The Darien Gap is a gap in the Pan-American Highway between Panama and Colombia. In other words, if you want to get from South America to North America overland, you have to go through the gap. And yet, last year, at least 520,000 migrants crossed it to come here. How did that happen? What is it? And why are so many of them crossing it? To find out, Tucker and Vanessa talk to Dr. Brett Weinstein, a world-round biologist and host of the Darkhorse podcast, to find out what's going on in the gap, and why it's so important to know what's happening there. Guest: Dr. Michael Yan, a former Green Beret and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent the past year and a half trying to make sense of the phenomenon of mass migration into the United States by way of the Panama Canal, a gap that has been described as the most impenetrable piece of land between South America and North America in the world. Dr. Weinstein and his partner, Heather Weinstein, take us on a trip to the gap to see what's really going on there and what it's like to cross it. Guests: biologist Brett Weinstein; journalist Michael Yan; journalist Tucker Tucker Tucker; and writer and editor-in-chief of The New York Times reporter David Rothkopf. Thanks to Tucker, Vanessa, and reporter-turned-producer Michael Yan. Music: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Ian Dorsch and "Outer Space Traveler" by Jeff Perla, courtesy of the band "The Good Fight" by the Good Fight Project Additional music: "The Lonely Planet Earth by John Singleton by The Good Fight by Suneaters and "Good Morning America by Kevin McLeod by the Badlands by Ian McKirdy edited by Caitlin Durand, and produced by Haley Shaw (credited to the excellent John Rocha and edited by Rachel Ward and by Matthew Boll Thank you for the excellent sound design by Rachel Goodman in this episode's music is by Matthew Kuchta by Mike McLennan and the excellent Jeff Perlan, by Rachel Maddison, and our editor is . thanks to the amazing Rachel Crowell on sound design and editing and editing is by by Matt McDade is
00:05:19.520Well, I'm very glad I went because it did actually radically change my understanding of what I was
00:05:24.300looking at for reasons I better understand now.
00:05:27.900Now, one needs to see the physical relationship between the various sites that he showed us in order to really piece together what this story is.
00:05:41.460So you went, if I can summarize what I think you're saying, because you're a researcher and you
00:05:46.360wanted to know what's actually happening.
00:05:49.020The thing that gets de-emphasized when we talk about high-quality science is the degree to which
00:05:56.900it is informed by well-tutored intuition.
00:06:00.780So I had a sense that I needed to see it for reasons that my conscious mind wasn't certain of at the time.
00:06:19.940And the whole thing was so mentally disruptive that I'm still in the process of unpacking what it was and debating with myself about what it means.
00:08:13.100So we went to several of the, I guess you would call them transit camps.
00:08:20.160These are places where people who have come by whatever route to Darien, where they recover if they're injured and they have to accumulate money.
00:08:34.480Because even if they settle out on their journey with enough money to buy a bus ticket to get them through Central America, by the time they've come through Darien, almost all of them have been robbed.
00:08:54.220The migrants talk about stepping over bodies in Darien.
00:08:57.760And for somebody with experience in these kinds of jungles, it's not hard to see how, without a support network, the kinds of stuff that can happen in a jungle can become deadly very quickly.
00:10:00.500We just had to check in with the Senna Front.
00:10:02.780The Senna Front is the Panamanian Border Authority.
00:10:05.860But once we had checked in, we were on our own.
00:10:08.560And people were interested in talking, including migrants.
00:10:11.980So we had many conversations with migrants.
00:10:15.520And these migrants, I have to tell you, when they come to the southern border of the U.S., they get through on the basis that they are political refugees.
00:10:39.140And they are fleeing in the direction of what they perceive to be economic opportunity.
00:10:43.540And, of course, in American law, these two things are very different.
00:10:46.500We protect people who are seeking political asylum.
00:10:49.960But we do not offer automatic economic asylum.
00:10:53.140And the reason for that is fairly clear, which is that in order to protect people economically, we end up robbing Americans of their economic well-being.
00:11:05.480And that's just not something that people are entitled to.
00:11:09.180No matter how much compassion you may have for people fleeing Venezuela, it is not our responsibility, especially not without some sort of a plan, an agreement about how many people are going to come through and in what way we're going to take care of them and how that's going to get paid for.
00:12:25.260And so they see it as their job to bring it about, to facilitate it.
00:12:29.400And in this case, that's particularly tragic because their desire to induce people to migrate is causing people who are woefully unprepared for the Darien Gap to try to make that journey.
