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Nov. 3, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:25:19

“DISASTER FOR HUMANITY!” Bret Weinstein On Israel-Palestine & Existential Crisis | Stay Free #238

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	you you
	you brought to you by
	this video In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	You can watch me on a variety of platforms right now for we stream wildly and widely, widely and wildly.
	But our home is that sweet home of free speech itself, Rumble, where we can say whatever the hell we like, quite frankly.
	And this is not what we like, actually.
	I don't like saying it because it's things like war is being sold as an economic opportunity.
	I don't like saying that.
	It's not like, hey, War, you know war?
	Yes.
	Terrible, terrible war.
	One of the worst things you can do.
	Well Joe Biden, who happens to be in charge around here, is selling endless war as an economic opportunity.
	We've got Brett Weinstein on the show and I always struggle with whether it's Steen or Stein because of Epstein and Weinstein, like, you know, I never know which one is the goodies and which one, you know, I mean it's confusing but I now know it's Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, a fantastic guest on the show, and it's a brilliant conversation.
	We talk about all sorts of existential stuff.
	It's absolutely amazing.
	You'll love it.
	Now, for the first 15 minutes, we'll be available everywhere.
	Then, we'll only be available on Rumble.
	Like, subscribe, download the Rumble app, if your crazy phone will allow it, because then you'll get informed every time we... You know what I've never started saying?
	When a new bit of content drops.
	Do you know why?
	I'm too old.
	I feel like I'm too old to say it.
	Like, and when I see people that are, like, maybe in a suit and their show's a bit more newsy... That drops at 9pm!
	Like, I feel like, nah.
	You know, I don't feel right saying it.
	Our show will become available.
	You know, like, I feel more like I belong to those days, I suppose.
	Anyway, like, you'll get a notification when we make new content.
	That's basically the upside of all of that.
	Now, um, you are aware because you are informed.
	Let's see your best Tucker face, asks Maximatisis over in the chat.
	Join the locals community, become an Awakened Wonder, press the red button, join the community, get access to, early access to our great interviews with people like Jordan Peterson.
	We've got a great interview with Tucker Carlson coming up.
	Here's my best Tucker face.
	Are you kidding?
	That's a sort of a Tucker face.
	Ha ha!
	I don't believe it!
	Like that kind of thing, that's how he talks, isn't he?
	Um, now obviously this is a tentative and terrifying time for all of us with the world being divided continually with both literal military conflicts and ideological conflicts and peculiar online spats occurring and people being divided on the basis of war wherever you look.
	But you can rely on the legacy media to ask the right questions.
	In this instance what a third world war would mean for investors?
	I had to read that a couple of times.
	What a third world war would mean for investors?
	Well the thing is with investors is you are a subset of another group that's called people.
	Now what a third world war would mean for people, which includes investors, is Death!
	It will mean certain death or no hold on don't be too pessimistic you might be one of the survivors that gets to live in a sort of a Kevin Costner style water world or some sort of Mad Max dystopia where currency's other people's teeth and that.
	It's not going to be great and anyway even looking at it as an investment opportunity Do you know what's a monster?
	I'll tell you what you should be invested in.
	Coffins.
	Coffins are going through the roof.
	Especially at the mortuary.
	It's just been bombed.
	Radiation cream.
	Buy!
	It's not a good idea to see everyone's death as an opportunity.
	I think that's an indication that we've gone out of alignment with the highest possible principle for the highest possible good.
	Perhaps this kind of thing happens when, for economic and financial reasons, conflicts get bundled together.
	Do you remember our bundles?
	Bundles not good.
	Remember, for example, during the economic collapse in 2008 that the financial system seemingly coordinated and were never penalized for?
	You know, that's when you learned the word bundle.
	These are the only times I've ever known the word bundle in my life.
	They bundled together subprime mortgages, collapsed the economy in 2008.
	Bundles of, like, sticks.
	Just from fairy tales, that seems to happen.
	And in British schools, bundle meant that you sort of have a bit of a pylon in the playground.
	I don't know if that was a thing you've done over in America.
	Whether it was or wasn't, bundling together complex, discrete, and vastly different.
	That was bungle in Rainbow.
	Grow up, Chrystia.
	Bundling together complex global conflicts ain't a good idea because they're all different and require different solutions.
	Also though, what's weird is Joe Biden, like say if you are affiliated with the conflict in the Middle East by virtue of religion or ethno-national identity, well Joe Biden has got a different set of priorities.
	Listen to John Kirby talking about that.
	So was the vice president correct he would veto an Israel only bill if it didn't have other issues that you were concerned about?
	Okay, he'd veto that.
	So if it was about supporting Israel, he would veto that.
	Does that change your perspective on what Joe Biden's loyalties and affinities are?
	It's interesting, isn't it?
	It makes it easier to believe that All wars are ultimately perpetuated because they are profitable.
	Remember Julian Assange says it's the function of government to transfer public money into private hands and for his brilliance and honest journalism and exposing corruption and revealing to the public he was of course given the knighthood and the Nobel Peace Prize and oh no he wasn't he was put into Belmarsh prison without trial.
	That's how the world works.
	The good old fair old just old world.
	So you can trust authority, can't you?
	You can trust the system.
	You can trust the legacy media.
	You can trust big tech.
	They've got your interests at heart.
	Lady Britney says Brett was epic.
	She's talking about Brett Weinstein, friend of the show, came on the show.
	We pre-recorded that.
	If you press the red button, become an Awake and Wonder, you can see these interviews when they happen.
	Sometimes we pre-record them to get great guests.
	Brett Weinstein came by.
	Good.
	Tucker, Who we have promised you and will deliver a special.
	And if you are an Awakened Wonder, you'll get that early.
	So become an Awakened Wonder.
	We'll bring Tucker in for a festive special.
	He was in the UK visiting Julian Assange.
	There's a little still of him doing that and his post.
	And that's really all.
	That's him there in a car park at Belmarsh Prison, I'm sad to say, with Stella Assange, Julian Assange's wife.
	It seems like the DeSantis and Trump feud is ongoing.
	I would not get in a war of words with Donald Trump, although I did once get in a war of words with Donald Trump.
	I also wrote him a letter of apology.
	I've had a relationship with Donald Trump of what I would say is a letter, a correspondence, you know.
	Epistemological.
	Is that what I'm going to say?
	Yeah.
	Epistles.
	Letters.
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Anyway, what I wouldn't do is criticize Donald Trump.
	He's too good at nicknames.
	He's too good at cussing.
	Like DeSantis is questioning whether or not Donald Trump has the balls to join the presidential race.
	He's got those sort of golf balls there.
	Donald Trump Jr.
	done this thing, look, of DeSantis in Italy as a boot.
	But Rod DeSantis isn't Is DeSantis an Italian type of name?
	I do like imagining Italy as a literal boot.
	Yesterday we asked a kid on YouTube who they want for present, they said the orange fat man.
	You silly sausages.
	Alright, let's have a look at Trump on DeSantis though.
	So they asked Ron DeSanctimonious and he said, I have no comment!
	And I said, I heard that, I said, play that back.
	One of the greatest inventions in history, TiVo.
	I like that he will sort of talk, that is, I think I've seen some compilation of Trump Seinfeld type thing.
	Yeah.
	Cause he does that.
	That's who's talking about TiVo like as a president, like in such a relaxed way.
	Like Obama was a very charismatic and to a large, you know, to a significant majority for a significant moment.
	And I'd say up until 2008 and the sort of droning and all that stuff, I would have said, I like Barack Obama a lot.
	But he didn't sort of say funny stuff about TiVo, I don't think.
	It seemed much more scripted and like, ding!
	Superstar president.
	This is an interesting way of communicating going on about TiVo.
	And so, like, he says TV was crappy to me.
	I don't really like this.
	Or it's alternative, right?
	There's a few of them.
	Better than television itself.
	Television was useless.
	You could never play anything back.
	Television was useless.
	I was used to it being outlawed.
	He said, play that sucker back.
	What did he just say?
	I have no comment.
	He said, that means he's going to run against me.
	I noticed in the polls that have really been spectacular.
	We're leading De Sanctimonious by 54 points, 60 points.
	61 came out today.
	We're at 70, almost 70, 69, and he's at like 8.
	Like, it's like a wounded bird falling from the sky.
	It's funny.
	Oh, who is that?
	Oh, that's Ron DeSanctimonious.
