transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hey folks, welcome to The DarkHorse Podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting this morning with my friend Joshua Stylman. Okay, have I call you Josh?

Speaker 2:
[00:10] Please do.

Speaker 1:
[00:11] All right, Josh is a little hard to describe, but he's somebody you should know about. At some point here, you should sign up for his Substack, which we will link in the description, and I'll point you to a couple of pieces that are particularly excellent. Josh is sort of, I think he says it jokingly, but maybe a stand-up philosopher. He's an independent researcher. I know him through encounters at the Brownstone Institute. In any case, Josh, welcome to DarkHorse. Thank you for having me. All right, Josh, I asked you to come on after reading a piece that you put out, must be a couple of weeks ago at this point. And this piece kind of stopped me in my tracks because I have been having a certain experience since October 7th of 2023, and I've been having a hard time articulating it to people. I'm of course Jewish, as my viewers know. I grew up in a secular Jewish home, and you know, I have a sort of complicated relationship with this. I don't really understand people who have pride in their ethnicity. I feel like, am I supposed to be proud I'm a man? No, it just happened to me. I'm happy as one, but it's not a matter of pride. And I feel sort of the same way about Jewishness. I got a ton out of it growing up, but you know, I don't know that it makes, I don't know that it makes logical sense to be proud of something that you had no hand in. And in any case, I've been sort of trying to keep my head above water as a Jewish person who tries to think very carefully about things in an era where that has become extremely difficult. And the piece that you wrote described my experience quite well. And many of the thoughts that I wrestle with, is it safe to even express them, came through in your piece so beautifully that I decided you and I should have a conversation, that that would be useful for me, I hope for you, but certainly for the audience who might not know how people like you or me think about this. Our first sponsor this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. Have you ever had a relationship with a product that was so uncomplicatedly positive that when you get a box from them, you are over the moon with excitement? That's how it is with Fresh Pressed Olive Oil. Always amazing, never disappointing, and perennially delicious and nutritious. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com and get a bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils for just $1. Olive oil is a succulent delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh. The fresher the better. Olives are actually a fruit, making olive oil a kind of fruit juice, and like all fruit juices, olive oil is at its peak of flavor and nutritional potency when it's fresh pressed. But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid. The solution is to have fresh pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest, when the oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak. Once again, go to getfreshdarkhorse.com and get a bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the newest harvest, for just one dollar. How can you pass that up? Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter. He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door. Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets. But if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. TJ's Farm Fresh oils are incredible. Fat is where the flavor is, and TJ's Farm Fresh olive oils are amazingly flavorful and distinct from one another. We've used several different varietals now across a wide array of delicious foods as marinades on meat and for roasting vegetables. Freshened salads are drizzled on cold soups or on freshly grilled halloumi cheese. We've made olive oil cake and Italian pesto and a Venezuelan green sauce rich in cilantro. Every single varietal we've had is superb, and the health benefits of olive oil are extensive, from being high in antioxidants to helping prevent Alzheimer's. This is a fabulous, flavorful fat that you'll never want to run out of. As an introduction to TJ. Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he will send you a full-sized $39 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the new harvest, for just $1 to help him cover shipping. And there's no commitment to buy anything, now or ever. Get your free $39 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com. That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping. So do you want to say something about your upbringing and where that places you?

