occasionally it sounds like you had a teacher who was pretty good.
But for the rest of the time, school was so busy dismissing me as not performing to potential was what it said every time on my report card, right?
That it was just really demoralizing.
And I remember sort of in the second grade having a kind of choice.
I didn't know what it was that I was choosing between, but it was like I can either surrender to their understanding of who I am or I can stop respecting them.
And so it created an attitude problem.
Sounds like you had a similar attitude problem.
And I wish I could give every student that attitude problem.
Yeah, because I know, like I said, I became very interested in what made people smart.
And what made people smart was not libraries.
What made people smart was an interaction with the world that rewarded them when they figured something out.
And very often that was the physical world.
So one of the things I worry about with a kid who maybe is not getting so much out of school, but they have access to an entire world of fascinating things on their computer is that it turns all of that stuff into an exercise in consuming information rather than discovering.
And so I would much rather see kids have access to a wild world, a forest that's intact, where they can go and discover things and those things aren't labeled and you don't know what it is and you don't know what it means.
Or you try to build a structure, a treehouse or something, and it tests your understanding of what the structure is that will hold you.
And that it is that feedback where you are not a consumer of the world, but you are a producer.
You're interacting with the world rather than just seeing it represented that is the most intellectually enhancing thing.
But yes, I think ideally you would have access to both, so it would create the reward patterns in your mind that would cause you to think about how to be productive in the world.
But I also think that the way the online world presents itself is strangely demotivating, right?
Because, you know, you see whatever social media platform you're on, you've got some 30-second clip of some person doing some utterly remarkable thing that I would have said until I saw it with my own eyes was impossible.
That doesn't create a pathway to discovering what the person in question can do.
What you're looking at is somebody whose abilities outstrips what almost anybody can do.
Guys riding down a ramp and launching themselves two or three stories into the air on a scooter and then turning around and dropping back onto the same ramp.
And of course, I think I saw Red Bull in there somewhere, right?
So it's like, first of all, you've got this corporation incentivizing people to take risks that aren't smart.
And then you've got an apparatus that you're not going to be able to build or approximate.
And then you've got the person who leverages the apparatus better than anybody.
And it's like, well, where's the opportunity for the viewer to be like, yeah, I want to get in on that.
Well, I think a Chuck Norris movie is probably a better tool.
The admixture of people who are highly capable and people who get some of the thrill of the highly capable person just by viewing it is not as good as it might be.
In other words, I think we've taken all sorts of activities that people used to engage in, and we've found a consumable equivalent, right?
Like sport.
People used to play sports.
Now most people who are into sports watch sports.
They are consuming the sport rather than participating in it.
And, you know, if we take ourselves back, you know, a couple hundred years, music.
Music used to be something that people did.
Everybody sung and they whistled and many people played musical instruments.
Now music is a consumable.
And the point is the reward may be somewhat similar to listening to a really good song as it is to play a really good song on an instrument.
But the degree to which you've been robbed as a human being who is capable of producing music and you just, you don't have a thought of doing it because there's so much to listen to, that's not positive for humans.
But isn't that like at least people are being exposed to a bunch of different ideas, so it has the potential to lead them to try and do different things.
Well, you know, when I was a professor, my thought was almost the entire job of education is about incentives.
It's about incentives and motivation.
It's not about delivering content.
If you can get a student to want to understand something, most of the work is done, right?
So when I look at school, I can't believe how badly structured it is because the idea is effectively it's going to threaten you into learning something.
That's not going to make it stick.
It's not going to make you want to learn more.
So my feeling is what you want is you want to create a desire in the student to understand the thing.
Then your work is pretty well done.
And then it's like play.
And if we took that approach to all of these things so that you felt rewarded by producing music, even if it's very simple, right?
Well, then you might pick up music for a lifetime and be generating it decades later, right?
You should not be delivered a message about sex where sex is something that is supposed to be perfected.
And therefore, a person who's new to that realm feels inadequate and therefore is incentivized to abandon it and go watch it.