	Look, DeSanctimonious came to see me.
	Would you do it?
	Tears in his eyes.
	That's a funny day.
	Tears in his eyes.
	Nobody would even believe it.
	I don't know if he was wearing those same boots.
	I didn't notice.
	Is he doing that from a teleprompter?
	Is he doing that from bullet points?
	Is he doing that off the cuff?
	It's very good communication.
	I don't care either.
	That I don't care about.
	That I don't care about.
	It's a risky business comedy, and Elon Musk was in our country for an AI convention conference thing, and Rishi Sunak, who's our Prime Minister at the moment, probably not for very long, and again, Someone I would be critical of.
	I'd be critical of him because he went to them parties during Covid.
	You know all of the government were having parties when we were locked in our houses and at the time we're going this ain't good.
	Also he's Moderna.
	He invested in Moderna hedge fund Right and then wouldn't admit if he profited from it and he was doing that before he was Chancellor and ultimately became Prime Minister.
	Also he gave contracts to his Mrs's firm during the Covid pandemic.
	Also his Mrs's firm has connections to WF so he's one of them sort of globalist Trudeau type ones.
	But I saw a picture of him as a little boy And like, his parents were just like, they're normal people, and it made me feel like, oh, he's just a kid.
	He's just like a kid trying to do well in life.
	I don't even think he went to Eton, and that's normally standard for a British Prime Minister.
	There's only one school they go to, and I've been there, and I don't mean you're bad if you've been there, because I know people that have been there that are nice.
	Lovely people, as a matter of fact.
	But like, Rishi Sunak, when he was a little boy, he looked kind of sweet.
	And I think, don't you think we've got to try and elevate ourselves to the level of love?
	Anyway, if you watch Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of our country, talking to Elon Musk, there's such a disparity in power.
	You also see Elon Musk sort of operates on that sort of very curious level that he's in, like sort of thinking around in his own sort of mind, where he's doing binary poems.
	And like, Sunak tries to sort of do a joke, And Jim Murphy says, I think so did Hitler.
	I think Hitler looked cute as a kid.
	Yeah, well, I mean, certainly I'm not arguing that Hitler was a bad person.
	He was definitely bad.
	Yeah, but like the beauty of children, maybe this is something we need to somehow cherish, maintain and carry through.
	I don't know, man.
	This is a complicated time.
	Anyway, look at this moment where Rishi Sunak sort of tries to do a joke and it makes you actually feel I don't know.
	Tell me what you feel.
	Do you feel embarrassed for him?
	Do you feel angry?
	Tell me what it is you feel.
	Anyway, before we watch this, tell me in the chat, would you, do you want to watch a video to round off our fun and games of the WF discussing how it's unnecessary to explain science around COVID to the plebs?
	That's us.
	Or two, Stroke risks connected to Pfizer's new two-in-one Covid flu combo vax.
	So one or two, do you want to see the stroke risk combo thing or WF deciding, you know, that we're too stupid to explain science to?
	Anyway, meanwhile, here's Rishi Sunak piggybacking off an Elon joke and making you feel sort of a bit of a shudder in your guts.
	No, as I was mentioning when we were talking earlier, I have to somewhat engage in deliberate suspension of disbelief.
	Because if I'm putting so much blood, sweat and tears into a work project and burning the 3am oil, then I'm like, wait, why am I doing this?
	I can just wait for the AI to do it.
	I'm just lashing myself for no reason.
	Must be a glutton for punishment or something.
	Call Demis and tell him to hurry up and then you can have a holiday, right?
	Don't try and be funny.
	Don't do that.
	Don't do that.
	Donald Trump with his TiVo comments and all that stuff.
	And then watch dear old Rishi Sunak.
	Call Dennis.
	Dennis is apparently one of the people that's working on AI.
	Yeah.
	Ugh!
	Says Melissa Ski.
	Max Mataitis.
	Don't!
	Like Iran.
	Don't!
	What would you say to Iran?
	Don't!
	Rishi Sunak.
	Don't!
	Don't!
	I don't know.
	What should we do, guys?
	Remember, you can become an Awakened Wonder and join these chats.
	Join this beautiful community.
	Slim150, Claude, BlessedOldBird, Maximotitis444.
	Don't be content with just being on Rumble.
	It's great to be on the Rumble stream as well.
	We love Rumble.
	It's our home.
	We're going to have to leave YouTube now, because what did we vote for?
	Did we vote for 2-in-1?
	Yay!
	Stroke risks!
	Now, like, what's mad about this?
	And we're going to say goodbye to you.
	If you're watching us on YouTube, you'll wake and wonder.
	We love you.
	We need you.
	We cherish you.
	And we want you.
	We need you to be part of this revolution.
	And we thank you for subscribing and following us there.
	Now follow us over to Rumble.
	There's a link in the description.
	Click it now to see Pfizer's new two-in-one combo.
	Once we're off, are we off now?
	Right, now we're going to do some jokes about that.
	OK, so let's have a look at this Pfizer.
	This is the Pfizer thing.
	Have you seen the Pfizer TV ad to get five vaccines, says Jebeneks?
	No.
	Let's get that.
	That sounds funny.
	See if someone can find that advert.
	Not for today, for tomorrow.
	Get five vaccines!
	Okay, let's have a look at this Pfizer clip on 10.
	A study released by the FDA found that flu and COVID-19 vaccines may slightly increase the risk of stroke in seniors.
	Like, because if you are a senior, you don't want to slightly increase the risk of stroke because it's relatively high.
	Anyway.
	By blood clots in the brain.
	In particular when... In the brain?
	I'm sorry to say that's not good.
	Not a blood clot in the brain.
	Probably should have been clearer about some of that stuff.
	Crazy, isn't it really?
	Because do you remember when it was like, um, if you don't get a vaccine you might kill your granny?
	Bit out of order.
	Bit out of order saying that.
	Particularly as they've not trialed it for transmission at that point and it doesn't.
	Change transmission or a prohibit.
	There's a is this the new Pfizer combo vaccines coming.
	That's what this is about It is coming.
	There's a new Pfizer combo.
	Combo, combo, combo.
	The two shots were administered at the same time.
	FDA researchers analyzed data from Medicare claims and found that the increase happened in adults who are 85 and up.
	This is the second study to find that COVID-19 and flu shots given together put seniors at a higher risk for stroke.
	For those who are concerned, researchers suggest receiving the shots at different times.
	Oh dear, that's not good.
	That ain't good.
	Very, very silly.
	So just stay very alert.
	Did you see our conversation with Peter McCulloch yesterday?
	Extraordinary.
	You're going to love our conversation with Brett Weinstein in a minute.
	Okay, listen.
	Is Endless War an economic opportunity or is it a kind of, what do I want to say, sepulchral opportunity?
	Is it a Opportunity for grim grim death itself.
	Joe Biden is discussing deploying troops in Gaza.
	The Middle Eastern conflict is escalating heartbreakingly and new military expenditure is being sold as a boon for local workers.
	Is that a little bit dishonest?
	And to remember that it used to be that Trump was a risk to world peace.
	So what's happening?
	What is happening?
	Here's the news?
	No, here's the effing news.
	Joe Biden's in talks about deploying troops to Gaza while escalating tensions between the US
	and Iran while simultaneously saying this situation could be a boon for American workers
	and somehow that Trump is the risk to world peace.
	How can all of this make sense at the same time?
	Nothing makes sense anymore.
	This current conflict in the Middle East being just one example of how difficult it is for us to find a consensus together.
	Joe Biden is of course currently in talks about the deployment of troops in Gaza.
	He's advocating for increasing tensions between the US and Iran.
	Remember people said that Trump wanted a war with Iran?
	Remember those boxes?
	Trump said, no I just wanted to demonstrate that there was plans for a war with Iran and I was opposed to it.
	This is a curious and peculiar time where Forever Wars are being sold to us as somehow necessary for the economy and beneficial, as if that's the best thing for ordinary Americans, as if there's no other way that the lives of ordinary citizens around the world could be improved without curious incidents that appear to be
	Oddly in alignment with the interests of the powerful and increasingly impossible to oppose on any level, even as they lead to death and destruction and annihilation and perhaps the sort of dismantling of our collective soul.
	All violence is wrong, either you believe that or you don't.
	And if you believe all violence is wrong, then there's nothing to discuss except how do we bring about diplomacy and peace in all of the world's conflicts?
	Surely that, at least, should be sayable.
