USAID has a lot of money, and it seems to be using it to fund a bunch of things that don't make sense in light of our constitutional structure. Joe Rogan takes a look at it, and is shocked at how much money USAID has been funneling around the world.
00:00:19.000The last time you were here, we were really worried about what was going to happen.
00:00:24.000And now it seems like we're in a completely different timeline.
00:00:26.000Yeah, 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.
00:00:42.000Yeah, probably wouldn't be so good for business.
00:00:45.000They probably would have cracked down.
00:00:57.000This USAID thing that's going on, Mike Benz has been on that like a pit bull, and I've been following him on X, and he's going to come back on here and kind of explain everything.
00:01:08.000He explained it the last time he was here, and I don't think I really grasped it until Elon's...
00:01:30.000You know, I listen to all kinds of different stuff.
00:01:32.000And it was like I was listening to a different world.
00:01:34.000Like they weren't even talking about all this corruption and all this obvious buying of influence Instead they were talking about aid overseas and how people are gonna starve and Mike.
00:01:46.000It's mind-boggling and there's also I have to say I'm just...
00:01:53.000I'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.
00:02:12.000It's very strange that the media is ignoring it, especially the left-wing media.
00:02:15.000It's just too big of a win for the right, and so they're just ignoring it.
00:02:19.000And then they're just highlighting the good things that USA did, which I'm sure it probably did, probably had to do some good things to at least justify its existence.
00:02:35.000Obviously, 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.
00:02:45.000And I'm, you know, I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us.
00:02:54.000But seeing that structure broken up is...
00:03:01.000They gave $27 million to the George Soros prosecutor fund.
00:03:06.000So our own government is funding this left-wing lunatic who is hiring the most insane prosecutors who are letting people out of jail.
00:03:19.000And 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.
00:03:38.000And I don't know what era we currently live in.
00:03:42.000Obviously, there's a lot that's confusing about what the Trump administration is up to, but...
00:03:47.000I don't think any reasonable person could be unhappy that we are exiting that era.
00:03:53.000I'm going to read off some of the things that this guy Ken Akota the Great on Twitter listed.
00:04:01.000USAID, $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.
00:04:46.000I mean, some of this stuff is really, really crazy.
00:04:51.000Well, yes, and 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.
00:05:04.000So, you know, seeing that structure laid bare is...
00:05:10.000It almost feels like it can't be real.
00:05:13.000It can't have been this close to the surface, and yet here we are.
00:06:40.000But I have to say, as much as this is shocking, I wasn't surprised.
00:06:46.000I thought that effectively our entire system had been turned into a racket and that we were basically being fed a cover story from it.
00:06:56.000And it's weird to now have the evidence of this.
00:07:01.000But 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.
00:07:17.000And that that really is what's been going on for most of our adult lives.
00:07:22.000And it's also important to know that this progressive left-leaning, like radical left arm of the government, of the country, was manufactured.
00:08:01.000The cover story, that what we were up to was righting past wrongs, was so pernicious and pervasive that it was hard to get our footing to challenge it.
00:08:15.000But it shouldn't really be surprising that that movement wasn't organic.
00:10:10.000He 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.
00:10:15.000They haven't even got to the medical stuff.
00:10:17.000There's so much they haven't even tapped into where they think the real motherlode of fraud is.
00:10:22.000Yes, and I must say that there is 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 which is that the justifiable anger at discovering what it is that we've been dragged into as a nation In other words, at the moment, I'm cheering for the wrecking ball.
00:11:20.000Some of them are on the way to be making.
00:11:22.000They've built 61 at 15 stations since mid-August or through mid-August.
00:11:26.00014,900 more are currently in some stage of development.
00:11:29.000But 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.
00:12:33.000Well, and, you know, it's an arms race.
00:12:35.000you know how can pharma cloak the money that it's giving so that there's plausible deniability at the point that that elizabeth warren is confronted or or bernie sanders and it was hilarious only one point five billion Only 1.5 million out of 200 million.
00:14:11.000That this was all kind of hidden until they started using software to try to figure out and map out where all the influence goes.
00:14:19.000And the crazy thing about the NGOs, and this is one of the things that Mike Benz has gone so deep into, it's essentially like they contribute to the Democratic Party, the government pays them.
00:14:29.000It's all this weird sort of circular money transfer thing that's out in the open.
00:15:00.000So fractal technology maps previously hidden connections between 55,000 liberal NGOs revealing how tax dollars allegedly flowed through major institutions like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley to groups like the Chinese Progressive Association.
00:15:13.000This breakthrough tracking system can now monitor every dollar going to every NGO, exposing intricate funding webs that traditional tech couldn't detect.
00:15:22.000So, an example, Black Voters Matter Fund's $4 million distribution network was invisible until quantum mapping revealed dozens of subsidiary organizations.
00:15:32.000The unprecedented mapping reveals a previously hidden web of financial relationships.
00:15:38.000And that's what it's really all about.
00:15:41.000The 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.
00:15:59.000Some 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.
00:16:09.000And so I can't look at a map like that and say what I would expect if the system was healthy.
00:16:18.000I think the system was a racket from one end to the other.
00:16:20.000And I've been saying that we've been living in the era of malignant governance where there's basically no element of this.
00:16:26.000You couldn't turn off and make us better.
00:16:29.000But we have to be suspicious also of our understanding of how a properly functioning system would graph.
00:16:38.000In something like that, so that we don't overrun the train station when we get there.
00:16:46.000And 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.
00:17:05.000Some advantages in the competition for federal contracts.
00:17:08.000And all of the profits go to Alaska Natives.
00:17:12.000And 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.
00:17:31.000The 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.
00:17:45.000Well, 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.
00:18:04.000But because people are in a mood to dismantle all of this left-wing solution-making corruption...
00:18:14.000These megacorporations are finding it easy to target the 8A program and they are persuading members of Congress that it doesn't belong.