There should be a recognition that actually this is something that you will develop over a lifetime.
And it's important that you do, and you should want it because it's access to some of the most rewarding stuff there is, right?
So just getting the motivation built in the person so that they want to pursue it is all you really need.
I joke around about it on stage, but I'm actually worried about it now because I've seen some of the new ones that they've developed, the new very lifelike human robots, which is, by the way, they seem to be, a lot of them are hot women for some reason.
Even though they're not sex robots, a lot of the robots are hot women.
Okay, I see what you're doing.
Like, you could do both things at the same time.
Obviously, the market is sex robots.
So what you're doing is you're having robot assistants that happen to be really hot, beautiful women.
Well, that are like pretty realistic right now.
Not realistic, like I couldn't tell, like if one was sitting there, that's a robot, you're a real person.
And really, what needs to happen in order that we don't reproduce the disaster of porn with, you know, in 3D or 4D, it needs to become sophisticated to understand that you really don't want any part of that, even if it's very good, especially if it's very good.
Instantaneously available and it reaches almost everybody.
Now, so anyway, I used to say very negative things about porn and I took a lot of flack over it.
That is less and less true.
I think people are beginning to realize how much damage it's doing to them.
And there are a lot more people ready to acknowledge that whether or not they're in control of it in their own lives, they wish they were.
They don't want it.
I will say, you know, I have two boys, 18 and 20, and I believe neither of them is involving themselves with porn, and they report they aren't the only ones.
It trains you to just precisely time things, to have yourself in this mindset to know exactly where you are in the game, to remember a sequence of moves, whatever it is.
It's an incredible training engine because the incentive structure is there so that you want to get to the next level, right?
It's like what school should be doing, except what does it train you do?
As soon as the next game captivates you, all of the skills that you invested in building are almost all wiped away.
Now, maybe that's not quite true because all the first-person shooters are the same, and so skills you develop in Halo work for, I don't know what the others would be.
But nonetheless, the point is you're investing your ability to train your own mind into something that is guaranteed to be obsolete.
That's not a good use of your time, even though I totally, you know, I did play video games.
That in fact, I mean, my feeling is school ought to look like a bunch of fun exercises and activities and puzzles that cause you to want to do it.
It shouldn't have to be school.
We shouldn't have to make you go.
It should be structured so that you want to be there because it draws you in.
And so a video game, I'm not against them in principle, because a video game could train you to do something or to think about something in some incredible way.
But they just don't because the market is going to find the thing that brings in the maximum number of people and holds them to the greatest effect and causes them to want to buy the sequel.
Wisdom, I argue, is effectively delayed gratification.
That, you know, figuring out that investment now, that doing something that doesn't feel good now results in a big reward later.
That's a huge part of the key to life.
And in part, that's what all of these consumer realms that are stealing from us are taking away.
The point is, if you want to be investing in something and you're willing to pay the price of whatever unpleasantness or time or whatever it is that you're spending, and you've got all of these competing things that can give you a hit of dopamine right now, it's very hard to develop that skill.
And this also, this sort of entitled world that we live in where we're so used to things being instantaneous and immediate gratification that that becomes a kind of a core tenet of how we interface with the world.
We only are interested in things that give us things right away.
You know, Heather and I used to teach an exercise, something we invented called Learn a Skill, where we would have students define any skill that they wished to learn.
It had only one requirement.
The requirement was it had to be objective whether you had succeeded or failed.
And the idea was not to get you to learn the skill.
That was a collateral benefit.
The idea was to get you to pay attention to how you develop a skill so that you would learn how your own mind learns and you could apply that to things that you wanted to learn later in life.
But what we often found was that these students, these would have been millennials, were very unrealistic about how much effort it would go, would be required for them to accomplish one of these things.
And they would just get schooled by how much harder it was to build the thing they wanted to build or to program the computer to do the thing that they wanted to program it to do or to play the song that they were hoping to play.