	But we're seeing politicians kicked out of their parties, we're seeing the word ceasefire being Sort of essentially banned.
	Why is that?
	As I've continually said during this conflict, I am not in a position to condemn those who are inflamed, engulfed and lost in emotion as a result of the original horrific attacks in Israel or the ongoing military action right now and its obvious devastating consequences.
	I believe that if you are directly affected by that or you have an affinity with that, who can possibly deny your right to your feelings?
	What is interesting for all of us, and I would like you, regardless of your faith or creed or religion, to consider these perspectives is people are making a lot of money out of this war.
	People are accruing a lot of power out of this war.
	People are being granted the ability to censor and cancel and possibly surveil and shut down as a result of this war.
	There are apparently plans to displace the entire Gazan population.
	That's something that's publicly understood now.
	Of course, the deployment of US troops is being discussed.
	Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are making significant profits.
	So we're living in a complicated time.
	There's no question.
	But that's enough of my wayward proselytizing.
	Let's see what the President of the United States of America has to say on this subject.
	Of course you are aware that originally Biden said that Trump was a threat to world peace.
	That Trump had to be gotten out of office before he brought the world to the precipice of apocalypse or even beyond because of his mad handling of the situation with Iran.
	The world has changed because of what Trump has done.
	And the American people, including independents and some republicans, know how bad he is.
	Know how much he's misrepresented.
	Know how he's getting close to getting us in a war.
	Joe Biden was in better shape then, wasn't he?
	That's not that long ago, 2020.
	He was sort of sharp, actually.
	I'd vote for that guy.
	And even if I didn't, he'd probably win.
	I said, as the walls close in on this man, I'm worried he's going to get us to war in Iran.
	Unfortunately, I may have been right.
	The fact of the matter is there's a lot at stake in this election.
	So things change in politics all the time.
	We all know that.
	But there's Joe Biden saying that one of his concerns about Trump is that Trump had the potential to bring about a war with Iran.
	So has a great deal changed?
	Has Iran changed a lot of their policies and positions in the interim?
	Or has something else changed?
	Let's have a look.
	In an interview with 60 Minutes earlier this month, President Joe Biden boasted of the United States' ability to fight multiple wars at the same time.
	Good for everyone.
	Good for business.
	We're the United States of America, for God's sake!
	We're the United States of America, for God's sake!
	I remember seeing him say that and thinking, this is not a cogent argument for bringing about limitless death.
	The most powerful nation in the history of the world, he assured his interviewer.
	Again, jingoism and aracinated wild patriotism are unlikely to bring about solutions in such a complex set of conflicts.
	We can take care of both these wars, the war in the Middle East and Ukraine, and still maintain our overall international defence.
	We have the capacity to do this and we have an obligation to do it.
	We are the essential nation, to paraphrase the former Secretary of State, and if we don't then who does?
	Do you ever wonder what America's political role in the world actually is?
	What is it that America are doing?
	You'll be familiar with both the maps of China surrounded by American military bases and now the map of Iran surrounded by American military bases.
	The assumption is that America is sort of somehow policing the world.
	And the story, I suppose, is that's to protect you from the rest of the world.
	The most optimistic argument, I suppose, we could make is that if America didn't occupy this position as a kind of global police force, then terrorists or the Chinese or Russians would take over your nation.
	But surely it would be possible to have a literal defense rather than attack industry or a defense policy that was about if anyone does anything like they're coming near us or our interests, Then we will prevent that from happening using military might.
	I suppose that immediately poses a bunch of questions.
	Are there American interests that are overseas?
	Seems like there are.
	Are these interests involving resources?
	It seems they might.
	Are there alliances with nations that ultimately amount to resource-based alliances or alliances of dominion?
	And does the American foreign policy really come down to an appetite for unipolar domination and global hegemony?
	Do you ever get enough time in your life to say, would it be possible to just have a different type of life, where America wasn't agitating for and aggravating wars because it's somehow beneficial to the military-industrial complex?
	Mightn't it be better for us as ordinary Americans, just our neighbours and our homes and our day-to-day lives?
	I mean, you don't get time to ask those kind of questions, and certainly if you ask them out loud, you're likely to be silenced and shut down.
	So something very unusual is happening.
	Would you agree?
	Biden's string of American exceptionalist cliches has since been given a vintage election year chaser.
	What if more wars represents an invaluable economic opportunity?
	In an Oval Office address earlier this week, the president said just as much.
	Dressing up new military spending in the language of economic nationalism and even name-dropping particular swing states where his advisors cynically expect the message to resonate.
	These wars have been cynically mobilized for economic and political purposes, literally in swing states.
	There could be more jobs in Arizona, so Who do you want to vote for in the forthcoming election?
	That is not how such a complex and difficult situation should be handled.
	Do not sometimes think that we are approaching a more and more dangerous scenario, and that the people in charge are not reliable, that they're not telling you the truth, that the agenda is not being explicitly stated.
	Other than someone saying, look, it's this.
	Either we are able to dominate the world, or China are going to dominate the world, or Russia are going to dominate the world, or Islamic terrorists are going to dominate the world.
	You'd have to then evaluate whether or not that assessment was accurate, whether or not you trusted these people to carry out that operation, and whether or not they were being honest about the economic undergirdings of that argument, i.e.
	how Orothean, Lockheed Martin, and the donor class benefited from this situation.
	Until that's extracted, I don't think you can get a clear picture of what's happening.
	Here is Biden's garbled Oval Office speech, where he makes all sorts of extraordinary claims, again, American exceptionalism, and also how war is good for the economy, in particular, the good people of Arizona.
	Let me be clear about something.
	We send Ukrainian equipment sitting in our stockpiles.
	And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment.
	Equipment that defends America, and is made in America.
	Patron missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona.
	Another swing states.
	Whatever these wars are, it is not beneficial to ordinary Americans in their everyday lives.
	In fact, there's a strong argument that this will place ordinary Americans at risk, whether
	overseas and potentially even domestically.
	If it causes, as it seems that it will, an enormous refugee crisis, as apparently that
	is something that is well documented and understood and WikiLeaks have revealed that that is part
	of the plan, there's not only a migration crisis, of course, but the likelihood that
	dispossessed, broken people across the world will find themselves in North America and
	European countries and perhaps feeling that America and other nations did not have their
	interests at heart when it came to previous decisions.
	I mean, generally over the last few years, has the displacement of people and agitation
	of domestic populations in the Middle East been beneficial for Americans?
	Is the world a safer place post Iraq?
	I mean, it took COVID to shut down ISIS.
	You know, just as in World War II, today, patriotic American workers are building the
	arsenal of democracy.
	Arsenal of democracy.
	Democracy and militarism are being presented to you as a combined idea.
	But that is so extraordinary, isn't it, when you consider that there is no referendum on whether or not you want wars, whether or not you want to continue to send aid packages to sustain the Ukraine-Russia war, or to advance military activity in the Middle East, or to continue to aggravate China into potential conflict over there in Asia.
	So the idea that it's a democratic arsenal is simply not true.
	It's at best An arsenal that serves the interests of the powerful who have made a set of decisions that they're telling you are good for you, but I've had good cause to not trust them.
	Conserving the cause of freedom.
	There you go.
	It's simple as that.
	Freedom.
	That's what this all comes down to.
	Last week, the White House sent a letter to Congress outlining what it called critical national security funding needs and tabling a proposal worth nearly $106 billion.
	According to an analysis by Steven Semler, much of that money represents little more than a stimulus to the US military itself.
	Subsidies to weapons plants and shipyards, the stockpiling of weaponry, etc.
	Let's take a break from the intensity of disasters around the world in the ongoing Omnicrisis to make sure that you are safe and survive this oncoming apocalypse.
	Did you know that 90% of pharmaceuticals in the US are produced abroad?
	Elsewhere?
	In a global crisis, countries could restrict exports and stockpile medications.
	Oh, there's not gonna be a crisis.
	There is a crisis.
	This can lead to rising drug prices and empty shelves in America.
	Oh no!
	Statistically, you or a family member will likely need a prescription in the next year regardless of supply chain issues.
	that's gonna happen to all of us.
	The wellness company's medical emergency kit offers you a solution to be prepared
	without paying thousands for a hospital visit.
	Their kit contains eight essential medicines, including antibiotics, antivirals, and antiparasitics,
	which includes ivermectin, which is just in case your horse needs deworming.