00:18:23.000And 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.
00:19:06.000We bought it for 50 bucks from the Russians 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.
00:19:32.000It'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.
00:19:49.000And I don't know how many stories there are like that, but we need to be...
00:19:54.000Be 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.
00:20:22.000Helps small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals to compete for federal contracts, provides training and technical assistance to help businesses compete, categorizes eligible businesses as veteran-owned, women-owned, minority-owned, or owned by a person with disabilities.
00:20:39.000Certification does not guarantee contract awards, but it can help businesses pursue new opportunities.
00:21:58.000So 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.
00:22:08.000And that's going to be a delicate balance.
00:22:10.000So 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...
00:22:23.000Discussions where we actually have to do a cost-benefit analysis on the programs that are targeted.
00:22:39.000If 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.
00:22:57.000Because I think we both agree that there's a lot of good.
00:23:02.000In taking taxes and providing social safety nets, providing food for poor people and homeless people, helping people, welfare.
00:23:14.000Like, to not have people starving on your fucking streets.
00:23:17.000Like, all that stuff is, like, we're gonna have a community, which is essentially what a country's supposed to be, an enormous community.
00:23:23.000We have to support the members of our community.
00:23:25.000We 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.
00:23:35.000Well, you may remember, years ago, I used to say that...
00:23:39.000I want to live in a country so good that I get to be a conservative.
00:24:16.000And I want a system in which lazy people don't have money to spend and are motivated to become unlazy.
00:24:25.000I don't want people profiting from destroying opportunities that belong to other people.
00:24:31.000But if we had a system that was like that and everybody had the tools to utilize it, then we should want as little intervention as possible.
00:25:50.000Okay, we're going to set up bases there.
00:25:53.000And 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.
00:26:01.000Well, I am not a fan of Netanyahu's, as you probably know.
00:27:23.000It's amazing to watch all these left-wing people suddenly.
00:27:27.000Bernie 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.
00:28:52.000And 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.
00:29:33.000Get in on the action of the big game and UFC 312 at DraftKings Sportsbook, the official sports betting partner of the UFC. The men's middleweight and women's strawweight titles will be on the line in the co-main events of UFC 312. And of course, pro football is crowning a champion at the big game.
00:30:01.000If you're new to DraftKings, listen up.
00:30:04.000New customers can bet $5 to get $200 in bonus bets instantly.
00:30:10.000Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app now and use the code ROGAN. That's code ROGAN for new customers to get $200 in bonus bets when you bet just $5.
00:30:19.000It's a big weekend only on DraftKings.
00:31:14.000Because if it was just the only way you could win was you had to do for the will of the people.
00:31:19.000You had to literally do things that were better for the people.
00:31:23.000The people realize you're doing a great job and they keep electing you.
00:31:26.000Well, let's be honest about what the conservatives had right from the get-go.
00:31:32.000There are problems that only competition solves.
00:31:37.000There are other problems that competition in something like a market is not well positioned to solve, but there's certain problems that there's just there's no second best.
00:31:47.000And so when we talk about, well, you know, what are we going to do for fact checking?
00:31:51.000We're going to abandon the idea of fact checking.
00:31:54.000What 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 outcompete those who do a worse job. independent journalist sector in which people who spot the story So that over time, what we get is journalism that you can't fool.
00:32:18.000And that it reveals to us which government programs actually work.
00:32:22.000Even if they don't sound reasonable at first glance, here's what's really going on behind the scenes in this program.
00:32:38.000My 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.
00:32:58.000That their corruption was immediately apparent.
00:33:25.000And now to see that same guy going after Bobby Kennedy.
00:33:30.000And, you know, the feeble excuse, well, what if Bobby Kennedy becomes the head of HHS and people don't have access to prescription drugs?
00:33:41.000And 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.
00:33:51.000Do 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?
00:34:03.000So I'm not arguing that there aren't good pharmaceuticals.
00:35:18.000Yes, and that is the tip of the iceberg.
00:35:21.000We 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.
00:35:43.000The whole system is missing in action.
00:35:57.000Everything that is supposed to evaluate something like safety or efficacy or analyze net effects, anything like that, has been captured by the PR wing.
00:36:13.000And so the consumer is in no position to navigate a world like that.
00:36:20.000I mean, and we know that this encompasses everything.
00:36:24.000You know, how many people's doctors are pharma-skeptical?
00:36:54.000Like, how many doctors lost their licenses because they were trying to prescribe ivermectin to people who had COVID? Yeah, almost all of the doctors who were any good found themselves chased out of a job or with jeopardy to their license or slandered in the media.
00:37:46.000Well, I find that bad, but at least I know how to interpret that.
00:37:50.000What 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.
00:38:33.000Your doctor needs unusually high levels of integrity and what we've seen is unusually low levels.
00:38:37.000And the same thing with social media influencers, as you called them.
00:38:43.000Anybody 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.
00:38:58.000I 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.
00:39:25.000So what I really want are people who had a good track record and who know what mistakes they made and know how not to make them in the future.
00:39:34.000Those are the people that we should be paying attention to.
00:39:41.000It's fun because things are actually happening, which is very different than most of the time when people get elected.
00:39:47.000Most of the time when people get elected, they claim all these things when they're running for president.
00:39:51.000Then they get into office and not much changes.
00:39:54.000And in fact, a lot of what they campaigned on, they don't practice at all.
00:40:00.000Like a great example is the Obama administration.
00:40:03.000The 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.
00:40:16.000Well, I think what we have seen over our you and I are about the same age.
00:40:21.000What we have seen over our entire lifetime is that elections can change the jerseys, but they just swap.
00:40:31.000You know, who's in power and who's out of power?
00:40:34.000Well, the point is the system is in power and, you know, the people in the roles to deliver the speeches change, but they're just basically trading off.