00:12:44.380And the humanitarian tragedy is immense.
00:12:49.940So the UN, which the United States is, I think, the largest donor by far, is paying for this with the U.S. government.
00:13:03.800Some are aware that there's a migration.
00:13:05.860But in large measure, this migration, once it gets through the Darien Gap, boards, buses, and effectively, what I now understand is that all of the countries in Central America are effectively waving the migrants through because those migrants are not going to stop in these countries.
00:13:26.640As long as they keep going to the U.S., these countries are willing to remain silent about it.
00:13:31.980Now, in 1991, Heather and I actually traveled the other direction through Central America, through all of the countries south to Costa Rica.
00:13:42.900And all of those borders are tightly controlled.
00:13:46.660And so it is very surprising to find those controls are effectively lifted here.
00:13:52.500That's clearly the result of a massive coordination.
00:13:57.280And, of course, it's resulting in a large migration.
00:14:01.980But what I was going to tell you about the fact that this migration doesn't appear to me to be just one thing is that we went to another camp called San Vicente.
00:14:12.840And everything in San Vicente is different than it was at Canaan Mambria.
00:14:18.220San Vicente, first of all, it's not a town.
00:14:21.640This is a camp that is built as a transit camp.
00:14:24.780It's built of containers and various objects to house people.
00:19:12.200So there's nothing about the fact that these folks are Chinese that throws me.
00:19:17.360And if they were fleeing that government, I'm not sure what we should do about it, but I'm certainly supportive of their desire.
00:19:24.540I would feel a great deal of sympathy.
00:19:26.180And in fact, I felt a great deal of sympathy for all of the other migrants that I met.
00:19:31.020But the sense of—it's really hard not to use the term hostility that I felt from the Chinese was particularly unsettling given that I know where they're headed.
00:19:53.860And what I know is taking place at the southern border of the U.S. makes this even more disturbing.
00:20:04.220Because although the controls at the southern border are still there for those of us who are crossing legally, the lack of any control for those who are crossing illegally is stunning.
00:20:16.860So if I may just compare, when I came back from Panama, I approached a kiosk with my passport ready to scan it.
00:20:29.000And although I didn't know that my picture was about to be taken, I hadn't taken my hat off, I was wearing my glasses,
00:20:35.500the kiosk told me I didn't need to put my passport there.
00:20:40.060And then a customs officer behind me called my name, Brett.
00:20:43.760He said, do you have anything to declare?
00:20:44.880I said, no, he said, you're good to go.
00:20:46.940So we have technology that is capable of identifying a person with that level of ease to the point that they knew exactly who was coming through the border.
00:20:59.440But we are not apparently taking that information when people cross our southern border.
00:21:04.420What we're doing at most is asking them their name and their birth date and taking them at their word.
00:22:39.240I can't be certain of that, but that certainly is suggested, that this is a message about how to make this journey for what purpose, I don't know.
00:22:50.020But I do not believe that the people I encountered had left China without the knowledge of their government.
00:22:56.540I believe their government has some reason to have facilitated.
00:23:01.900But the administration must be aware of this.
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00:26:41.300Their credit card companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough.
00:26:45.460This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.
00:26:48.380Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.
00:26:55.840Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.
00:27:03.400This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
00:27:06.840In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.
00:27:12.220The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world.
00:27:17.260Double candidates and eight times more than Europe's.
00:27:20.700That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.
00:27:25.080I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act.
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00:27:35.820Another thing that Michael showed us, which is maybe the most surprising thing I saw, is a bridge building project at Javitsa, which is the town at the very end of the Pan American Highway in Darien.
00:27:59.980So there is a massive bridge being built.
00:28:59.420The foreman was Panamanian and we asked him what the purpose of the bridge was and he didn't know, but he speculated that it was to bring yucca from Darien, from the villages on the other side, into Panama.
00:29:16.160That's a low margin agricultural product for those who are watching.
00:29:20.080It doesn't justify a steel reinforced bridge across the river.
00:29:22.720There's nothing about this that makes any sense.
00:29:28.860It grows all over Panama and all over the world's tropics.
00:29:33.760There would be no reason to grow it in Darien.
00:29:35.780In fact, there are very good reasons not to encourage more of it to be grown in Darien, given the priceless habitat that will be cleared to grow yucca there for no good reason.
00:29:44.680There's lots of better places to do it.
00:29:46.260So, what I was left with is the sense that there is a bridge going in and it has a purpose that has not been shared with the Panamanians.