	Don't try using that for anything else now.
	It's like having a pharmacy in your bathroom or wherever you need it.
	Visit twc.health forward slash brand to get your medical emergency kit and use the code brand for a 10% discount at the checkout.
	Okay, let's get back to this story which demonstrates why you're gonna need that kit.
	As if that were not enough, Politico has reported that administration officials are now circulating talking points in Congress that argue that providing military aid is good for American jobs.
	Using the jobs argument to sell weapons transfers is precisely backwards.
	Selling arms to combatant nations must be justified on the basis of their security and human rights consequences, not the jobs and profits they generate.
	But what is the real agenda that's driving American involvement in these global conflicts?
	Support was declining for continuing aid to Ukraine because of the failure of the counter-offensive, because there were obvious domestic problems, notably Hawaii, where American people felt their resources might be better directed.
	Let's have a look at how the defence industry really regards this type of conflict, as opposed to what they say publicly.
	After Israel declared war in response to Hamas killing over 1,400 Israelis and taking around 200 hostages, the stocks of major American and European war profiteers soared, according to a report from Eyes on the Ties.
	Five industry giants collectively recorded $195.6 billion in military-related revenue last year.
	They are Boeing, $30.8 billion, General Dynamics, $30.4 billion, Lockheed Martin, $69.3 billion,
	and Northrop Grumman, $32.4 billion, and RTX, formerly Raytheon, $39.6 billion.
	The top shareholders in these five defense companies largely consist of big asset managers
	or big banks with asset management wings that include BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street,
	Fidelity, Capital Group, Wellington, JP Morgan, Chase, Morgan Stanley, Newport Trust Company,
	Longview Asset Management, Massachusetts Financial Services Company,
	Geode Capital, and Bank of America.
	Eyes on the Ties also highlighted our chief executives are handsomely compensated and the CEO's ties to Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street and foreign policy think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
	During third quarter earnings calls this month, analysts from Morgan Stanley and TD Bank took note of this potential profit-making escalation in conflict and asked unusually blunt questions about the financial benefit of the war between Israel and Hamas.
	The death toll, which so far includes over 7,000 Palestinians and over 1,400 Israelis, wasn't top of mind for T.D.
	Cohen's Kai Von Ruhmer, Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst specializing in the aerospace industry.
	His question was about the upside for General Dynamics, an aerospace and weapons company in which T.D.
	Asset Management holds over $16 million in stock.
	Hamas has created additional demand.
	We have this $106 billion request from the President, said Von Ruhmer during General Dynamics earnings call on October the 25th.
	Can you give us some general colour in terms of areas where you think you could see incremental acceleration in demand?
	This particular conflict is more divisive than any other conflict in the world, maybe in world history for all we know.
	Even in formerly allied and aligned spaces like the Conservative right or online pundits or left-wing commentators.
	There are new fissures and fractures emerging, new opportunities for censorship, new forms of conflict even just when it comes to communication with people that aren't directly involved.
	Even though some people of course are ideologically or religiously involved and as I've said many times I wouldn't seek to comment on their position.
	Plainly they're invested in a way that's deeply emotional and suggests a deep connection.
	But to hear people talking about it in purely economic terms I think is very very important.
	And it suggests that however powerful, upsetting and awful and devastating this conflict is, all of the lives being lost by everybody involved, a devastating and awful conflict, which personally I believe we should all be praying for an immediate end to, is bringing about profit and opportunity to some very powerful and influential interests.
	Do you imagine for one moment that the perpetuation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict isn't somehow connected to the amount of donations and lobbying these enormous companies are able to spend?
	Do you think that it's exclusively that conflict that's affected in that way, even having heard just a piece of that conversation?
	So while, out of respect for those of you that are directly affected on both sides of this conflict, and we pray for the victims, we pray for them, and I pray for an end to this war, isn't it clear that at least part of what's driving this is profit?
	Or do you think that this conflict is different from other conflicts when it comes from the ability for these powerful companies to extract profit, because they don't see it any differently?
	In the case of Ukraine, sending arms without an accompanying diplomatic strategy runs the risk of enabling a long grinding war that could even lead to escalation to a direct US-Russian confrontation.
	The suggestion that this support should continue because it creates American jobs is misguided and dangerous.
	Yeah, where are you going to be working in some post-apocalyptic nightmare?
	Seems like a risky policy and seems like a good time to mention Julian Assange's famous edict that they don't want a short war in Afghanistan, they want a long war in Afghanistan because a long war is more profitable.
	Do you imagine, based on what you're hearing, that that mentality has, poof, disappeared and replaced by, how can we support the people that we ideologically agree with?
	This is terrible, we all have to stand together at this time.
	Does that seem to be the MO of this particular set of interests?
	Let me know in the chat or comments.
	A recent poll indicates that roughly two-thirds of Americans support a ceasefire in the Gaza conflict.
	That's just the poll though.
	There will never be a referendum.
	There will never be real democracy.
	The arsenal of democracy does not support democracy.
	It supports hegemony and the unipolar agenda of a very particular set of interests.
	And those numbers may grow as heart-rending scenes of death and destruction continue to make their way back to America.
	While the jobs argument should take a backseat to strategic and human rights concerns, it's worth exploring its validity since it's been introduced into the debate.
	Although it does seem ridiculous that as human beings sharing a planet together, we would consider jobs and finances as in any way superior arguments to life itself, humanity, the deaths of children, any children from anywhere, as a parent, as a human obviously, That's appalling and should be prevented as quickly as possible.
	Surely.
	There are many more ways to create more and better jobs without resorting to increased weapon spending.
	Well, we need to create jobs.
	What should we do then?
	Why don't we drive everyone's future off a fucking cliff?
	Oh, well, I don't know.
	Where would we be doing the jobs?
	While we're falling down a cliff?
	I love my new job!
	Pop pop!
	Pop pop!
	What is your job as you fall to your death off the precipice of Armageddon?
	Virtually any other form of government outlay or even a tax cut yields greater employment than military spending.
	It's the worst way to create jobs.
	They could do almost anything else.
	Let's just have ice cream vans driving up and down giving ice creams away.
	Well, that does create more jobs than Armageddon.
	OK, let's just release dogs into the street and then we can have people catch those dogs and see which dogs is running faster.
	Well, it does create more jobs than this government weapons outlay that could also lead to Armageddon.
	Let's just stand in the street and throw fruit at one another.
	I mean, like anything, anything you want to do would create more jobs and potentially not kill us all.
	Forging a less militarized foreign policy and rolling back a Pentagon budget that is soaring towards a trillion dollars per year would open the way to building a more peaceful and sustainable economy.
	What do you want for America?
	What do you want for the world?
	When are we going to evaluate what the vision is for our planet, where our principles are, where our values are taking us?
	Is this what you want?
	Are you, I'm talking to you, are you actually happy?
	Is this working for you?
	Do you want to change things?
	Do you sometimes think there might be a better way?
	There isn't.
	For probably virtually any other way would be better.
	Like the old job creation schemes.
	But the first priority, especially with respect to Israel-Gaza, must be to stop the killing and end the war, not debate the economic effects of arms spending.
	Of course that has become unsayable because people are so hurt by this terrible conflict and by the atrocities of recent weeks, but surely there has to come a time we're talking about peace in evolving The jobs argument should have no place in this hugely consequential discussion.
	As Pennsylvania representative Summer Lee remarked this week, the deluge of post-September 2001 expenditure not only incurred a cosmic cost to the public, but made the world less safe in the process.
	Would you agree with that?
	Post 9-11, our federal government's decision to fund Endless Wars cost 4.5 million lives, including over 7,000 U.S.
	service members, and displaced tens of millions in a time of deep pain after 3,000 beloved American lives were brutally stolen by Al-Qaeda on September the 11th.
	These Endless Wars cost U.S.
	taxpayers $8 trillion.
	Perhaps it's just worth looking at some alternative versions of reality.
	Perhaps it's worth questioning what America's role in the world is.
	Perhaps it's worth inquiring how significant is the impact of the military-industrial complex and these powerful and influential companies on American foreign policy.
	Are they doing what they say they're doing in, for example, Ukraine and Russia?
	And then once you've come to a decision there, think about other conflicts.
	What is the role of America?
	Again, when talking about this discussion, I don't want to hurt or offend anybody.
	There's enough hurt and offense and pain and suffering in this world.
	I would love to be part of a group that talk about peace and benefit and what we share as a species rather than what divides us.