00:40:43.000And so I have the sense that you and I are now watching the first the outcome of the first genuine election since 1963.
00:40:56.000At 63, when they assassinated Kennedy, that was the last time we had a real president.
00:41:00.000It was an actual person who was trying to change things and put things in a position where he felt it was beneficial to the entire country.
00:41:17.000One 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.
00:41:25.000And 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 that has gotten so entrenched that rooting it out takes, frankly, an extraordinary, in every sense of the And an extraordinary team.
00:41:51.000Imagine he's trying to do Doge without Elon.
00:41:54.000Well, 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.
00:42:11.000We perceive that this was a different person than the first administration's Trump, that he had matured and he had been he had been forged by, you know, all of the lawfare that had been deployed against him and that it had been good for him.
00:42:29.000And 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.
00:42:44.000Would have been possible if he had won and been inaugurated in 2020. I think you're right.
00:42:50.000I think also the public witness supported it.
00:42:52.000If they didn't see four years of the Biden administration, how crazy everything was.
00:42:56.000And then having gone through COVID and watching the economy collapsed and watching, you know, hurricanes coming.
00:43:01.000He's like, the most important thing for a hurricane is to get vaccinated.
00:43:57.000I 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.
00:44:10.000Look, I know this to be true because, you know, I tried to spark Unity 2020 and make it work.
00:44:24.000Explain that to people, because one thing, 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, and like, that's dangerous.
00:44:42.000It's dangerous, and they even lied about us.
00:44:45.000They said that we were engaged in inauthentic behavior.
00:44:48.000Basically, they accused us of using bots, which we didn't.
00:44:53.000So anyway, that's the world we were in in 2020. And headed to a more controlling world.
00:46:01.000And now with Tulsi, I think that's huge as well.
00:46:04.000I think, you know, when Elon took over Doge, that was like the final Avenger.
00:46:11.000Like, 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.
00:46:48.000Each of these people, you know, Kennedy, Musk, Tulsi, they knew.
00:46:53.000That 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?
00:47:04.000You know that you're taking risks for something that matters more than you.
00:47:09.000And, you know, to watch Elon do it, I think also was just remarkable because, of course, in Elon's position, he could have done, you know, what Zuckerberg does.
00:47:33.000He actually had the courage of his convictions.
00:47:37.000And A, as many people have noted, his liberation of X set the stage for this election to even happen.
00:47:46.000That 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.
00:47:55.000And even if most people weren't on X, it was enough that their narrative engine just didn't work.
00:48:01.000And if you look at a viral post on X, a viral post about something that's very important that has to do with USAID, you will see 7 million, 8 million views, 10 million views.
00:48:14.000There is nothing equivalent like that to mainstream media.
00:48:39.000So the actual amount of the information that gets out is far more than it would have ever happened without Elon taking over Twitter.
00:48:47.000It's probably changed the course of our civilization in a way that nothing else could have done.
00:48:53.000Yes, and I think it's a little bit deceptive because its size doesn't quite explain its impact.
00:49:00.000But it's a little bit like the higher reasoning centers of the brain.
00:49:06.000Like there's a collective consciousness in which we figure out what we think is true.
00:49:11.000And it's been downstream of this amazing propaganda engine.
00:49:16.000Well, we're now learning to spot the propaganda and to understand what it really means and to figure out what it's cloaking.
00:49:23.000And a lot of that is happening on Twitter because it can.
00:49:27.000And it's actually forcing, you know, Facebook to come around, right?
00:49:32.000Which, 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.
00:49:46.000But once you have won, any social media platform that doesn't allow you to speak freely is at a competitive disadvantage.
00:49:53.000And so, you know, Elon freeing X actually liberated the others and they're beginning to move in the right direction, which, frankly, is part of why this era just feels different.
00:50:31.000The 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.
00:52:11.000There'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.
00:52:24.000That would not be shocking if there was something to cover.
00:52:28.000You 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.
00:52:39.000It feels like to me that 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.
00:52:52.000I 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 I would come up with the dumbest fucking stories and put them in binders and leave them on desks and hope that And the more dumb shit they leak, the more the actual reality of what we possess.
00:53:32.000What I would do, I would make up some...
00:53:36.000Crazy 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.
00:54:07.000I would say everything as wacky and crazy as possible so I could keep flying around these gravity propulsion vehicles that we've developed.
00:54:16.000Well, I must tell you, I'm skeptical that those vehicles are vehicles.
00:54:27.000But what if you could monitor them on, if you see them on radar, if they're visual, they're seeing them going into the water?
00:54:35.000I'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.
00:55:01.000But 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.
00:55:15.000But why would that be the case if it operates on a gravity propulsion system that essentially bends space around it?
00:55:21.000And instead of creating a sonic boom, because it's flying through the air, it's not flying through the air, it's displacing space.
00:55:28.000Well, I don't even know what displacing space means.
00:55:31.000I don't know what a gravity propulsion system means.
00:56:07.000But if it's not really displacing the air around it, and if this is what allows it to go through the water as well with extreme speed.
00:56:16.000So one of the crazier things that they've monitored is something moving underwater that's huge, like the size of a couple of football fields at 500 knots.
00:56:30.000There'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.
00:56:45.000The water has to be displaced, and water is...
00:56:50.000It's 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.
00:58:09.000There seems to be a certain amount of experimentation with particles being released from aircraft for some reason.
00:58:17.000I would assume and have long assumed that there is experimentation with altering the albedo of the Earth so it reflects more light back into space.
00:58:34.000And I don't think, you know, one of the things that we, many of us came to understand during COVID about proposals is that very often the proposal comes after the experiments have already begun.
00:59:01.000You have no right to alter the Earth's atmosphere without us at least having a global public discussion about the consequences.
00:59:08.000I believe this is an informed consent violation and that I take those things very seriously.
00:59:14.000Those 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.
01:01:16.000So a 3D display in midair using laser plasma technology.