Speaker 2:
[05:16] Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words. It means a lot to me. You are a very thoughtful person who clearly considers all perspectives. And this is a really nuanced one that seems like we're not supposed to talk about. I have a tendency to talk about the things we're not supposed to talk about. So I grew up a progeny of Holocaust survivors. Half, essentially half the family, everybody I knew was in the camps, everyone that lived. My grandmother was the sole survivor of a town of people. All six siblings, parents, neighbors, all gone. I am named after her oldest brother who burned in a gas chamber. My other grandfather was a freedom fighter who fought for Israeli independence or so I'm told. And he was Menachem Begin's personal bodyguard for about 20 years. So I understand certainly the trauma associated with that whole generation and those people. It was passed down to me. I heard never again from the time I was in the crib. I was not raised particularly religious. So, you know, this is always a, you know, you sent me a note and said, do you want to talk about what it's like being Jewish in America right now? And I was like, well, I don't know that I'm qualified to speak to that. I can't remember the last time I went to a temple. We're not raising our kids Jewish in any way. And yet somehow culturally, I'm entirely Jewish. I think I probably identify more with Jewish as someone who watched Seinfeld than as someone who studied Talmud. So there's, but like you, and I think it's a really good framing, this is just who I am, right? And our identity that we inherit is the one we just inherit. Of course, I may identify as Muslim tomorrow. I'll change that. But for the time being, this is what it is, right? I guess I'm looking around and I'm watching, I'm watching the world go crazy across a lot of different areas, right? Pick your topic. And this one seems to be one of the moment that's been bubbling for a few years and I hope we get into that. But I'm watching sort of, let's all oversimplify and just say half the people say, look around, it's the Jews. Why do you think they've been kicked out of 109 countries or whatever it is? And you see the other half saying, oh my God, we're so oppressed. Look, we've been kicked out of 109 countries. And I think that is the mechanism that I've become obsessed with. So it to me, it's either quite obviously, it's the Jews, or it's someone who wants us to think it's the Jews.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] Yeah, I'm watching the same dynamic. And I will say that it actually strikes at the heart of what I would have taken to be the core of Jewish identity, for lack of a better term. So the house I grew up in was really built around careful thinking. And we had arguments at the dinner table about things, some of which mattered, and some of which were just abstractions that were interesting puzzles. But what I understood, I mean, even just the fact you say that being Jewish is at the core of your identity, but you can't remember the last time you were in a temple. Well, Judaism is, I don't want to say the unique tradition, but maybe it even is. It's a tradition in which your relationship to the metaphysical claims is not central to what it is to be part of that tradition. You know, in most traditions, if you were to become an atheist, well, then you're no longer a Catholic or something like that. But for Jews, I always understood that we were kind of allowed to navigate our own relationship with the supernatural and that it still did not liberate you from the requirement to be very deliberate in your thinking. And after October 7th, like immediately after, which is one of the things that comes through in your piece, the nuanced thinking seemed to evaporate, you know, like isopropyl alcohol that you spray on the counter. It just vanished. And suddenly there was a perspective that you were expected to adopt. And if you didn't, you were morally suspect, which is already an analytical violation. The idea that your moral position is contingent on an analytical conclusion is just a non-starter where I grew up. So in any case, watching that happen has been very troubling for me. And one of the other things that you describe in your piece is that I've described this on many topics. And this one, it's especially clear that everybody seems to be running an algorithm where either you agree with the totality of their perspective or you're with the enemy. And the problem is if you try to be nuanced when that algorithm is running for people, you become everyone's enemy because you're not saying what any of them are saying. And instead of thinking, huh, that's interesting. Josh is a guy who has spotted difficult things early. If he's saying something different than what I'm saying, maybe I should think carefully about it. I could be wrong. That's my instinct. But it's at least worth my going back and checking my own math in order to see if he's trying to tell me something. Well, I don't see any evidence that that's what's going on. It's really just a question of teams and jerseys and accusations about character for anyone who doesn't fall into line. And that seems to me the opposite of the values that I was raised with.