	And if we are afraid to have that conversation, if we have no appetite for that conversation, if people are being condemned for mentioning that conversation, then we really are in trouble.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	See you in a second.
	Thanks for watching Zicfox's latest video.
	Now, here's the fucking news.
	So, when it comes to military conflict, should the economic component be at the forefront of our
	minds?
	And if it is, and if we're critical of that, ought we be advocating for peace?
	Again, I say that with all respect to those of you that are directly involved emotionally, Stay free!
	religiously in this appalling, appalling conflict. I pray it ends. I pray it ends. I'm going to do a
	brilliant interview right now with Brett Weinstein. You know him. He's the evolutionary biologist and
	co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, which you can see on Rumble.
	The link's in the description there.
	Here I am with Brett Weinstein. Stay free. See it first on Rumble. Brett Weinstein's with me now,
	the evolutionary biologist, host of the Dark Horse podcast, and I would say free speech and
	freedom movement advocate.
	Thanks for joining me, Brett.
	I am thrilled to be here.
	It's very exciting to have you here.
	Have you been participating in ARC with Jordan Peterson et al.?
	I was at the ARC conference and I was at the, I don't even know what you would call it, but the Jordan Peterson extravaganza at the O2 last night as well.
	I'd call it an extravaganza.
	Did you enjoy yourself?
	Oh, I did enjoy myself.
	Met lots of interesting people and it's always great to see Jordan on stage in his element.
	Yeah, of course it is.
	It's fascinating.
	We've been speaking and communicating recently and I suppose there's a sense, an unavoidable sense, Brett, that we're in a very critical period.
	Do you know, like, it's not that long ago, it seems to me, that the apocalyptic preachers were peripheral and marginal figures, derided and maligned at the time as crackpots and lunatics and conspiracy theorists, and indeed they were the first to be picked off, cancelled, removed, even before the term cancelled existed.
	There were people that were eliminated from public discourse for a variety of reasons, but In retrospect, it looks like they were right about a good many things.
	You will see a series of global crisis, an escalation of tensions, an increase in censorship, the legitimization of surveillance.
	And this is something that you've been talking about yourself for a while, I would say, from a more credible and certainly from an academic background.
	And that was germane during the pandemic, which was a time of great cleansing, censorship and control.
	Now that we're to a degree on the other side of it, how do you feel that the continuation of control will be exerted going forward, now that if we're indeed not in the pandemic era, how is it going to be possible to legitimise the kind of authoritarianism that became normalised in that period?
	Well, there are a number of answers to that question.
	The most obvious of them has to do with the World Health Organization and the pair of structural modifications that are currently moving through that body under the heading of pandemic preparedness.
	Yes.
	And for those who are not paying attention to this, These documents, I think they are designed to be so boring that you will not notice them, but what they contain is essentially the framework for a global tyranny that could be triggered by the next pandemic, but pandemic
	is defined so loosely that anything will do, including climate change, and that having defined such a pandemic, all of the signatory countries to the World Health Organization would effectively become subordinate.
	Our sovereignty would evaporate.
	And within the treaty modifications that are being proposed, there are various requirements, for example, that if the World Health Organization were to decide that Some threat to public health was sufficiently severe.
	It could, for example, mandate things including vaccines and gene therapy.
	I kid you not, it's actually, it's named in these proposed modifications.
	And maybe the icing on the cake is That they have also anticipated the conversations that might break out if they attempted this, and they have carved out a right to dictate to the signatory countries what sorts of censorship measures they might have to deploy.
	I think the way to understand this is if you look at what happened during the COVID so-called pandemic, they attempted to deploy a narrative that we were simply supposed to swallow and it didn't work because effectively the force that was imposing this didn't really understand the danger of podcasters discussing these things outside of the normal channels and so the narrative broke apart.
	And you know, in the US now we have something like 3% of people are taking the latest boosters.
	That tells you how badly the narrative fared.
	But they have decided to not lose to us again.
	And they're creating the architecture that would make it impossible to have the kinds of discussions that we did have during COVID.
	And that's frightening.
	Yes, when the word globalism is used, I understand it as meaning the subordination of sovereignty in the manner that you describe, the anti-democratic process that seems to be enshrined in this treaty, the ability to just demand that nations impose preordained regulations, including I feel like it's 5% of the national health budget, and Yeah, and as you say, a curiously loose definition of the term or word pandemic itself, and I was unaware, I missed what seems to be a crucial point, the ability to censor.
	I'm always struck by how this new form of tyranny is masked in the livery of a kind of gentle bureaucracy of Recently, we received more YouTube restrictions. We've
	already been demonetized. It seemed that the UK government asked for our channel to be demonetized
	and YouTube in particular agreed. But this has been escalated actually and now we can't
	post. It seems like kind of niche to say you can't post external links.
	links and stuff like that. But really what this is, is censorship and control of information
	is being posed and imposed to an unprecedented level, because I suppose of this unprecedented
	technology. I suppose how I came to look at the pandemic was as a period of revelation.
	It revealed how pre-existing power structures operate, how their interests converge, and
	what their agenda looks like, visible not only in the instances where it was carried
	out, but in particular perhaps, where it was resisted. And you are saying, Brett, that
	this WHO treaty is in a sense the legislation for the continuation of those measures.
	After this initial attempt has to a degree failed but to a great degree succeeded if by success you mean the profits of those pharma companies if by success you mean the ability for nations where you wouldn't have believed it possible to have successful lockdowns or the measure of control exerted people giving up norms pretty much almost immediately and largely unquestioningly the kind of good faith that was handed over and it seems that to me since then that there's been Perhaps I don't know when it began anymore, Brett.
	Was it 2001?
	Was it 2008?
	But there's just this never-ending sense of crisis, this escalating sense of fear and dread.
	And now the kind of casual advocacy for war on potentially three fronts is being normalized also.
	What new complexity does this conflict bring, in particular to this matter of centralising control, closing down dissent?
	Do you see this as part of the same trajectory, potentially?
	When you say this, are you talking about the Who Treaty or are you talking about the conflict in the Middle East?
	This conflict.
	The Middle East.
	Yeah, and actually the sets of conflicts and the way they're being funded in bundles spoken about and conflated in quite peculiar ways.
	You know, the most recent package of 106 billion, some of it for Ukraine, some of it for Israel and Palestine, some of it for China, Taiwan.
	All of it for the military-industrial complex.
	Do you see this as being part of a kind of set of crises that are never-ending and always have as their end point, regardless of the complexity within the crisis, the ability to assert control?
	Well, there are about 20 things in there and I know I'm going to forget some of them, but there are a number of things going on.
	One is there is this incessant push for centralization and The violation of a sensible principle for governance that actually oddly comes out of Catholicism called subsidiarity.
	Now, it's interesting.
	Subsidiarity was a big theme at the ARC conference, and I know Jordan Peterson has talked about it occasionally.
	Three years ago, I thought I was the only person in modern times who was even using the term.
	Maybe that was wrong, but subsidiarity means Everything should be governed at the lowest effective level that it can be governed, right?
	The who should not be dictating your relationship to your doctor, for example, or how your local park functions.
	But these excuses, these crises create the pretext for moving power upwards.
	So it's farther from our ability to exert any kind of countervailing force.
	And it really is.
	It's an excuse.
	You know, the pandemic masqueraded as a series of interventions that would only make sense in the context of a government that was absolutely obsessed with our safety.
	But we know that our governments are not obsessed with our safety.
	They put us in danger in many different ways, you know.
	Every day of the week.
	Yes.
	So the idea that they're suddenly so concerned that we're going to catch COVID and that we, you know, might end up in the hospital over it is preposterous in light of, you know, the food supply and the poor quality of what it is that they're allowing us to eat.
	And in fact, you know, the strange food pyramids that they've put together that have us eating exactly the wrong things.
	Total failure to recommend.
	going out and making vitamin D in the sun, right?
	They're not obsessed with our safety and well-being, but if they can claim a crisis in which they can invoke that, then they can do all sorts of things, including censor us.
	They can take all sorts of freedoms.
	With respect to the crisis in the Middle East, it is playing a number of roles here.
	One, maybe it's just pure luck.
	In fact, I think we have to assume it is.
	But it is distracting people from this, you know, guided missile headed directly for our sovereignty and our capacity to even invoke informed consent in the defense of our own bodies.