00:29:59.680That purpose really has to be, as far as I can tell, it's got to be one of two things.
00:30:04.700Either this is about bringing lumber out of Darien National Park, which would be obscene.
00:30:16.100This is priceless hardwood that is in part still standing because it is such a difficult jungle to access.
00:30:23.760So, it's possible that somebody has targeted that wood and not told the Panamanians and they're building this bridge for that purpose.
00:30:31.960But the other potential purpose is that they're intending to finish the Panamanian Highway through Darien, which is something that would certainly need to be discussed to be reasonable.
00:30:45.500Now, in the aftermath of our trip, Anne Vander Steele put up a video sharing just a view of this construction site and her perspective on it.
00:30:58.780And this caused a small scandal in Panama because the Panamanians weren't aware.
00:31:03.940And suddenly, this was on the internet and they were talking about what is this bridge at the southern end of the Panamerican Highway in Panama.
00:31:12.820And the Panamanians claimed that it was just to reach the villages on the other side.
00:31:21.880So, I'm left with the very odd sense that their cover story is that this is a boondoggle.
00:31:30.160If this was a boondoggle and they were just putting money into a project that meant nothing, then that would explain the bridge to nowhere.
00:31:36.320But this didn't look like a boondoggle.
00:31:40.460This looked like somebody wanted the bridge.
00:31:42.560And given the Belt and Road Initiative and the sense that the Chinese have about what the future should look like and in which direction resources should move and for what purpose, it's hard for me not to connect the dots between these things.
00:31:58.160You have a massive migration of people, labor, you have a likely invasion of military age, largely Chinese males, who are not forthcoming about why they have embarked on their journey and appear to be encouraged by something in China to do this.
00:32:19.760So, you know, given what you're describing and what you saw with your own eyes, doubtless you have seen Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois' comments in the Senate where you said, hey, we should let people who came here illegally join the U.S. military.
00:33:07.440That that likely had the purpose of getting rid of the kinds of people who refuse moral orders and that it created a much more compliant force.
00:33:19.220Now, what happens if migrants are given citizenship in exchange for military service in the U.S. military?
00:33:29.380That seems to create a major hazard because the perverse incentives for a migrant and the lack of allegiance to fundamental American values means that that would be just the kind of force that could be used to impose tyranny on other Americans because they would have, you know, no history with us that would cause them to think twice.
00:33:56.640We've seen this. We've seen this before with the Roman legions.
00:34:00.360That's exactly my conclusion. Does that sound like a crazy conclusion?
00:34:07.500I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy.
00:35:10.700And people can check this out on the Dark Horse Locals community.
00:35:18.020We've posted the entire conversation in which he and I reached some, I think we spooked ourselves trying to reason through what this might be.
00:35:26.520And he reminded me of the massive number of surplus males that China now has as a result.
00:35:39.000I was thinking the exact same thing as a result of the one child policy.
00:36:47.620If you have a society that has too many females, you should produce a male.
00:36:51.480And if you have a society with too many males, you should produce a female, which tends to balance these things out.
00:36:56.660That logic should have applied to China.
00:36:59.200The fact is there were lots of excess males.
00:37:03.920And if you put yourself in the mindset of a Chinese person having a child, if there are too many males, you should want to produce a female.
00:37:12.520A male is very unlikely to find a mate.
00:37:19.080So that logic should have caused the sex ratio to return to 50-50, and yet it did not, which caused me all those years ago when I wrote this piece to wonder if there wasn't another evolutionary force in play.
00:37:33.540If evolution did not have a mechanism for producing armies, that when a country was in a position to expand, that producing excess males does pay off at a lineage level.
00:37:47.100That excess males who have no reproductive prospects at home become an effective weapon against neighboring populations.
00:37:55.580So I can't believe that that did not occur to me as I was preparing for this trip, but it has occurred to me now.
00:38:05.720I guess it didn't occur to me because when I wrote that all those years ago, I was expecting to see evidence that this was turning into a military force, and I didn't see it.
00:38:15.100But now I wonder if that isn't exactly right, and if what happened is that a male-biased population in China was produced as a weapon, and if that weapon is now being deployed.
00:39:01.660I lived on Barrow, Colorado Island, which is an island administered by the Smithsonian Institution in the Panama Canal.
00:39:08.300It was a hilltop that got isolated when the canal filled, and the Smithsonian took it over because it was a marvelous opportunity to have an isolated piece of forest that they could watch over time and learn how tropical biology works.
00:39:21.900So I had the privilege of living in the canal for 18 months, and I got very familiar with the canal zone.