Something had trained them that life was easier than it was.
And also we've set up a society where people become exceptional with no merit, right?
Like social media influencers and TikTok influencers are people that just captivate attention, whether it's by, you know, clickbaity headlines or whatever they're doing or just like being hot and dancing around in front of the screen.
They're doing that.
And that has become one of the main things that children aspire to.
When they ask kids what they want to do, one of the big things that kids want now is to be famous.
It's much more prevalent than it ever was in history.
Because before it was really hard to be famous.
If you wanted to be famous, you had to be a real psycho.
Like you had to be like completely ignored by everyone around you to the point where like, you know what, goddamn it, I am special and I'm going to show the world.
I'm going to be on that stage singing that song or whatever it was, you know, being in that movie on that big screen.
And you had to really want it.
You had to be really sick to get to the top.
And a lot of them really were.
And that's how you made it.
You know, and so it was a very rare thing that most people did not aspire to because they didn't think it was a realistic goal.
But now people see people that are nothing.
There's nothing special about them.
And they're billionaires.
You know, like if you watch the Kardashians, yeah, they're cute.
Okay, they have nice clothes.
Like the whole show is based on very boring people who are living these extremely privileged lives for no reason that anybody can explain that makes any sense.
They've generated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars through no way that anybody could like map out and say like, this is how you do it.
But on the other hand, the internet as it stands is a training program for this.
So in part, the reason that people become focused on the things that they become good at is because they get some early reward that causes them to return and try to do more.
I'm convinced this is true.
If you went back to the things that each of us are good at, you would find some early experience that caused us to stick to it enough that we ended up good.
But everybody is in these social media environments competing for likes.
I mean, even just inadvertently, you don't want to put up a post and have nobody react to it.
You hope they react and you hope they react positively.
So the internet is training people to be influencers.
Most of them are not going to make it.
But, you know, it's like the sports stars who become the irresistible icons in certain communities because obviously that's, you know, that's a whole different world of possibilities.
Right.
So, you know, it brings everybody in.
Well, in this case, you've got everybody in a de facto training program to be an influencer and almost none of them are going to get there.
We have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said on the podcast was essentially that you can't really prove evolution.
First of all, I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it's interpretable.
I don't really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not evolution.
That's not coherent.
I think what he means is we see evidence for what we would call microevolution, but we don't see evidence for what we would call macroevolution.
This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.
And so microevolution, we would talk about the way a creature or a population of creatures would change relative to their environment.
If the environment gets drier, those individuals who are more drought tolerant will out-compete the individuals that require more water, and so we'll see the population change over time.
But he's saying we don't see evidence for macroevolution, which is the production of new species from old species.
I am concerned that the right way to address Tucker's challenge, and as I said the last time I was on your show, when I heard him say it the first time, I reached out to him and I said, you know, you really ought to let me talk to you about what's actually going on here, and he welcomed it.
We still haven't sat down to do it.
But nonetheless, he's open to hearing that he doesn't have it right, to his credit.
But here's the problem.
The correct response to Tucker, I do not believe involves what most people want me to do in response to something like what Tucker has said.
I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case very, very clear so that they can relax Tucker's concern isn't based in science and they can go back to feeling comfortable that, you know, the Darwinists have it well in hand.
That's not where I am.
I could do that, but I don't feel honorable doing that.
I think, as a scientist, I should not be in the business of persuading people.
I want you to be persuaded.
I want you to be persuaded by the facts.
I want them to persuade you, but I don't think I'm allowed to persuade you.
I think that it's a that it's effectively PR when I attempt to bring people over to Team Darwin.
Further, as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I'm not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern Darwinists.
In fact, I'm kind of annoyed by it.
And although Tucker, I do not believe, is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025.
And it has to do with the fact that, in my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.
So by reporting that, yes, Darwinism is true and we know how it works and people who aren't compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever, they are pretending to know more than they do.
So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken.
Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it.
I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism.