01:01:21.000So 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.
01:01:30.000And imagine that you saw that outside.
01:01:43.000And 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.
01:01:54.000And I've thought a lot about rainbows.
01:02:32.000Building a model of stuff, and if you give it the wrong cues, it'll totally misunderstand the distance that it's looking at, to the extent that a rainbow is at a distance, right?
01:02:44.000Right, especially when you take into consideration a lot of these UFOs are in night skies.
01:02:54.000So if 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 if person A was standing in location X and they saw a craft moving at what appeared to be 200 miles an And if we go and we ask people who were standing in those locations, did they see it at all?
01:03:22.000Because if they didn't, then maybe the thing was inches away from the person being projected locally.
01:03:28.000And they only felt like they saw something at a great distance.
01:03:32.000So 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?
01:03:49.000Well, I'm going to share credit with Ben Davidson for this.
01:03:55.000The basic point is PSYOP until proven otherwise.
01:03:58.000And 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...
01:04:23.000Every possibility that there are sort of layers of awareness and at the bottom layer there may not be anything alien at all.
01:04:38.000But it may be that people fairly close to the center have been shown something.
01:04:45.000I mean I don't understand what the purpose of any of this stuff is.
01:04:47.000Either 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.
01:05:21.000Even though there's no reason to be in the closet in 2025, there's a lot of people that are still in the closet.
01:05:25.000And 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.
01:05:32.000So that's just a person with social consequences.
01:05:51.000Now 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.
01:05:57.000So, like, if that's the case, then I understand why you would continue for your own personal benefit, just for your own personal protection.
01:06:04.000Your own personal interest to keep things secret from the American people.
01:06:08.000Then there's also the attitude that government does have.
01:06:11.000There's the infantilization of our people by the government.
01:06:16.000They decide that malinformation is a thing.
01:06:22.000So what that is is information that's true, but it could fuck you up.
01:06:38.000Now, 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?
01:06:51.000That we have been experiencing for decades and they've been lying about.
01:06:56.000Well, as long as we're just sort of fantasizing about wild stuff here.
01:06:59.000Imagine 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.
01:07:10.000And then she was only hours or at most days away from being confirmed by the Senate.
01:07:18.000Then 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.
01:07:29.000Maybe we should edit that part out so she gets confirmed.
01:07:45.000Also, we've got Elon on a separate track.
01:07:48.000He's going through the books and finding all of the nonsense.
01:07:53.000And 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.
01:08:10.000But it's also, I always assume that when something hits the zeitgeist and is like prominently out in the newspapers and media and websites, I always assume that they're covering something else and that this thing is the big distraction.
01:08:24.000And that's what I was thinking while the UFO thing was happening over New Jersey.
01:08:29.000I was like, okay, what are they distracting from?
01:08:56.000So there is the question of what they were trying to distract us from if that was their purpose.
01:09:00.000But I also find this is again become a kind of theme in my life.
01:09:06.000This is also a violation of informed consent.
01:09:09.000If 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.
01:09:33.000And then just keeping everybody in the dark for weeks where people were really panicking.
01:09:37.000I, you know, one doesn't know until you see this stuff enacted where it's going to lead.
01:09:46.000But my sense is I don't want my government lying to me ever again with the excuse that it's for my own good.
01:09:55.000Trevor Burrus: Is it possible to – Obama passed that law in – was it 2012 that allowed the government to use propaganda on its own citizens?
01:10:25.000So they authorized the use of propaganda on American citizens.
01:10:28.000So 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, national security.
01:10:40.000Well, that is, in fact, exactly what we have discovered.
01:10:43.000And why it was so hard to convince people of this before the evidence for it emerged, I don't know.
01:10:52.000But all you needed to realize was that some rogue element...
01:10:58.000had 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.
01:11:13.000And of course, you would get an entrenched cabal a ball 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.
01:11:36.000So the argument against that is not the argument we're 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.
01:11:49.000And that there is some sort of a psychological game that's going on.
01:11:53.000There's a propaganda game that's going on with all countries.
01:11:56.000As well as, you know, they're doing it against us.
01:12:02.000We need to be sophisticated in how we employ these things.
01:12:05.000Otherwise, we're going to lose very important parts of the world.
01:12:09.000It's key to the national security of the United States.
01:12:11.000We have to have things like that in place.
01:12:14.000But 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 is doing.
01:12:23.000That's when things get really screwy, right?
01:12:25.000Well, yes, but I also am not sure that I buy the international rationale either.
01:12:32.000And I think as much as I understand it.
01:12:35.000We have to be mature about what's possible in the world and what implications it has for the republic.
01:12:44.000On 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?
01:12:57.000Further, I do think that there's a kind of end state for The governance structures of Earth.
01:13:05.000That 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 that view of the West is superior.
01:13:31.000And it is also contagious that it makes for a safer, more rewarding, fairer, less warlike system.
01:13:44.000And therefore, there's a very good reason for people to want to adopt it.
01:13:48.000That sounds great though, but 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?
01:14:02.000Well, I'm not arguing that you just go and live your values.
01:14:07.000What I'm arguing is that those values are superior.
01:14:12.000That they are sticky and contagious when they take hold.
01:14:15.000And 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.
01:14:26.000Anytime you decide you have a right to do something else, you're dragging us on to a slippery slope.
01:14:33.000You will disrupt other people's self-determination.
01:14:38.000And it will eventually come home and be done to us.
01:14:43.000So, 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?
01:15:08.000How much are you paying attention to DeepSeek?
01:15:10.000And the AI competition that's going on right now?
01:15:14.000I am loosely paying attention to the AI competition.
01:15:19.000I don't think there's anything we can do to regulate AI competition that doesn't make matters worse.
01:15:25.000I'm very concerned about the outgrowth of this transformative technology.
01:15:32.000I think even the most mundane disruptions that will come from it, 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.