	We're not noticing that because we have this very dramatic crisis, and we are right to be paying attention to that crisis.
	There's a tremendous hazard in it that this crisis, A, as bad as it is in the Middle East and as critical as what goes on in the Middle East is to the world, it also could escalate into a global crisis in which, you know, we might be very directly involved.
	So there's all sorts of reasons to be paying attention.
	The fact that our attention span is divided between these crises, and as you point out, that there is a pattern, a never-ending series of crises, that almost looks like it was designed to keep us reacting out of fear, to keep our amygdala in charge and to sideline our conscious minds, I don't know, maybe that's just the nature of the modern world, but to the extent that we are stuck in this, you know, reactive, fear-based response, we're not thinking very clearly.
	And we need to, because the only way out of this stuff is to think clearly.
	You know, what options are we not seeing, right?
	We're being told that everything involves two sides.
	You're going to pick which side you're on and we'll know whether you're a decent person based on which flag you're waving, right?
	That's not how any of this works.
	And it's a disaster for humanity, and I hope we will get to this later in the discussion, but it is a disaster for humanity to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a previous mode in which civilizations functioned and away from the superior mode that, yes, we had never completed, but we were well on the way to getting there.
	We had a really good prototype of an alternative system that was in fact fairer, safer, more liberating, more prone to have us pursue meaning and compassion and all of the things that we value about ourselves.
	Those were on the table and they're slipping away from us as we're now very focused on conflicts that we've been told are so utterly binary that, you know, we will out ourselves as immoral if we ask any questions at all.
	Do you mean that liberal democracy was succeeding?
	That there was a period sort of in the, are you saying the 20th century where it appeared like there was meaningful progress and something has pivotally, there's been a pivotal and fundamental change.
	What is the period that you're talking about where things were on the table to use your phrase?
	What has been lost and when did this happen?
	People who follow me will know that I use a term called metaphorical truth.
	And what I mean by metaphorical truth, these are ideas that if you act as if they're true, they work.
	They work in your favor.
	That doesn't mean that they're perfectly literally true.
	The story I would tell, which I think is at least metaphorically true, and I believe it's probably close to literally true also, is that the founding fathers of the United States accidentally solved a problem in trying to confederate the colonies.
	They created a system that didn't perfectly solve the problem of people rigging the system in their own favor, but it solved a lot of the problem.
	Enough That the system actually founded the modern West.
	And it became contagious because when people saw how productive a system that did not rig itself in favor of particular constituencies was, they of course wanted in.
	So they mimicked it, right?
	Now, sometimes they mimicked it without the particular constitutional provisions that really made it work.
	But as long as everybody was loosely on board with, you know, free speech, for example, it didn't really matter whether it was inscribed in your constitution.
	So, to make the story succinct, the West is essentially the agreement not to rig the world in favor of your people, to collaborate with people based on the fact that they bring something to the table that makes them worth collaborating with and to ignore their skin color and the shape of their noses and the particular traditions in their religious places of worship, right?
	You would put those things aside and you collaborate because there's wealth to be produced by teaming up.
	Now, this system is better in virtually every way that it could be better, but it has one vulnerability, which is it's fragile.
	And the problem is that when it breaks down, we should know why it breaks down.
	It breaks down because the productivity runs out, the growth that it would produce runs out.
	And when that happens, it's like a game of musical chairs in which the music has stopped
	and instead of being one chair short, you know, 30% of the chairs are missing and people
	start looking for who they can trust and then all of that lineage stuff comes back.
	And my claim is that this is where we are in history, that all of the growth that we
	would normally be able to produce has run its course.
	There will be future bits of growth that we will get to by innovating new technologies, for example, but we never know when this is going to happen.
	Many games have been played to pretend that we have growth.
	Most of those games have run their course and the bills are coming due.
	And so as that, you know, looming Unbreakable recession shows up on our radar people default back into this lineage against lineage violence and the problem the really big problem is The world was like that that was all of history until the West emerged
	That was terrible.
	All of the greatest tragedies are born of this kind of thinking.
	But it was at least possible for humanity to move along this way.
	It probably isn't possible for us to do that.
	If we descend as a globe back into lineage against lineage violence, if that just comes to characterize everything with modern weaponry, I don't think humanity has much time left.
	So my claim, and you know, I don't want people to get this depressed sense, I wouldn't be doing the stuff I do if I didn't think that there was a way out.
	But if we don't find our way out, then the point is, it's a short ride.
	And we have to reinvigorate the West in order to escape that.
	May I offer that it seems to me that also masked within that ideology is that the consensus and teaming out that you described was predicated on a set of materialistic ideals.
	I don't just mean materialistic in terms of commodity, I mean materialistic in terms of rationalism and that which is measurable.
	That it was devoid of a spiritual dimension in so much as that collaboration was only based on productivity And even Marxist critiques, one of the areas where that analysis remains absolutely verifiably true, is that, as you have said in your own description of this problem, is prone to boom-bust cycles.
	And if that becomes the raison d'etre and determining principle of an entire culture, when it inevitably falls into decline, it's exposed as if not nihilistic, then somehow, I don't know undeniably, Entropic.
	And it feels to me, Brett, that part of the failure is that while the lineage traditions are plainly tribalized and conflict is baked into them, I feel like that Schmittian dialectic of othering becomes germane here, that in order for the in-group to be valuable, we have to have this other group.
	And that feels to be getting metastasized under some new terrible global Dominion or domain, rather.
	Now, what I have long felt is a challenge, whilst I feel that you're entirely right about subsidiarity.
	Subsidiarity.
	Got to get into my own accent.
	Subsidiarity.
	Subsidiarity.
	The thing that I like, I like subsidiarity because I like the idea of power being as close to the individuals affected by it as possible.
	That we let go of the idea of progress being about pace and efficiency, as if there's some Immutable, incontrovertible telos, this thing that we're trying to get to, when plainly that is baked into the models of commodity and built-in obsolescence and disposability and materialism and individualism.
	If all that matters is that which is measurable, then in the end what I'm left with is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
	And it seems interesting to me that many spiritual doctrines are about Caution when it comes to pleasure and suffering being the determinants, your own preferences becoming your default ideology.
	So like it was interesting you said at the beginning of that, that people sort of mimicked it without inscribing some of its constitutional principles and it still worked anyway because it's an effective system.
	But where it has failed, it has failed monumentally and it has failed sort of in historic terms, Quite quickly in terms of empire like it's like it's rattled itself into annihilation indeed if what we're experiencing now is some sort of burgeoning end time pretty rapidly and I feel Brett and I do and it's not who gives a shit what I feel I'm asking you
	Don't you feel that there's a requirement for a set of values and principles that go beyond materialism and individualism and somehow capture something arcane, divine, unitary, and sort of that respects the sanctity of the individual and the community?
	And when we rebuild out of this, it's not just built on, why don't we buddy up so as we can trade shit?
	Oh, you're 100% right about this.
	As I was saying, I was thinking, this sounds good, sounds alright.
	No, you're hitting the nail right on the head.
	And so I would say the next thing to understand is that, first of all, evolution is an amazing process.
	It has produced all of the most incredible features of humanity in addition to producing all of our worst features.
	So it is an amoral process.
	I'm not advocating for us to subordinate ourselves to it.
	In fact, we need to override it.
	Its objective is to have us get our genes as far into the future as we can.
	It would be wise of us to recognize that one of the – that's a sentence you could say for any species, literally, any species that has ever existed.
	The objective is to get genes that are contained by the organisms in that species as far into the future as possible.
	That is not an interesting goal.
	It is not something that any reasonable person should want to honor.
	You are a robot with that goal, but it's like being a cyborg that has discovered you have a mission that you don't think is a good idea.
	So we need to override our program and say actually the capacity to engage in rational evaluation, to establish values that are meaningful, to pursue objectives that are not fundamentally genetic, that's actually the better part of what we are.
	That's something that we cannot say other species are capable of.
	We are uniquely capable of it.
	And so the part of us that is special is a means to an end, a genetic end that is not interesting and not honorable.
	What we should do is we should turn the tables on evolution and we should say, how do we take the stuff that's actually really cool that we're uniquely capable of and provide an environment that fosters it?
	Which does go directly to, I don't know if you want to call it a religious perspective or a spiritual perspective or whatever it is.
	The way we live has to satisfy that need in us.
	That need is a fundamental need.
	And I won't say I don't know what it is that would satisfy that need and function in the long term to stabilize what I'm calling the West, this ability to collaborate.