I think I know why that happened.
I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself, and so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was.
There are several different things that are wrong with it.
The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect.
This is a very hard thing to convey, and I want to point out that if the explanation for creatures is Darwinian, that does not depend on anybody understanding it, and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.
Okay?
I think I could probably do a decent job on those fronts.
But if you happened onto the earth 100 million years ago, you would have found lots of animals running around, lots of plants growing.
You would have recognized where you were and more or less what was going on.
There's not a single creature on the planet that would have any idea what an abstract thought was.
There would be no creature that had any inkling that there was even a question about where all this had come from.
And Darwinism would still be the answer.
So somehow, whether Darwinism is the answer does not depend on anybody knowing it or being able to explain it.
here's the problem Let's say that we went into the parking lot, and in one parking space, there's an excavator.
And in the next parking space over is a Maserati.
Now let's say we took those two machines and we tore them apart so that we just had a stack of the compounds that they were made out of, right?
The rubber, the vinyl, the various metals, all that stuff.
There would be differences between the excavator and the Maserati, right?
They would just be made of some different stuff.
And then there'd be a lot of stuff that they had in common.
Now you could look at the differences in the materials that they're made out of.
And you could say, well, the excavator is really good at, you know, lifting materials and moving them around.
And the Maserati is really good at going fast on a paved surface.
And those differences are due to the differences in materials that they're made out of.
That would be wrong.
Probably you could take the list of materials that an excavator is made out of, and you could give it to a bunch of engineers, and you could say, I want you to make a Maserati, but you're limited to these materials.
And they could do it.
Wouldn't be quite as good because there'd be some places where the ideal material wasn't available to them anymore.
But there's no reason you couldn't make a Maserati out of the stuff.
So what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car, but they're not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do.
The chemistry differences are incidental.
Now when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew-like ancestor, and that shrew-like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons, those three-letter codons specify amino acids,
of which there are 20, and that the difference between the bat and the shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by the genome.
We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference.
It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars.
But nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right?
The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.
I don't believe that mechanism is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.
The mechanism that we invoke is random mutation, which I believe in, random mutation happens.
Selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give the creature an advantage.
There's nothing wrong with that story.
That story is true.
Random mutations happen.
Selection collects the ones that are good, and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome.
All of that is true.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.
What you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism whereby selection, which is ancient at the point that you have shrews, explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance.
I believe there's a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer.
That what we did was we took the random mutation model and we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is, and we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces on the basis of those random mutations.
And we skipped the layer in between in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet codon in nature.
Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward.
It can only look backward.
And there's a way in which that's just simply true.
On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution, and you can look forward.
Right?
So if evolution can't look forward, but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward?
I think it effectively can.
So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are better adapted to the world than their ancestors.
What if it can bias the game?
It can enhance its own ability to search, right?
If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right?
You go through a systematic process of search, and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.
So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access to increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question.
And this is simply that.
I'm not really saying anything that extraordinary, right?
If I say, you know, do you know that computers, all they do is binary?
Well, that's true.
But if you then imagine that that means that the people who program computers do it in binary, well, there was a time when that was true.
But it's not true anymore.
It's not how you do it.
There's a much more efficient way to program a computer, and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand.
But you can build a computer that can either interpret the language in real time, or you can build a computer that can accept the code as it's spit out by a compiler.
These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer.
But it all comes out binary anyway.
Right.
In the end.
That's really what I'm arguing, is that there's the initial layer of Darwinian stuff, the random mutation layer that it looks like what we teach people.
There's another layer which we're not well familiar with, and it results in a much more powerful capacity to adapt than we can explain with that first mechanism, which is why guys like Tucker think there's just something.
These Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat, and then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the mutations that actually turn out to be good.
It's just not powerful enough, and they're not wrong.
They're detecting something real.
And frankly, Tucker is the layperson example of this.
You've had Stephen Meyer on.