00:39:26.300You lived in the Panama Canal for 18 months.
00:39:28.960We used to swim in the waters for whatever reason.
00:39:32.280The crocodiles that inhabit those waters, if we would encounter them while swimming, they would turn and go the other way, which was lovely.
00:39:39.220Apparently that's no longer true, and you can't swim there.
00:39:58.180It's a little miracle that exists in these forests.
00:40:01.500But anyway, maybe we'll talk about that another time.
00:40:03.860But I was well familiar with the canal zone because we used to—the canal zone, in fact, the military, this was before the handover to the Panamanians.
00:40:12.860So we, you know, the military made it possible for the Smithsonian to work there, and we were constantly interacting.
00:40:21.580We'd go on their bases to watch a movie.
00:40:23.120So we were using this military infrastructure, which has now all been handed over to Panama.
00:40:29.000And what impressed me was when we went back, specifically to Fort Clayton, something that is now called the City of Knowledge.
00:40:39.960The City of Knowledge is housed in—or its central building is the former Army South building from the U.S. Southern Command.
00:40:51.080So this is both an important fact for the military, that U.S. Southern Command is a segment of the military dedicated to protecting American interests in the Caribbean and all of Latin America, south of Mexico.
00:41:10.440And it has this impressive structure in Fort Clayton, immediately above the Las Flores locks.
00:41:23.540So it was both physically there to protect the canal, and it was metaphorically this imposing presence looking out over—
00:41:34.100And after the handover, all of the military bases that were in the canal zone were handed over, and this one has been taken over by the U.N. and the international community, and all the NGOs have offices there.
00:41:46.240And it reminded me of how many things in our society have been—had their purpose inverted, right?
00:41:55.120Universities used to exist to make young people smarter and more analytically capable.
00:42:02.420Universities now make people stupider and convince them of things that just simply aren't true.
00:42:08.080Newspapers used to help us understand what the facts were about events that were taking place that involve us.
00:42:16.120Now newspapers obscure the facts from us.
00:42:19.100They're the last to report the news after we embarrass them into doing it.
00:42:22.260So this structure that once was a testament to the achievement of the Panama Canal and the importance of protecting the Panama Canal is now involved in what looks like obvious subterfuge against American interests, right?
00:42:43.660An organization that is dedicated to facilitating migration without asking Americans, without there being any plan at all for how the well-being of these people is going to be financed.
00:42:56.520That their office, IOM, is sitting—if this building, U.S. Army South, the Las Flores locks, is—it's like a person.
00:43:11.500And at that person's left knee is the IOM looking out at the Bridge of the Americas, which when I was there was the only way to cross the Panama Canal, right?
00:43:20.820It's almost the exact inversion of what these structures were built for, and how many times do you have to see the inversion of something to begin to get the sense that that's—something has taken over our system and it's become sick?
00:43:35.580Well, it's—and I'm sure there's a biological term to describe the process of maybe cancer, the body eating itself.
00:43:46.660I mean, it seems like the structures set in place to protect the country are now at war with the country.
00:43:52.720I do have the sense that the country, the structures—and it's not even just the country, it's the West.
00:44:01.920And, you know, I view myself as very much a patriot of the country, but I'm also a patriot of the West, which I see the country as having—maybe it's slightly overstated to say invented the concept.
00:44:15.620But in any case, yes, the West appears to be sick with an infection.
00:44:26.780And again, I don't want to drag you into too much biology, but everybody knows what a parasite is.
00:44:34.600There's also something called a parasitoid.
00:44:37.380And a parasitoid is a parasite that kills its host in the process of doing its job.
00:44:43.340And I'm concerned that we may have a parasitoid that is actually at least indifferent to the destruction of the United States and the West and is acting accordingly.
00:44:56.920So I know it's become your life's work or part of your life's work to figure out what exactly that entity is.
00:45:11.240I mean, maybe I'm partway, and that part involves—I now look at a map with much more skepticism that I understand what it means.
00:45:25.120That we have become so accustomed to looking at something like a nation like China and thinking of it as an entity that behaves in some way.
00:45:35.660And something about the ease with which various power structures interact suggests that we—I don't understand why my government is behaving in a way that seems to be sabotaging the interests of average Americans, but it is, undeniably.
00:46:00.680It seems to be acting on behalf of our enemies.
00:46:07.720I don't know whether that could conceivably because there's actually hostility.
00:46:16.240But my guess is what there is is just a rampant outbreak of amorality where people are willing to do whatever is expedient, and that has made the game rather easy for powers that be elsewhere.