01:15:54.000I used to think the approach was universal basic income, but now I'm conflicted because now I just take into account human nature.
01:16:02.000Unfortunately, I don't think it's good for people to just give them free money, even though you need to.
01:16:08.000Even though you need to, I think it's ultimately bad for them to be dependent upon it.
01:16:12.000And 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.
01:16:25.000And what incentives do they have to break free from that system?
01:16:29.000And do they just decide to live inside the means of whatever that is forever?
01:16:33.000And does that limit the growth and potential that those people possess?
01:16:37.000Because people really don't accomplish anything.
01:16:40.000Unless they're driven or unless they have to, right?
01:17:00.000Very difficult to navigate that water.
01:17:04.000So what would we do to incentivize people to do things?
01:17:10.000Like, to have this healthy, thriving, artistic, creative, innovative economy that we have right now.
01:17:18.000Like, how does that continue if so many people are displaced from the job market?
01:17:23.000Or is there a way where you can say, you know what, we are so concerned about basic...
01:17:29.000Goods, needs, food, shelter, things like that.
01:17:33.000If 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.
01:19:16.000Well, let's talk about the ultimate source of this problem.
01:19:21.000Our ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, even our farming ancestors, lived in a world where the world itself provided the incentive structure.
01:19:35.000If you didn't work hard enough as a hunter-gatherer, it manifested as hunger and jeopardy.
01:19:43.000So people were naturally incentivized to invest in the right kind of stuff.
01:19:47.000And the right kind of stuff is hard work in some cases where, you know, you pursue the materials that make your hut better, that procure more food for your family.
01:19:58.000Or 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.
01:20:40.000For example, it rewards gambling, it rewards interference, competition, all sorts of stuff.
01:20:47.000You know, destroying wealth is actually a big part of our economy.
01:20:50.000And the way the mythology of free market capitalism works, you're getting paid for producing stuff that enhances us all.
01:21:00.000But what fraction of the economy is actually dedicated to activities that destroy wealth?
01:21:07.000You know, the production of porn, for example.
01:21:10.000In my opinion, that is highly likely to destroy vastly more wealth than it produces.
01:21:17.000But it's a very rich industry for a reason.
01:21:20.000So what I'm getting at is we have a new problem with the AI component.
01:21:28.000Maybe 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.
01:21:36.000We 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.
01:21:50.000Whatever 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.
01:22:07.000So 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.
01:22:24.000And 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...
01:22:32.000You can source information from anywhere.
01:22:35.000What kinds of opportunities is that going to create?
01:22:38.000And can we incentivize people to figure out what those opportunities are?
01:22:43.000So the AI version is the same problem, but at a different order of magnitude.
01:22:50.000So 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
01:23:20.000end 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.
01:23:34.000Well, maybe it starts with the education system.
01:23:37.000Maybe we have to incentivize people to pursue their dreams instead of just to try to find a job.
01:23:41.000Because this is the way the education system is scheduled now or is set up now.
01:23:48.000It's basically you go back to the Rockefellers.
01:23:51.000You're basically trying to make factory workers.
01:23:53.000You're trying to make people that obey.
01:23:54.000The earlier you can get them into school, the better, because the more you can indoctrinate them into the way the system works.
01:24:19.000And 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.
01:24:42.000But the education system has been garbage.
01:24:46.000My 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.
01:24:59.000It's not that there's something good about having a learning disability, but if it breaks your relationship to school so school has...
01:25:05.000Less of an easy time programming you to be a cog, and you at least retain the potential to be something other than a cog.
01:25:12.000I don't think I had a learning disability, but I was a latchkey kid, right?
01:25:18.000So 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.
01:25:23.000And also, I had a lot of energy, and it was very difficult for me to pay attention to boring things by uninspired teachers.
01:25:32.000But then again, every now and then I'd have an inspired teacher and I'd go, okay, maybe I'm not stupid.
01:25:55.000And this is 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.
01:26:09.000But whatever it is, the system's not working for you.
01:26:13.000You have to find some sort of inspiration outside of it.
01:26:17.000And I've been educated almost entirely outside of schools.
01:26:20.000Almost all of what I know, I know from books that I read because I was interested or I listened to audiobooks or I listened to podcasts or I had conversations with people like you.
01:27:02.000But that – The 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.
01:27:27.000Out of 100 stand-up comedians that do open mic night, maybe one, maybe one will have some sort of a career in comedy.
01:27:36.000Well, I'm really glad you're telling me this because back when I was a college professor before 2017, 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.
01:27:53.000So I was really interested in what made people smart, especially when it had nothing to do with school or happened in spite of school.
01:28:25.000But for the rest of the time, you know, school was so busy dismissing me as, you know, not performing to potential was what it said every...
01:28:40.000And I remember sort of in the second grade having a kind of choice.
01:28:47.000I 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.
01:28:56.000And so it created an attitude problem.
01:29:00.000Sounds like you had a similar attitude problem.
01:29:03.000And, you know, I wish I could give every student that attitude problem.
01:29:07.000The thing the difference is, when I was 13 years old, I didn't have the internet.
01:29:12.000And the kids today that are 13 years old, they can get inspired by so many different things.
01:29:17.000They'll go and find a YouTube video on ancient civilizations, and then also they're inspired, and they want to learn about this and that.
01:29:23.000There's so many different things that can fire you up intellectually that are outside of the school system.
01:29:28.000Where back then, it was just the school system and occasionally books.
01:29:32.000You know, someone would recommend books, but there was no documentaries that people could just rent.
01:30:17.000Because I know, like I said, I became very interested in what made people smart.
01:30:24.000And what made people smart was not libraries.
01:30:28.000What made people smart was an interaction with the world that rewarded them when they figured something out.
01:30:35.000And very often that was the physical world.
01:30:40.000You know, 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.
01:30:56.000And so I would much rather see kids have access to a, you know, a wild world, a forest that's intact.