Speaker 2:
[11:58] I'm the Yankees, you're the Red Sox. We hate each other. We have nothing in common. Everything you say I am opposed to, and I know you are opposed to everything I stand for. And as the algorithm takes more control of our thinking, it seems as if we keep getting sliced and diced, and eventually we're sort of atomized into our own unit of one. Staring at this screen, getting the preordained information that we're supposed to know based on our own pre-existing world view, right? So it seems as if the end, I get into a lot of this in the piece, I sort of open up with a dear friend of mine had a metaphor, not that long ago about how essentially if you lock me in a cage with a pit bull, I know I need to kill it before it kills me. But did it dawn on me who locked us in the cage together? And I sort of use that as a vessel for the story, right? So I've become obsessed with that idea. And it seems like the cage builders are very prevalent in our lives, particularly as we get disconnected with nature and our neighbors and eye contact and all that, and now most of our reality is filtered through an LED screen. So at this stage, the essay is really kind of about that. It's about the cage, certainly more than it is about me being Jewish, right? I'm fascinated with this topic of Jewish identity and what it means at this particular moment in time, because I think it's really, really important. But that said, that's the mechanism and it's applicable to lots of different topics, right? It's been the most obvious that's gone on now for forever, really, but it's been amplified over the last decade or so, is the left and right political reality, and all the culture wars that fall under that, whether it's the trans thing or whatever. Based on what you just said, I sort of realized that during Covid, right? And I think a lot of us had this experience in our own little necks of the world, some more public than others, right? And I thought, because clearly something was going on, right? There was fear in the air, and everyone just sort of followed the herd, and you have to assume the experts know. And I know you've talked extensively about all this through the last few years, and you've certainly been influential in not just what I think about it, but the way I think more so the way I think about it, right, and kind of zooming out. And it seems like every time you zoom out, you realize your aperture isn't quite wide enough to understand the magnitude of what we're dealing with. But I recall talking to some friends, you know, and realizing, well, hey, maybe these drugs aren't really tested, or maybe that mask doesn't work, or whatever the case may be. We all have our own unique Covid story. You would think, I'm a pretty reliable guy. Like I have a really good reputation in business and personally, and over that I can, you know, I'm in my 50s, right? Over decades. I am not someone who talks out of my ass, bluntly. And I would have thought that when I was ringing alarm bells, saying, there's danger here, pay attention. And I'm not going to tell you what to think, but here's a toolkit, right? Here's Peter Bregman's book, here's whatever, right? I got this, you know, just ears closed. And it didn't fit their frame of reality and the perspective that got played back to me through mutual friends or whatever was, Josh went crazy. And it was so reductive and so dismissive when, in fact, I was simply presenting a point of view that hadn't hurt. And in part, as you all know, it hadn't been heard because it was entirely filtered through the reality that's being constructed for us. So I guess when the 10-7 stuff rolled around, you know, it was early in the morning, I'm in the East Coast, it was early in the morning, our time. My wife was up and, you know, she, I woke up, I looked over there, she's like, oh my God, there was a terrible attack in Israel. And I just looked at her and said, medical freedom's toast. Because it was sort of instinctively, I just knew. And I'm on a bunch of message boards and one in particular that was vibrant. It was like a bunch of dissidents from New York that all found each other. And unlike, I mentioned it in the piece, but unlike a lot of these people, I was still attached to my friends and family. In fact, we're a strange group because we've never gotten, my friends never agreed on anything until Covid. And it sort of brought us together for the first time in a while. People on this board were mostly strange, like friends and family totally turned against them. The stories you've been talking about for years now. Literally, people sitting around making fun of the news and how ridiculous it is and mockingbird all of it, right? By that night, literally by that night, people quitting this message board in a huff, everyone reverted back to their priors. I hate you now. And oh, you're on that side and you're on that side. It's everything you just mentioned about the team. So it was truly disheartening. And I think now, we're two and a half years later and it's only amplified.