	But I'm not arguing that the reason to do it is because it produces lots and lots of growth and because, you know, it's productive.
	I'm arguing that it should be done because of all of the auxiliary things that it allows to take place.
	We want a world in which warfare is less likely, in which violence is less likely, in which people are truly liberated to do meaningful things.
	And the best hope we have of doing that is putting aside our lineage differences and collaborating, which is what has happened in the West.
	Not perfectly.
	We've never completely gotten rid of racism, for example, but we have done better than any alternative.
	So that's why I'm arguing we should do it, is actually to foster the best characteristics that humans have and allow those things to spread.
	Within the limits of rationalism it's difficult to continue to advocate only for rationalism when we've seen where rationalism has brought us and it feels to a degree that that's what you're attempting to do.
	I'm reminded of C.S.
	Lewis's claim or observation The rationalist scientist in the laboratory observing a far-off nebulae posits that the rules that are applicable locally to the scientist would be applicable here, using the rationalism that he himself claims is the result of a set of chaotic processes with no teleology or intention, no trace of divinity,
	that the temporal is absolute and the spatial is absolute and not necessarily abstract but
	potentially sort of localised customs that may not be absolute across the entirety of
	the universe. And what I feel, and then I would, wouldn't I, is that we're buttressing
	against some precipice that's going to require a new resource.
	In a sense, this is kind of, I suppose, the Christian idea, is it?
	Maybe that you can't get beyond here now unless there is some transformational, transcendent experience.
	Unless the individual is willing to somehow...
	It's not only in Christianity, it's sort of in Stoicism, certainly Marcus Aurelius and within Buddhism.
	The idea of death of self, the idea that there is a purpose that is greater.
	Now, from your perspective and your field of obvious expertise, evolutionary biology, where you can demonstrate the efficacy and the function of genes and how they behave and how they mutate and how they succeed and how they fail.
	Of course, I recognize that that is the sort of track that you will use as the dominant frequency for formulating your opinions and perspectives.
	It would be mental if it wasn't.
	But I wonder if within that, isn't it necessary for us to collectively invite the possibility that the reason for our distinction as a species is, you're going to have to get quite close to saying there is something sacred about human beings or important or special or different or something, and that there is something unitary between us, something shared between us, Otherwise, I think it's easier to make the argument for domination.
	It's easier to say this set is better than that set, which is the argument, you know, American hegemony, provoking China into a South Seas war, saying that Russia caused this war themselves, when there's an obvious argument that there was provocation.
	In a way, to deny, to somehow say America should get out of these conflicts, that we should be looking at maximum democracy, maximum subsidiarity, in order to make that argument, you have to somehow... I don't know if it's enough to do that on the basis of economics or that the West was a Great success and look at these pillars and columns or look at Michelangelo or whatever.
	I don't think we're going to have to reach deeper into somehow the mystery of consciousness, somehow the limitations of some inkling of the divine, some dormant near silent spark that perhaps may yet feed us something that you might find in the Tao or in Meister Eckhart.
	Oh, 100%.
	And I never would have said anything else.
	I mean, look, my toolkit is a rational toolkit, but I am not rationality first.
	I am human first.
	And the fact is, all of the things you're pointing to are essential pieces of the package that got us to this moment in history.
	I wouldn't dismiss them.
	And, you know, I freely talk in terms of miracles.
	I refer to a god that I do not believe is a literal creature that would be recognizable to us.
	But I don't hesitate to use the metaphor because I think it's very powerful, right?
	So I'm comfortable with the idea that the proper way to bring everybody on board with the story that we can rationally deduce must be the way forward is not a rational It's not going to work.
	For one thing, it's just going to strike everyone as too cold to be meaningful.
	So, yes, the problem, though, is that when you say, OK, we have all of these traditions and they contain some sort of metaphysics that is fundamentally about the divine.
	Right?
	There is a temptation to just simply retreat to these belief systems.
	And here's the problem.
	Those belief systems evolved.
	They are compendiums of wisdom.
	Much of that wisdom is decent and honorable.
	Some of it is not.
	If you look carefully at Bibles, you will often find, especially the farther back you go, the more dominated by lineage against lineage violence that they are, you will find perfectly immoral things spelled out very clearly in these texts.
	So we can't reactivate that part.
	You could make the argument that the purpose then should be to select the stuff that we should honor and, you know, downregulate the stuff that's no good.
	But there's a more fundamental problem.
	Because those belief systems evolved, They are adapted to the environments in which they came about.
	We don't live in those environments.
	None of us do.
	Any ancient tradition is now placing those who adhere to it in a kind of limbo where our traditions are not a good match for the problems of modernity.
	So we have to, to the extent that there is a fundamental human need to think of these things in terms of something deeply spiritual, it can't be some version that we reboot from ancient history.
	It has to be.
	It can borrow from those things, but it's going to have to involve a good deal of new material.
	And the fact is, you can't, we can't even spell it out.
	Selection is going to have to refine it.
	You're shaking your head.
	I was just working out something.
	Although the accoutrements are doubtlessly cultural, what else would they be?
	I mean, it would be odd if they weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic or Arabic, given, you know, and that they didn't bear reference to shepherds and goat herds and the things that were sort of prevalent in that time.
	What interests me, I suppose, Brett, And in particular where there seems to be an invitation to examine the relationship between that which is apparently external and that which is apparently internal.
	The fact that there are metaphors and nomenclature that you would anticipate being localized to conjecture otherwise would be pointless and implausible.
	What I feel We're perhaps moving towards together is that when this becomes, you know, when I consider evolution to be kind of linear, and I suppose one would because it's generational, like, you know, it would be sort of split in and diverse and invisible.
	And I'm sure there are all sorts of patterns that you're aware of that I can't even begin to conceive of.
	One of the things I'm noting is that Customised and customary traditions that were necessarily local because of the way the world was then are now being not only applied to a different time, and that's an interesting idea because what does that mean?
	Culture has evolved, things have moved forward, have they regressed?
	Are the false markers of technology and medicine being used to present an idea of progress that perhaps is not absolutely true?
	Aren't many of the problems we're experiencing now from diet to screen time the result of the fact that we're fundamentally similar to the pre-agricultural beast that we once were?
	Certainly from a biological perspective, if you dumped me 10,000 years ago, mightn't I adapt?
	So what I'm saying is, These ideas don't work.
	The areas where we find challenges, it seems, in one way, I'm inviting us to consider it, is when you globalise it, and when you try and advocate for a kind of a unipolar position, when you say that the world should be Islamic, or the world should be Judaic, or the world should be Christian, or the world should be secular, it becomes tense, and taut, and fraught, or the world should be Zen, or the world should be Tao.
	Isn't it that This position of subsidiarity has to be deployed.
	And in order to do that, could it not be argued that within all of these traditions that it
	could be argued, but certainly it should not be imposed, that there are very peculiar local
	customs and beliefs that seem somewhat out of step with our sort of what you're posing
	as a sort of a Western ideal for all its problems has many successes, which in a way is what
	we're criticizing for those biblical traditions.
	They've got some great ideas and wisdom traditions, but they've also got throw someone off a tower
	or throw stones or all of that stuff that we point out, the violence and brutality and madness.
	What I'm saying is that unless the real problem is an attempt to centralize authority to a
	degree that whatever it is, even if you just didn't some weird Icelandic thing that you
	wouldn't recognize as a religion or new emergent progressive gender identity type of
	Like, unless we get to a point where it's like, what is it that's driving this tendency to centralise and coalesce power?
	Why is that happening?
	It's obviously creating conflict.
	And I sense in it, and I wonder if this maps onto your understanding of evolution, that they're trying to resist the opposite.
	But what the technology and communication miracle is doing is saying, hey, do you know what?
	Actually, we could organize things really differently now.
	You can have loads of independent media.
	You could have loads of independent dissenting voices.
	People could start opting out.
	You could live in England and just go, hey, we're not English anymore.
	We're going to belong to this subsidiarity.
	We're going to run our community like this.
	Yeah, we're in the middle of Delaware, and we're not paying taxes anymore.
	We're going to run our community like this.
	So a, like, pan trans Amish revolution of everyone just opting out of, like, travelers and gypsies here in our country.
	We're not paying taxes.
	We're out.
	But that could happen sort of en masse as people start to recognize that the central hegemonic forces are not beneficial.