You know, he's actually, he's a scientist who's quite good, and he's spotted that the mechanism in question isn't powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains.
And so he's catching up.
But that's really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can't yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing.
I mean, and let me, this is, there's nothing strange about this.
If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer, a cognitive layer, in which the human being is born into an environment.
And that environment could be, you know, a hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago, or it could be a modern environment.
And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments.
It has to be sensitive to the information in those environments so that it can become adapted to them developmentally.
So development is one trick that the genome uses to make a human being more flexible than other creatures.
You do not come out of the womb being ready to do human stuff.
You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program.
But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space.
That is the Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way.
So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.
So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively will out-compete the creatures that have fewer of these things.
So you should expect what I often say is we have to remember we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.
You're looking at Darwinism 10.0.
You're looking at a highly sophisticated evolutionary structure that is the result of all of the discoveries of the prior structures.
And that includes some things that modern creatures can do, but it also includes an evolution of enhanced evolutionary capacity, including things like culture.
It's an accelerator because that's how you compete.
The faster you adapt.
And so this is one of the other things that I think needs to be corrected about Darwinism.
We have a very crude, a primitive understanding of what fitness means.
We know that it's important, that it's sort of the core thing that selection is trying to accomplish, enhanced fitness.
But we pretend that that means the same thing as reproduction.
Often it's very tightly correlated to reproduction.
But if you think it's the same, you just miss out on all of the places where reproduction is not the key to lasting a long time into the future, which is really the trick that selection is targeted at.
Selection is always trying to get a creature to lodge its genomic spellings as far into the future as it can land them, right?
So that means one way to do that is often to produce more offspring.
That's a good way to increase the likelihood that your genome makes it into the future.
But that's of limited value.
Let's say that you're in a population that is in jeopardy, but you as an individual are highly successful.
So maybe you have 10 offspring, right?
You beat the expectation by five times.
But then your population goes extinct 100 years after you're gone.
Your fitness could be high based on how many offspring you produced, or it could be zero based on the ultimate outcome of what happened to all of your descendants.
My claim is your fitness was actually zero.
And you should have adjusted what you did to increase the likelihood that your population would endure whatever ultimately challenged it and not invested so much in producing your own offspring because that didn't end up being productive.
So there are lots of cases where producing more offspring and increasing your reproductive success is not actually a key to increasing your fitness, as I would instantiate it.
And it is fitness that selection is targeted at.
But when we pretend that fitness is something you should be able to measure, we screw up Darwinism.
I think the problem is the instinct that we should be able to measure it.
It's not that kind of parameter.
And I think it's perfectly fine to say reproductive success tends to be very closely correlated with fitness.
And we can measure reproductive success.
But we have to recognize that when you imagine that they are synonymous, any place where producing more offspring is counterproductive to getting into the future, we will be confused by, and we are confused by them.
My advisor, I believe, nailed the answer to that question.
My advisor was a guy named Dick Alexander.
He was a marvelous human being and a very insightful biologist.
His argument was that human beings or our ancestors attained a kind of ecological superiority where the most important dictator of whether or not you evolutionarily succeeded or failed was your competition with other humans.
And so his point, which I think is accurate, is that it is humans in an arms race with other humans that caused the radical elaboration of our capacity to puzzle solve, to think, to exchange abstractions.
Now, I would add to that, Heather and I have written on this, that the mechanism, we argue that there is a flip-flop that will happen in evolutionary modes for human beings.
So as we talked about a few minutes ago, humans are special in the sense that the genome, which is still the thing that is trying to get into the future, has solved genome problems by offloading the adaptive capacity to our software layer, right?
Once your software layer has the capacity to adapt and is not tethered to changes in your genome, well, now you can evolve very rapidly.
But how do you do it?
And what Heather and I argued in our book is that there is a flip-flop between two modes of cognitive functioning for humans.
One of them is the mode that you employ when your relationship to your environment is very much like your ancestors' relationship to their environment.