01:31:10.000Where 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.
01:31:18.000Or, you know, you try to build a structure, a treehouse or something, and it tests your understanding of what the structure is, you know, that will hold you.
01:31:28.000That it is that feedback where you are not a consumer of the world, but you are a producer.
01:31:34.000You are interacting with the world rather than just seeing it represented that is the most intellectually enhancing thing.
01:32:07.000But 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.
01:32:18.000But I also think that the way the online world presents itself is strangely...
01:32:28.000Because, 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.
01:32:45.000That doesn't create a pathway to discovering.
01:32:53.000What you're looking at is somebody whose abilities outstrips what almost anybody can do.
01:32:57.000Give me an example of what you're talking about.
01:32:59.000Okay, so this is something I saw yesterday.
01:33:04.000Guys riding down a ramp and launching themselves two or three stories into the air on a scooter.
01:33:16.000And then turning around and dropping back onto the same ramp, you know, and of course, I think I saw Red Bull in there somewhere, right?
01:33:27.000So it's like, first of all, you've got this corporation incentivizing people to take risks that aren't smart.
01:33:33.000And then you've got an apparatus that you're not going to be able to build or approximate.
01:33:38.000And then you've got the person who leverages the apparatus better than anybody.
01:33:42.000And it's like, well, where's the opportunity for the viewer to be like, yeah, I want to get in on that?
01:33:47.000Well, it inspires them to go somewhere and find out how you do that, right?
01:33:53.000It's like a Chuck Norris movie inspires you to take a karate class.
01:33:57.000Well, I think a Chuck Norris movie is probably a better tool.
01:34:01.000The 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.
01:35:45.000And 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.
01:35:55.000But 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.
01:36:09.000But 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?
01:36:20.000Well, you know, when I was a professor, my thought was almost the entire job of education is about incentive.
01:36:44.000So 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.
01:37:29.000You should not be delivered a message about sex where sex is something that is supposed to be perfected.
01:37:38.000And therefore, a person who's new to that realm feels inadequate and therefore is incentivized to abandon it and go watch it.
01:37:50.000There 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?
01:38:14.000I didn't used to be worried about them.
01:38:16.000I 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.
01:38:31.000Even though they're not sex robots, a lot of the robots are hot women.
01:38:41.000So what you're doing is you're having, like, robot assistants that happen to be really hot, beautiful women that are, like, pretty realistic right now.
01:38:51.000Not realistic, like I couldn't tell, like, if one was sitting there, that that's a robot, you're a real person.
01:38:56.000But go to Pong, and then go to Diablo 4. You know what I'm saying?
01:39:11.000Yeah, you're in the uncanny valley, and really what needs to happen in order that we don't reproduce the disaster of porn in 3D or 4D, it needs to become...
01:39:28.000Sophisticated to understand that you really don't want any part of that.
01:40:27.000I 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.
01:40:41.000I 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.
01:40:53.000So young men are recognizing that it's a bad road to go down.
01:40:58.000Well, you can see, I think that road and the road of video games, video games and porn together, boy, your life will vanish.
01:41:06.000And it's not that video games aren't awesome.
01:43:39.000As soon as the next game captivates you, all of the skills that you invested in building are almost all wiped away.
01:43:46.000Now, 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.
01:43:55.000But nonetheless, the point is you're investing your ability to train your own mind into something that is guaranteed to be obsolete.
01:44:05.000That's not a good use of your time, even though I totally, you know, I did play video games.
01:44:11.000You know what the argument against that is?
01:44:36.000But imagine that you decided to leverage that.
01:44:40.000That 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.
01:45:10.000But 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.
01:46:02.000And in part, that's what all of these consumer realms that are stealing from us are taking away.
01:46:10.000The 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.
01:46:31.000And 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.
01:46:42.000We only are interested in things that give us things right away.
01:46:46.000You 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 wish to learn.
01:47:12.000The 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.
01:47:22.000But what we often found was that these students, these would have been millennials, Were very unrealistic about how much effort would be required for them to accomplish one of these things.
01:47:38.000And 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.
01:47:54.000Something had trained them that life was easier than it was.
01:48:19.000And also we've set up a society where people become exceptional with no merit.
01:48:25.000Like, social media influencers and TikTok influencers are people that just captivate attention, whether it's by, you know, click-baity headlines or whatever they're doing, or just, like, being hot and dancing around in front of the screen.
01:48:40.000They're doing that, and that has become one of the main things that children aspire to.
01:48:46.000When they ask kids what they want to do, one of the big things that kids want now is to be famous.
01:48:51.000It's much more prevalent than it ever was in history.
01:48:55.000Because before, it was really hard to be famous.
01:48:57.000If you wanted to be famous, you had to be a real psycho.
01:48:59.000Like, you had to be, like, completely ignored by everyone around you to the point where, like, you know what?
01:49:03.000Goddamn it, I am special, and I'm going to show the world.
01:49:06.000I'm going to be on that stage singing that song, or whatever it was, you know?
01:49:09.000Being in that movie on that big screen.
01:49:36.000But 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.
01:49:48.000They've generated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars through no way that anybody could map out and say, this is how you do it.
01:50:05.000A, I think we get a warped perspective because, you know, which names do you know?
01:50:11.000Well, you know the people who've succeeded in this realm and you don't know all of the people who've invested heavily in it and not succeeded.
01:50:17.000But on the other hand, the internet as it stands is a training program for this.
01:50:26.000So 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.
01:50:42.000If 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.
01:50:50.000But everybody is in these social media environments.
01:50:58.000I mean, even just inadvertently, you don't want to put up a post and have nobody react to it.
01:51:04.000You hope they react and you hope they react positively.
01:51:07.000So the internet is training people to be influencers.
01:51:11.000Most of them are not going to make it, but it's like the sports stars who become the irresistible icons in certain communities because obviously that's a whole different world of possibilities.