	So even though there are things in religions as there are in the Western tradition that are at odds with the principles that one might encourage and present as defining, it's Wouldn't matter, would it, if there wasn't this sort of idea that we're all progressing together and the general trajectory of that progression is one centralised set of interests that are able to dominate and that you can observe because you saw in the pandemic where all the money went.
	You know where it is.
	We know what strike that is.
	So I know I said a lot there, but I'd love to know what you think about it all.
	I can't do it all, but I do think I get the central thread of what you're asking.
	And I absolutely agree with you.
	If COVID didn't scare you about the idea of centralization, then you didn't understand what happened.
	So believe me, nobody's more terrified about the centralizing idea.
	It is not synonymous with what I'm saying about the West.
	And here's the point.
	We've got two kinds of people on Earth today.
	We've got those who are basically up for the idea that we should get along, right?
	Now, that's not a competition-free view of the world.
	That is, hey, let's cooperate to compete.
	Let's do this without violence, and let's not rig the world in favor of people who happen to carry our genes, which, frankly, we shouldn't care about at all.
	So, I'm not arguing that The West should impose itself on everybody.
	I'm arguing that we have a de facto problem, which is that some of us are on board.
	And this cuts through, I think, every nation.
	It cuts through every population that I'm aware of.
	That there are some people who are on board for the idea of, you know, swords into plowshares and Not using violence between lineages to settle stuff.
	And there are those who aren't, who see the world in terms of my people need to dislodge other people in order to continue.
	And the world is going to have to settle on this superior way of being.
	And I mean superior by virtue of the fact that it takes all of the things that we would describe as honorable values and it augments them.
	That does not mean that people have to pick the same system that we have to live under
	some globalized Western system.
	It means that we all have to embrace the basic idea of getting along.
	Now, in a world where we had embraced the basic idea of getting along, many things are
	possible and I agree with you about the beauty of subsidiarity.
	It does not fall into the trap of saying, hey, the answer to everything is decentralization, because it isn't.
	Who's going to protect the oceans?
	The oceans are important.
	Somebody has to protect them.
	They're not inside of any nation.
	They can't be a no man's land where we, you know, strip them of their species.
	And that is what we're doing.
	So The oceans are going to have to be governed by agreement from all of the parties that have an interest in the oceans continuing.
	And there is also, I will say, again, I'm a rational guy.
	That may be a defect, right?
	This might be better done through a spiritual portrayal.
	But nonetheless, I'm going to use the tools that I've got.
	And the way to do this is to illustrate the advantages that come to people by embracing these sometimes counterintuitive principles.
	And then the trick is to figure out how to stabilize a world so that the ebb and flow, as you point out, the natural tendency, boom and bust, does not trigger us to fall back into that violence.
	And this is the hard part.
	Because, we don't have a trick.
	We have never found a trick to make growth consistent.
	We've tried, and it doesn't work.
	Sometimes we can stave off a disaster, but then when the disaster happens, it's even bigger.
	So, I do think, and Heather and I outline this in our book, the Maya appear to suggest a mechanism by which such things might be done.
	I don't know how much exploring in Maya territory you've done. Any? None? None.
	Do you mean the Mayan folk? Yeah, the Mayan folk. The Mayan people. The Yucatan, right?
	This is a culture that lasted... Pyramids, calendars... Bingo.
	Those are the ones, right?
	This is a culture... A bit of human sacrifice, I'm sensing.
	They weren't perfect.
	You know, this is a culture that lasted 3,000 years.
	This is a culture that measured time in units of 400 years.
	The Bakhtun, right?
	400 year periods.
	That's very long-term thinking.
	This is a culture that had figured out mathematics to the level that they actually had a concept of zero, which the Greeks did not have.
	Okay?
	This was a sophisticated culture.
	They could tell you where in the sky Venus was going to be.
	Not an easy thing to predict.
	They were farming intensively on very fragile soils, and they were doing it with chemical augmentation.
	They had a system of enriching the soil, and this allowed this culture to go on for three millennia.
	Now, they also, interestingly, failed before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
	So we know it's not even as if we can say that this was an indefinitely long-lived culture, because it wasn't, right?
	It had its limits, but 3,000 years is a pretty good run.
	Yeah.
	So, what were they doing?
	Well, one thing they were doing, those temples that you know of, we think of them the same way we think of, you know, Egyptian pyramids.
	That's not what they were.
	These were like layers of an onion.
	Those temple complexes, and really I encourage you You should see these things, and you should go to some of them that are not well known, some of them that are still somewhat embedded in the juggle, and walk on these complexes.
	You know, you've got a temple that you see because it sticks out of the canopy, but it's on some giant platform with other structures.
	It's incredible.
	And they grow with time.
	That is to say, if, you know, the archaeologists have gone in and they find layer after layer, these things were built up over the course of hundreds of years.
	What that implies is that this was a culture that had surplus, and what they were doing with the surplus was they were investing it in these public monuments, right?
	They were investing it also in an elaborate system of roads, right?
	Stone roads that went between these city-states, through the jungle.
	So, if you do that, if you commit yourself to taking surplus and putting it into public architecture, One thing you are not doing is allowing your population to grow in proportion to the amount of food available.
	And the problem with letting your population grow, which is naturally what evolution will do to you, if you have a surplus, your population will grow until you don't have a surplus.
	Okay?
	That's part of where the boom and bust comes from.
	If we've got a surplus, we're going to burn it, and then we won't have one, and then we got to find another.
	So, if instead of allowing that to happen, if instead of allowing, you know, suppose you have 10 good agricultural years in a row because the weather's been hospitable.
	Right?
	Well, then your population would tend to grow.
	And then as soon as you have ten bad years in a row, you're going to have violence because you're not going to have enough food to go around.
	And when people don't have enough food to go around, they do the natural thing, which is they try to get it for themselves and their family.
	But if you invest in the years that are really good in the growth of this, you know, if you make a public investment of these giant structures, which Creates work for people it creates an impression that you are part of something very durable much more durable than you are Then in the bad years, you don't have to build them up and nobody has to starve so You can imagine from a Western perspective that if we were to take an enlightened view of the relationship between you know market forces and our well-being and we were to optimize for something like our resistance to violence
	That we could invest in something that was publicly available, that enriched us as a people, and in bad times we could invest less or nothing in it, and we would not have to resort to any of these other mechanisms.
	Right?
	That does suggest that the Maya, this long-lived population, had a means for Basically flattening out those boom and bust cycles, which would have been agricultural in their case, in a way that would have reduced violence.
	Probably why they lasted 3,000 years.
	What are you proposing that the model was?
	Are you saying that it was somehow preservation, or are you saying like sort of labour forces?
	Are you saying it's population control?
	What are you suggesting there?
	Yeah, I'm sugge... I mean, we don't know.
	We actually know more about the Maya than any of the other New World cultures because they also, among other great accomplishments, had a written language.
	It's a weird impulse.
	inscribed it in stone, which allows us to have seen it now.
	Unfortunately, they didn't just inscribe it in stone and the Spaniards burned all but
	one of the texts that was written on other materials.
	But it's a weird impulse.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's actually a very natural and still happening.
	Yeah.
	So I have monuments.
	But I think what must have happened is that they had a religious story in which the gods
	undoubtedly wanted them to build up these temples.
	that those stories, you know, evolved.
	And the reason that they stuck and were elaborated was because they insulated these populations from the natural boom and bust violence cycles that they would otherwise have faced.
	Right.
	And that's that's all of our story.
	Right.
	All of our traditions are Metaphorical wisdom.
	Sometimes that wisdom is immoral, right?
	It tells you to go after your enemies.
	It tells you to engage in perfectly horrifying behavior, to enslave other people, for example, right?
	We can't bring that stuff into the present.
	That stuff doesn't belong here.
	But these things were metaphorical portfolios of beliefs that if you followed them, you did well.
	And they have all, you know, the example I often use for metaphorical truth.
	Is in the Old Testament you will find that the deity does not want you shitting in camp.
	He's disgusted by this and you don't want to piss him off so you don't do it, right?
	That is a metaphorical belief that gets you to behave as if you understand the germ theory of disease more than 2,000 years before anybody knew what a germ was, right?
	So that's powerful stuff.
	This is life-saving beliefs encoded in a way that's Stay free!
	and intuitive and easy to transmit to the next generation.
	That's what all of those traditions are.
	And I'm not trying to burst anybody's bubble about them.
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