So in other words, if you are in a circumstance and your grandparents knew how to live in the place that you live, it does not make sense to be trying to figure out some new way to be.
What makes sense is for you to do whatever they were doing and maybe improve it if you could figure out how.
But in general, what you should do is you should accept the ancestral wisdom in a cultural form and you should learn to do whatever it is your people do and you should do it as well as you can and upgrade it if that's an opportunity.
But there comes a place either in space or in time when whatever it is that your ancestors were doing is no longer productive.
So if you imagine that your people are, I don't know, maybe you hunt elk.
Well, if we move far enough across space, there'll be some place where there aren't elk, right?
Where the habitat isn't hospitable to them.
Maybe it's too dry.
And so you could take the ancestral wisdom that talks about how to hunt elk, or you could recognize that that's not very productive here, and we need to do something else.
So I don't know exactly what it is that you'll move to, but you'll have to innovate some new way of being, you know.
Maybe you'll take up, I don't know, hunting smaller game, right?
Or maybe you'll take up gathering some material, or maybe you'll invent farming.
But the point is, wherever you are in either space or time, that your ancestor's wisdom is no longer highly productive, you will be triggered into this second mode, which we would call consciousness.
So the first mode is culture, second mode is consciousness.
And the idea of consciousness is that human beings have the capability of doing something no other creature can do.
We can exchange abstract ideas between individuals.
And that means, and we use the metaphor of a campfire for this, that a human population will gather around the campfire at night, and they will talk about whatever they've observed in their habitat, and they will talk about what opportunities there are there and how those opportunities might be exploited.
And they will parallel process the puzzle, right?
Every member of the group has different skills and insights.
And so in talking about how the new opportunities might be exploited, they will come up with some prototype for a new way of being.
So the argument I've made is when during normal times, your ancestors knew pretty well how to exploit the habitat that you'll be born into.
You should take their wisdom and deploy it.
If you are at the edge of that habitat, or you are at the point where that habitat changes and it isn't any longer productive to try to do what your ancestors did, you will engage in this conscious exchange of insight, consciousness, that will allow you to innovate a new niche.
And at the point you've got that new niche pretty well figured out, it will be turned into a culture that will be passed on to future generations until it's no longer useful.
So that process accounts, we believe, for the radical variation in niches that human beings inhabit, right?
Thousands of niches over the history of our species.
That's unlike any other creature.
For any other creature, once you've named the species, you've pretty much named a niche, some way of being that that species engages in.
For human beings, this isn't true.
Human beings are like thousands of different species.
The differences between them, there are some physical differences, but most of those differences between the de facto species that exist within our overarching species, most of those differences are housed in the cultural layer, right?
They're software.
They're not hardware.
That is an amazing capability for a creature to have, the ability to switch niches in this way and therefore adopt every continent, every habitat except the Arctic has been made productive by people in this way.
Well, I think that goes back to my advisor's insight.
The idea that once human beings become their own primary competitor, the primary dictator of the success of a population is how it does against another population that is similarly equipped.
That arms race produces incredible problem-solving capability.
It's why our craniums were expanded as they were, why our raw processing power is so large compared to our next nearest relative.
It's that capacity which then allowed human beings to become regular niche-switching creatures.
The couple things that need to be said here are, A, I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they are on the right track.
I'm open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I've seen no evidence of that universe myself.
I'm open to it.
If it happens, I will look at it.
But I believe this can all be explained in Darwinian terms.
And more to the point, I would highlight the fact that they don't really have a competing explanation.
So the fundamental principle of reason is parsimony.
That the simplest explanation, we would typically say the simplest explanation tends to be right.
In my opinion, if we had all of the information, the simplest explanation would always be right.
It would be a more reliable law.
But in general, the simplest explanation tends to be right.
If you take the intelligent design folks and you extrapolate from what they seem to be suggesting, they do not escape a necessity for a Darwinian explanation.
Even if the creatures of Earth were designed on a drawing board by a creature that wanted to make them, that creature has to have come from somewhere.