Speaker 1:
[17:18] Well, I don't know if you remember this or even encountered it. Frankly, I don't remember the exact context and whether you were present. But immediately after October 7th, A, I was alarmed that the story of October 7th didn't add up. And I think over time, the validity of those concerns has become evident to many more than it was initially evident to. But the fact that the story didn't add up, and the fact that it felt like a direct hit on the coalition that had grown up around Covid, a coalition that had unusual capacity to fight power. It had sort of learned on the battlefield that it had tools that the enemy couldn't deal with, that it had the ability to bootstrap capacities that were necessary to fight. That coalition was very powerful, and it played a big role in the 2024 election. So my thought was that coalition, whatever it is, is on Goliath's mind, because Goliath has been bruised by it. And then when it evaporated, as you point out, on October 8th, 2023, it felt like it was shattered. And I said, probably unwisely at the time, I said something to the effect of, I wonder if this is not an accident. And let's just say, in retrospect, I'm willing to accept that maybe that was a conjecture that was overly context-dependent because I had lived at the heart of the fight over Covid and I watched the coalition that I was so proud to be a part of destroyed in an instant. And the historical event that had destroyed it was in some way inorganic. I felt like this is about something, or at least potentially so. And then I took a lot of crap for that because it sounds paranoid and insane and in retrospect. It certainly, you know, I think it's incumbent on us to wonder about such things. We should consider all hypotheses and the ones that are easily dismissed, all the better. That simplifies the job. But anyway, I said it out loud. And you know, years later, I'm now trying to grapple with what part of that suspicion was actually well founded, maybe pointed at the wrong object, maybe the there was something, maybe it was understood by whatever participated in making that attack, what it was, or capitalized on it in the aftermath, or both. Whatever that thing was, has a general instinct about what serves its interest and the division, the inability of people who, as you point out, the day before would have mocked anything in the New York Times, were suddenly accepting the presentation as delivered. And if I can just say one more thing about it, I feel like there is a adaptive evolutionary mechanism for coming together and rallying around, I don't use this term pejoratively, but rallying around a myth when it is necessary to do so for survival. And I feel like that built-in mechanism is being artificially triggered in order to make sure that we can't point ourselves the right way down the battlefield.

Speaker 2:
[21:16] Yes, to all that. I can draw a straight line to another tragic event and use one of the taglines, which was, they hate us for our freedom. And it took me a minute, it took a dear friend of mine who was also my red pill for Covid, to demonstrate them with that. We're not going to get into the whole 9-11 thing. But when you start to understand that these stories are preposterous, like truly preposterous, the official story is a bigger conspiracy theory than the conspiracy theorists version of the story. Right. And again, we won't relitigate all that. But the fact that you're not even permitted to ask these questions without serious social consequence should be the reveal.

Speaker 1:
[22:06] Yes. And if I can sort of close that loop, I think what happened to Heather and me over Covid, it's a very interesting example of something. It's a very clean example because at the beginning of Covid, Heather and I pretty much accepted the story that we were told about this virus. In fact, when Heather and I were, we went into the Amazon, into a remote field station, about as remote as you can get, to finish our book. First draft of our book was completed as we were in the forest, disconnected from the world. And as we emerged from the Amazon, we came to a military checkpoint that you had to cross through, which was the first place that we had connectivity in weeks. And as luck would have it, the first case of Covid, I think in, the first acknowledged case of Covid, at least in South America, maybe it was in the New World, had emerged in Ecuador, where we were. So the news was sort of focused on what this virus was, and we were sort of had our attention called to it. And I thought, what's that? And it was like, oh, okay. A virus has emerged from a bat in China, and I had been a bat biologist in graduate school. And so I decided to check the story and just make sure it added up. And you know, I knew the family of bats in question. I looked at the basic claim, and I sent out a tweet that said, yeah, superficially, this story adds up. And I got an angry response from a longtime follower who said, so it's just a coincidence that this virus emerged on the doorstep of a BSL-4 laboratory studying these exact viruses. And I thought, what the hell don't I know? So I retracted, there's literally, it's almost exactly an hour, like almost to the second. I sent a second tweet that said, wait a minute, I don't know what I don't know. Let me dig deeper. And so anyway, my point is this, Heather and I started out ready to accept what we were being told about this global event. And as we pushed back on particular things that were clearly being presented in a way that wasn't accurate, the right response should have been, oh, okay, let's adjust the story. Let's, you know, let's get to the truth. That's what we're supposed to be about. And the reaction was the exact inverse. So the story over the course of several years was that as we took our biology toolkit and pointed it at Covid and looked at the things that didn't add up as presented, instead of the story getting better and more robust, what we got back was hostility, punishment, misdirection. And that tells the story. It says, this story is not about reality. This story is the cage you're describing. Somebody has put us in a cage and anybody who notices the cage and starts talking about the cage is the problem. And once you've seen that, once you've had the experience of being told, don't think about this, you know more or less where you are. Thinking about this is how you figure out how to get out of the cage and the people who built the cage need you in it. So we're going to threaten you until you give up that instinct.