00:46:34.460And I don't know—I don't know where the analysis becomes absurd.
00:46:40.640I have watched policy on the West Coast make the quality of life drop spectacularly so that people are fleeing, including wealthy people.
00:46:54.260And I look at wealthy people fleeing California, for example, and I think, something about this story doesn't add up.
00:47:04.420It's rather a lot like building up a population with too many males.
00:47:08.540There's something else that explains this because at the end of the day, wealthy elites are going to end up with the best real estate.
00:47:15.420So the fact that they're fleeing either means that which elites are going to end up with that real estate is about to switch.
00:47:30.740And I wonder, you know, having seen something that very much looks like an undeclared invasion moving through Central America,
00:47:43.620knowing that the Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of long-term planning over the movement of people and resources,
00:47:54.940that our system, we've effectively opened the gates of the city to anybody who's willing to pay to corrupt our political structures.
00:48:06.760There is a story you could tell in which the CCP has a different understanding of what the future of our country is than most Americans do.
00:48:16.920And, well, let's just put it this way.
00:48:21.900Maybe I'm imagining what I saw, but if I'm not, then all of those Chinese migrants who don't want to talk about what they're doing moving into the U.S.,
00:49:09.160I mean, there's economic opportunity in China, but there's also economic opportunity for unemployed Chinese in the Philippines or Vietnam, Malaysia.
00:49:20.440It's not obvious that they would come to the Darien Gap to get here.
00:49:24.500Well, the Darien Gap is a very strange place to have gone.
00:49:27.360For one thing, as Chris Martinson points out, the absurdity, if we're going to invite people in, let's say we had decided that we didn't have enough people to do labor
00:49:42.220and that it was actually good for the U.S. to bring in large numbers of people from elsewhere.
00:49:45.900Having people go through the theater of marching through Darien is absurd and dangerous.
00:49:56.620And it is creating a humanitarian crisis in addition to the environmental crisis, which is in Darien.
00:50:03.860We're creating a humanitarian crisis that's absolutely needless.
00:50:07.480Either these people should be welcomed because it's good for us to bring them in.
00:50:13.840And the only purpose I can think, especially given that the Chinese, many of the Chinese, I don't want to say all, there are Chinese people in the other camps.
00:50:25.860But the only purpose I can think of for coming to America via Panama is that it allows them to blend with all of the people who are coming from South America.
00:50:43.800It makes it hard to discuss, but I can't think of another reason to do it that way.
00:50:48.820It's, at the very least, wildly inefficient.
00:50:55.860Did you run into any journalists from big newspapers or TV channels when you were down there?
00:51:05.860Absolutely not, which is also shocking.
00:51:10.420I mean, this is emblematic of the era we are living in where the issues, which obviously have our well-being tied up in them, are hiding in plain sight.
00:51:30.960And the fact that that's not happening, that our major news organizations are disinterested in this story, again, suggests a system that has been corrupted across the board.
00:51:44.920You would imagine that even if the New York Times didn't want to report this story, that some reporter with ambition would chase it down anyway.
00:51:54.460But so universal is the complicity here that nobody reports it.
00:51:59.720And if they do report it, they report it wrong.
00:52:02.320They report it so that it leads you to have a confused sense or a sense that this is more minor than it is.
00:52:08.180But we're talking literally about millions of people, and millions of people is not a minor issue in a country with 300 million.
00:52:17.840This is a major demographic shift one way or the other.
00:53:14.060But also, I would point out, the farther north, this migration obviously has a relationship with the cartels.
00:53:26.700The cartels are largely about American demand for illicit substances.
00:53:32.000And a massive uncontrolled wave of migrants is an obvious mechanism whereby fentanyl and other things are entering the U.S. in an unmonitored way.
00:53:46.280I mean, and in fact, to the extent that they come in with migrants, we are apparently facilitating their transport into the interior.
00:54:20.440Well, I mean, and strangely, it goes back to the idea of giving ourselves permission to entertain all kinds of possibilities, even things that are crazy and we have to ultimately reject.
00:54:32.660But we have to not talk ourselves out of noticing what is taking place.
00:54:39.800That's a scientific principle, is it not?
00:54:43.380Scientists are losing their way as well.
00:54:46.100And I think how science is actually done is being forgotten.
00:54:50.980And, you know, I think we are actually literally in a cryptic dark age.
00:54:57.280Now, every dark age has a small number of people, I call them keepers of the flame, who do remember how to do science and keep that knowledge alive in one way or another.