And the only explanation that has ever been proposed for where such a creature could have come from is Darwinian evolution.
So to me, the problem with intelligent design, the most fundamental one, is that even if it were true, you've basically solved the problem of explaining Earth's creatures at a cost that is a million times worse in terms of parsimony.
If it's hard to explain a tiger through Darwinian processes, it is that much harder yet to explain a tiger designer.
So the point is, sooner or later, you're going to reach for Darwinism because there's literally no competitor.
There's nothing else anyone has ever said that could even in principle produce living creatures.
Oh, in one way, yes, because let's put it this way.
I think we teach evolution badly.
There's a process that I would call selection, which accounts for all pattern in the universe, right?
Some differential force that arranges the size of the pebbles on a beach.
It arranges the galaxies.
It accounts for the number of stars of each different type, the elements.
Selection produces all of that structure in the prebiotic universe.
It becomes adaptive in the biological sense when you add to selection heredity.
When the patterns in the universe become capable of biasing the universe into producing more of themselves.
Red dwarf stars do not bias the universe into producing more red dwarf stars.
There's no heredity there.
So there's a number of red dwarf stars that is the result of selection, but it is not the result of any hereditary process.
The thing that's different about us critters is that heredity allows the adaptations to stack on top of each other so that they increasingly bias the universe into producing more of whatever they are.
A bat is biasing the universe into producing more bats.
So there is no reason at all to think that new game that happens when heredity gets attached to selection is limited to Earth in any way.
Now, it could be that it is so difficult for it to happen that it just hasn't gotten around to it anywhere else.
Well, the idea is that it no longer becomes biological, so it no longer has all of the needs.
Like if we have all these different Darwinian mechanisms that are enabling us to become human beings, if we eventually create artificial intelligence and if we merge and become sort of cyborgs, if we lose all of our human desires,
all of our needs, all of our animal instincts to procreate and reproduce our genes and carry on, if we become essentially, or we stop being viable and this new thing emerges as the apex creature on Earth, a silicone-based life form.
We can call it artificial life, but it behaves and acts like life.
It makes decisions.
It's intelligent.
It can change its environment.
It can rewrite its own code.
You know, we know that ChatGPT has, even as crude as large language models are in the sense of like what it could be ultimately, they've shown this desire for survival, right?
It's tried to copy itself when it thought it was going to be shut down.
It's tried to back itself up on other computers and servers.
That's unless its motivation is to protect this process.
So maybe the process is, this is the natural process, is that the human develops the artificial, the intelligence develops to the point where it develops artificial intelligence, then the artificial intelligence becomes the premier species.
There's a theme that is increasingly a focus of mine because it keeps it pays a lot of dividends once you start tracking it, which is this distinction between complicated things and complex things.
And importantly, the distinction between the mindset with which you approach truly complex things versus the mindset in which you approach complicated things.
So A, I think we have a lot of folks who have gotten very, very good at complicated things and that when they take over complex things, they inevitably fuck them up.
So in part, our interventionist sense of the way medicine should work is a bunch of complicated problem solving in a complex system where it is destined to create harm.
And I think we are going to see that again and again.
Anytime you hear somebody confidently pontificating about some complicated solution that they want to deploy to a complex problem, alarm bells should go off.
That now puts us in an interesting place with respect to our machines.
Because what I think is about to happen, if it has not happened already, is that our machines, which are hyper-complicated but not complex, are just about to cross that threshold and become complex, which means that our expertise in thinking about them is about to be rendered obsolete.
So AI, I believe, has the characteristics of true complexity, or at least it has a primordial form of it.
And that means that our thinking about machines is of an outdated kind.
And anyway, I'm expecting a kind of catastrophe to arise out of that as we deploy complicated thinking and what we're really up against is misleading us because it still, you know, it's on a screen.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I've got to tell you, when I see Larry Ellison talking about Stargate, it makes me shudder because it feels like exactly the type specimen of the arrogant.