Speaker 2:
[25:59] I think it's ridiculous that you think viruses are real. I'll just say that. You do. I'm just, I don't want to get the hate mouth from talking to you about viruses in the first place. I'm making a point, right?

Speaker 1:
[26:13] And it's, do you want to clarify your position?

Speaker 2:
[26:16] My position is my position on most things, which is I don't know. And I, you know, we got thrust into this thing, right? And yes, there were people like my friend who I mentioned were far ahead of me, 20 years ahead of me. And in terms of understanding that the institutions weren't just wrong about stuff that they were lying and suppressing actual truth, you know, truth, you know, verifiable truths, suppressing really important thinkers through, you know, through centuries and things of that nature. I guess my own, my own journey on some of this stuff is that I really thought I was a pretty awake person. You know, I knew like, you know, to question things like 9 11, like all the wars, let's just say that. I've questioned the wars, questioned the pharmaceutical industry, although I'm, I'm such a big jackass that when it, I wasn't paying attention at all during Covid, because like a lot of people, I was disoriented, right? So, you know, Covid hit, I lived in New York City. I owned a brewery there. I was just so grateful that we had a place about two hours north that we could escape to. I remember telling my wife, pack our bags, we may be there for a long time. I was following someone I knew who lived in China, warning me that this thing was coming. And I bought it. I was scared. You know, I got here and I wasn't really, I just, I knew there was a culture war going on. I wasn't even paying attention to it. I was so busy trying to hold my business and my family together with Duckgate. You know, working like 18 hours a day in a physical world business, trying to pivot to be an e-commerce company overnight, homeschooling my kids. We never had to wear masks because we live in the woods, which is now my full-time residence. It was only a little later. I was stupid enough. I got the first jab of J&J, literally rationalized it with, I've put so much shit in my body through the years. How bad could this be? Which is embarrassing to verbalize, by the way, particularly as a Covid dissident. It just makes me a fool and I'll own that. A friend of mine, I knew the mRNA was a thing, and truly I wasn't even paying attention to it. A friend of mine got me a copy of Breggen's book, which I had mentioned, and I went from zero to genocide in about five minutes. This makes no sense. The way my buddy, who is a scientist, explained it to me, and this was by the way, like a week after I had gotten jabbed. The way my buddy explained it to me, it's like trying to cure a headache with a gunshot to the face. Headache is gone.

Speaker 1:
[29:09] Except it wasn't even that good because even the claims of it being effective.

Speaker 2:
[29:14] Of course. But for me, so I was like, what the hell is going on? It shook me to the core. I started pulling back the layers and I've been interested in crypto for a while, and I was like, oh my God, they're doing vaccine mandates. I always wondered how they were going to usher in central bank digital currency. Oh, this is how they're going to do it. It all just kind of clicked. Then we started, I got together with a little study group that I'm still in five years later, that which is just some of my closest friends, and there's a couple of scientists and a doctor, and a couple of people that investigate fraud. It's a pretty eclectic group of people, but mostly the thread, the through line was just concerned parents, right? It's a bunch of concerned dads that were all sharing notes. We started pulling back the layers like, oh, wait a second, this is a financial crime, first and foremost. Then now, we know it's the greatest upward transfer of wealth, arguably, in human history. Eventually, you get to the great reset, and we kept zooming out further and further. Wait, Pearl Harbor is a false flag too? It's like you go through any moment in history. Now, forgive the expression, but I've gone full retard. I'm in the space where, and again, I can consider an idea without believing it, but I also know that I need to reopen the book on things that I thought was fully closed.