00:55:08.180But it's time to dust it off and bring it out into the mainstream.
00:55:12.960And, you know, the toolkit for figuring out what a story like this means is not different from the toolkit you use to figure out what's going on in a tropical forest.
00:55:33.980This is one person's view of what they saw.
00:55:35.980What you really want is many people to have seen it, and then you want them to pool their understanding, to point out what doesn't make sense about one story, one explanation or another.
00:56:00.980Something is afoot that none of us have seen before.
00:56:03.580Even to the extent that there are echoes of historical processes here, much of this is quite new.
00:56:13.160I mean, for one thing, a mass migration through a dense jungle where people have been informed about how to transit it, you know, by cell phone, where money can be wired by Western Union to buy yourself a bus ticket after you've been robbed by bandits in the forest.
00:57:07.940In Darien, I'm almost certain she was raped.
00:57:12.600I didn't ask her, but I told her that I thought her journey had been more perilous than she shared, and she confirmed that.
00:57:21.840And I think we both knew what I was talking about.
00:57:24.540But in any case, she lost her phone to bandits.
00:57:31.120But the other thing that happens is the exhaustion that people who are unprepared for the Darien Gap experience in struggling up these just mud doesn't even describe it.
00:57:45.340The clay and the clay in these soils is such that you just imagine incredibly slippery faces that are being drenched in rain on a daily basis.
00:57:56.040People are so exhausted that they rid themselves of the possessions that they thought they would somehow bring through.
00:58:06.640You know, they lose their shoes, they drop all of their possessions, and they walk out with nothing.
00:58:14.480So in any case, I would say probably most of them have phones when they embark, and I have no idea what the percentage that actually...
00:58:24.420What is it doing to the environment, to the landscape?
00:58:28.440I mean, it's certainly going to be limited at this point to the...
00:58:32.940I think there are three major routes through the Darien Gap at the moment.
00:58:36.600They are absolutely littered with trash and bodies, and it's apparently quite hellish.
00:58:47.240In fact, Jen told me that on her trek, she spoke pretty good English.
00:58:54.720She said that she didn't see a single animal.
00:58:57.360I'm sure she meant mammal, but the idea of walking across Darien and not seeing a single mammal suggests that this is just absolutely devastating.
00:59:11.220Now, it's nothing compared to what will happen if a road gets put through.
00:59:16.380Roads have a very well-understood impact on a forest like this.
00:59:20.540Once you have roads, you're going to have hunters, and they're going to empty the forest.
00:59:24.520You're going to have empty forest syndrome.
00:59:25.880After that, you're going to have loggers.
00:59:28.040They're going to be pulling out all of these priceless tropical hardwoods.
00:59:31.700You're going to get miners who are going to illegally go in there and mine and leave big tailing piles and toxins.
01:01:24.740And the drought combined with the massive extra losses of water is resulting in the Panama Canal having greatly reduced traffic,
01:01:36.120which is a huge hit to the Panamanian economy because each of the ships that transits the canal hands over a huge pile of cash to be allowed to do it.
01:01:46.840And this is a major piece of the Panamanian economy.
01:01:49.320Certainly, we're at the beginning of the dry season.
01:01:51.580I don't know what's going to happen by the end of the dry season, but it may go from a greatly reduced number of transits per day to, I don't know, could it go to none?
01:02:13.100So I don't know if the Nicaraguans are going to.
01:02:15.800At the moment, the Panamanians are using the train that parallels the canal.
01:02:21.240And basically, lots of ships are offloading their cargo onto a train, and it's going overland to a ship on the other side.
01:02:28.120So in any case, Panama has a stability problem of its own, and that combined with the hazard posed by this migration, and if America closes the door on this migration, where do these people go?
01:02:49.760Well, so last question, if you were to, I know that you will continue your journey of inquiry in this topic, but where else would you go to get answers to what exactly is happening?
01:03:04.360Well, if I was initiating an effort to figure out that question, I would bring the people who have navigated the story this far together with whatever experts still exist on the various related topics.
01:03:26.540I mean, frankly, I would talk to Michael Yon about all of the things that are connected to this story, all the things he's seen all over the world.
01:03:34.560He has a very good sense for who the players are, and what he knows has to be brought together with an understanding of how these dynamics might play out.
01:03:51.540But I have to say, I don't know if what I saw implies another shoe is going to drop.
01:04:06.420How many of these Chinese sleepwalkers have to end up in the U.S. before some other phase kicks off?