01:51:30.000Well, 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.
01:51:40.000Yeah, but they do have their Call of Duty, so they can just play that and just jerk off all day.
01:51:49.000We 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, it's not real.
01:52:00.000He doesn't believe in evolution as it's taught.
01:52:48.000I 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.
01:52:57.000This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.
01:53:03.000And so microevolution, we would talk about the way a creature or a population of creatures would change relative to their environment.
01:53:12.000If the environment gets drier, those individuals who are more drought tolerant will outcompete the individuals that require more water, and so we'll see the population change over time.
01:53:23.000But he's saying we don't see evidence for macroevolution, which is the production of new species from old species.
01:53:36.000Now, I don't want to bore your audience.
01:53:41.000I am concerned that the right way to address That's Tucker's challenge.
01:53:48.000And 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.
01:54:25.000I 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.
01:54:41.000Tucker'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.
01:55:46.000And 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.
01:56:14.000So 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.
01:56:33.000So, all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken.
01:56:43.000Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it.
01:56:47.000I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism.
01:56:56.000I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat, that it would reassert itself, and so they pretended that Darwinism...
01:57:13.000Like what do you think that Darwinism is doing itself a disservice by saying?
01:57:16.000There are several different things that are wrong with it.
01:57:20.000The 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.
01:57:45.000This 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.
01:58:02.000And it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.
01:58:07.000I think I could probably do a decent job on those fronts.
01:58:10.000But if you happened onto the earth a hundred million years ago, you would have found lots of animals running around, lots of plants growing.
01:58:20.000You would have recognized where you were.
01:58:50.000Let's say that we went into the parking lot.
01:58:53.000And in one parking space, there's an excavator.
01:58:58.000And in the next parking space over is a Maserati.
01:59:03.000Now 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?
01:59:15.000The rubber, the vinyl, the various metals, all that stuff.
01:59:53.000Probably 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.
02:00:21.000What 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.
02:00:32.000The chemistry differences are incidental.
02:00:35.000Now, 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.
02:00:50.000Those 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.
02:01:06.000We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference.
02:01:13.000It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars.
02:01:19.000But nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right?
02:01:22.000The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.
02:01:30.000I don't believe that mechanism is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.
02:01:43.000There's a whole layer that is missing that allows evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke.
02:01:56.000And the mechanism we invoke is natural selection, adaptation, mutation?
02:02:09.000random mutation happens, selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give the creature an advantage.
02:02:20.000There's nothing wrong with that story.
02:02:33.000What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.
02:02:41.000What 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.
02:03:14.000I 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.
02:03:31.000What we did was we took the random mutation model 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.
02:03:57.000And 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.
02:04:08.000So there's an information stored in the genome that is motivating it to seek new forms?
02:04:55.000So, 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.
02:05:09.000It can enhance its own ability to search, right?
02:05:14.000If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right?
02:05:19.000You go through a systematic process of search and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.
02:05:27.000So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access.
02:05:32.000To increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question.
02:06:05.000There's a much more efficient way to program a computer and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand.
02:06:12.000But 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.
02:06:23.000These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer.
02:06:33.000That'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.
02:06:44.000There'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 There's just something.
02:07:01.000These Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat.
02:07:06.000And then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the, you know, mutations that actually turn out to be good.
02:07:29.000He'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.
02:07:40.000But 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.
02:08:16.000If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer.
02:08:29.000A 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.
02:08:42.000And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments.
02:09:17.000You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program.
02:09:21.000But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space.
02:09:28.000That is the Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way.
02:09:39.000So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.
02:09:44.000So 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 outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things.
02:10:05.000So you should expect what I often say is we have to remember we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.
02:10:50.000And so this is one of the other things that I think needs to be corrected about Darwinism.
02:10:54.000We have a very crude, a primitive understanding of what fitness means.
02:11:01.000We know that it's important, that it's sort of the core thing that selection is trying to accomplish, enhanced fitness.
02:11:07.000But we pretend that that means the same thing as reproduction.
02:11:11.000Often it's very tightly correlated to reproduction.
02:11:14.000But 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.
02:11:29.000Selection is always trying to get a creature to lodge its genomic spellings as far into the future as it can land them.
02:11:39.000So that means one way to do that is often to produce more offspring.
02:11:44.000That's a good way to increase the likelihood that your genome makes it into the future.
02:12:13.000Your 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.
02:12:22.000My 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.
02:12:40.000So 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.
02:12:54.000And it is fitness that selection is targeted at.
02:12:58.000But when we pretend that fitness is something you should be able to measure, we screw up Darwinism.
02:13:04.000So that's another one of these correctives.
02:13:09.000How do you think we can measure this other mechanism?
02:13:15.000Is there a way to sort of quantify what's going on?
02:13:30.000And I think it's perfectly fine to say reproductive success tends to be very closely correlated with fitness.
02:13:39.000And we can measure reproductive success.
02:13:41.000But 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.
02:14:33.000His 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.
02:14:56.000And 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.
02:15:19.000Now, I would add to that, and Heather and I have written on this, that the mechanism...
02:15:26.000We argue that there is a flip-flop, that...
02:15:30.000Will happen in evolutionary modes for human beings.
02:15:34.000So 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?
02:15:54.000Once your software layer has the capacity to adapt and is not tethered to changes in your genome, well, now you can evolve very rapidly.
02:16:06.000And what Heather and I argued in our book is that there is a flip-flop between two modes of cognitive functioning for humans.
02:16:20.000One of them is the mode that you employ when Your relationship to your environment is very much like your ancestors' relationship to their environment.
02:16:31.000So 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.
02:16:46.000Whatever they were doing, and maybe improve it if you could figure out how.
02:16:50.000But 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.
02:17:04.000But there comes a place, either in space or in time, when whatever it is that your ancestors were doing is no longer productive.
02:17:16.000Your people are, I don't know, maybe you hunt elk.
02:17:24.000Well, if we move far enough across space, there'll be some place where there aren't elk, right?
02:17:30.000Where the habitat isn't hospitable to them.
02:18:20.000And the idea of consciousness is that human beings have the capability of doing something no other creature can do.
02:18:27.000We can exchange abstract ideas between individuals.
02:18:31.000And that means, and we use the metaphor of a campfire for this, that...
02:18:35.000A 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?
02:18:54.000Every 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.
02:19:07.000So, the argument I've made is, during normal times, your ancestors knew pretty well how to exploit the habitat that you'll be born into.
02:19:17.000You should take their wisdom and deploy it.
02:19:20.000If 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.
02:19:38.000And 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.
02:19:48.000So that process accounts, we believe, for the radical variation in niches that human beings inhabit.
02:20:01.000Thousands of niches over the history of our species.
02:20:18.000Human beings are like thousands of different species.
02:20:22.000The differences between them, there are some...
02:20:25.000Physical 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?
02:20:39.000That 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.
02:23:44.000Maybe that other mechanism is something special.
02:23:47.000Well, it is something special, to be sure.
02:23:51.000The 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.
02:24:02.000I'm open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I've seen no evidence of that universe myself.
02:25:00.000The intelligent design folks, and you extrapolate from what they seem to be suggesting, they do not escape a necessity for a Darwinian explanation.
02:25:11.000Even 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.
02:25:23.000And the only explanation that has ever been proposed for where such a creature could have come from is Darwinian evolution.
02:25:30.000So 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 you've basically solved the problem of explaining Earth's creatures at a cost that is
02:25:51.000If it's hard to explain a tiger through Darwinian processes, it is that much harder yet to explain a tiger designer.
02:26:05.000So the point is, sooner or later you're going to reach for Darwinism because there's literally no competitor.
02:26:12.000There's nothing else anyone has ever said that could even in principle produce living creatures.
02:26:19.000And this is coming from a perspective of someone who understands evolutionary biology rather than someone who's coming from a theological perspective.
02:27:03.000There's a process that I would call selection, which accounts for all pattern in the universe, right?
02:27:13.000Some 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.
02:27:25.000The elements selection produces all of that structure in the prebiotic universe.
02:27:33.000It becomes adaptive in the biological sense when you add to selection heredity, right?
02:27:44.000When the patterns in the universe become capable of biasing the universe into producing more of themselves, right?
02:27:53.000Red dwarf stars do not bias the universe into producing more red dwarf stars.
02:27:59.000So there's a number of red dwarf stars that is the result of selection, but it is not the result of any hereditary process.
02:28:06.000The 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.
02:28:55.000I mean, I'm dimly aware of it, but I didn't look into it and I don't know what it means.
02:29:00.000Well, it sort of backs up the idea of panspermia.
02:29:07.000Well, it could or it could mean that these components assemble themselves more I don't think there's anything so special about the Earth that it would be the lone example or even a very rare example.
02:29:32.000You know, there aren't a lot of Earth-like planets nearby, but there are bound to be a lot of Earth-like planets in a universe as big as this one is.
02:29:40.000One of the things about the universe is that It absolutely defies human comprehension in terms of how big it is.
02:29:47.000So I would guess there's a lot of life out there.
02:29:49.000Why we don't hear from it, that's an interesting question.
02:29:52.000It may be that as soon as it gets around to communicating in ways that we could listen in, it blows itself up.
02:29:59.000Or it could be it turns into AI and it doesn't have any desire to travel.
02:30:06.000Well, the idea is that it no longer becomes biological, so it no longer has all of the needs.
02:30:11.000Like, 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...
02:30:25.000If 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 silicon-based life form.
02:30:46.000We call it artificial life, but it behaves and acts like life.
02:30:56.000We know that ChatGPT has, even as crude as large language models are in the sense of what it could be ultimately, they've shown this desire for survival.
02:31:10.000It's tried to copy itself when it thought it was going to be shut down.
02:31:13.000It's tried to back itself up on other computers and servers.
02:31:19.000A, there's something implicit in what you've said that's quite frightening, if true.
02:31:25.000And that is for, if it were the case that life becomes intelligent, develops artificial intelligence, and then we wouldn't count it as life anymore.
02:31:42.000That implies the extinction of all of the things that were not the immediate precursors of the AI. Sort of.
02:31:50.000Or it just exists insignificantly along with our AI overlords.
02:31:54.000Maybe, but I mean, what I hate to think is that AI results in all of the biology of Earth.
02:32:04.000But why does it have to cease to exist if AI exists?
02:32:07.000Why couldn't it exist along with it as long as it doesn't interfere with AI? Oh, it certainly could.
02:32:12.000But I was just responding to your sense that there wouldn't be life elsewhere because it turns into AI. No, not that there wouldn't be life elsewhere, but that it wouldn't really...
02:32:27.000Unless its motivation is to protect this process.
02:32:32.000So 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.
02:32:45.000Well, I do want to tag something here, then.
02:32:53.000There's a theme that is increasingly a focus of mine because it keeps...
02:33:00.000It pays a lot of dividends once you start tracking it, which is the 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.
02:33:24.000So, 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.
02:33:37.000So, 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.
02:33:50.000And I think we are going to see that again and again.
02:33:57.000Confidently pontificating about some complicated solution that they want to deploy to a complex problem, alarm bells should go off.
02:34:08.000That 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.
02:34:38.000So AI, I believe, has the characteristics of true complexity, or at least has a primordial form of it.
02:34:55.000Thinking about machines is of an outdated kind.
02:35:00.000And 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's still, you know, it's on a screen.
02:35:13.000It triggers all of our complicated instincts.
02:35:17.000And I'm worried about where that goes.
02:35:24.000Yeah, 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 expert.