Speaker 1:
[30:45] Oh, I fully agree with that. Let me just say a couple of things in passing here. One, you're evidencing the key skill of the moment, and I'm increasingly obsessed with it. Acknowledging that you got stuff wrong is incredibly painful but necessary to coherent thought never has been more necessary than in our current moment because the ability for pure fiction, not myth that's useful, but pure fiction, to be passed off as fact has never been greater. The sophistication of the fiction mechanism is profound. So your ability to look at what you thought and say, yep, got that one wrong, don't love it, but it's causing me to reinvestigate other things that I was pretty sure of, that's the coin of the realm as far as I'm concerned. And it's an incredibly rare skill at this moment. People are punished for exploring it. So even people who have a primordial version of it are not elaborating that skill, they're retreating from it. So anyway, that's kind of, I think, why you and I are able to have this conversation. I got lots of stuff wrong and I'm investigating lots of things that I was pretty sure of. I'm alarmed to hear you say that Pearl Harbor was a false flag. And I'm hoping that you're about to tell me false flag is the wrong term, that the story is more complex and that the attack was known to be coming. Are you going to tell me that there was an actual false flag?

Speaker 2:
[32:37] I know I don't know. At a minimum, the story was far more complex and they knew the attack was coming. That much there is evidence of. So I don't think it makes sense for us that that's probably a host show into itself. Although you should do a false flag show on Dark Horse because I'm sort of at the point where my assumption is, if I'm reading about it in the New York Times, it is probably in some way at least manufactured or distorted at a minimum. And I'm far more interested in whatever they're not printing.

Speaker 1:
[33:11] Oh, 100 percent. As long as we are here, let me run something by you, just a model for how to think about these things. We have a unresolved conflict in civilization about how to think about what I will loosely call history. And the problem is, there are a bunch of realms in which two distinct things are filed under the same heading, and we keep tripping over ourselves over it. So to give you an example, psychology is a therapeutic art that is a replacement for a role that used to be played by friends and family and clergy. And it's now been turned into a commodity. We can argue about the wisdom of that. But the point is, that therapeutic art, psychology, flies under the same heading as an academic field in which we study cognition, and the two things have very little to do with each other, right? The person, the psychologist who sits in the chair and is able to help you understand your own predicaments so you can improve the quality of your life is not proceeding from what we know about cognition in the scientific sense, because in fact we know very little. So the problem with history is that history is two things. History is an academic discipline whose mandate is to discover what actually happened and why. History is also a set of myths that allow us to function. And I don't mean fictions. I mean there are myths about a people, who we are, who the founding fathers were, what it means about our values, what it means about our rights and obligations in the world. Those stories have a relationship to the truth. I assume that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Adams and all the rest existed. And I assume that their story is not made up. But I also assume that the picture that we hand over is really about functioning more than it is about the details that actually occurred. And so the point is the academic historians and the custodians of the myth are tripping over each other because we haven't agreed whether history is a functional phenomenon or an analytic phenomenon. So there is, I mean, you can see how that dynamic applies here. But there's a question about what one needs to believe and what's true. And we in the moment are in what I call the Cartesian crisis, where because the fiction engine, which is not about myth, myth is functional, fiction is lies, right? Now, obviously, there's fiction that is labeled as fiction in the bookstore. That's not what I'm talking about. But when the New York Times publishes lies to get you to behave in a way that's not good for you, but is good for whoever motivated the lying, that's a whole different architecture. It's something that should be resisted at all costs. And I don't know that it's true. But my guess is the New York Times at one time had a bias that there were always fictions in it that served the people who motivated them. But that it also had a truth-seeking element, which has more or less evaporated over time. And because the New York Times is a mirror for every other truth-seeking operation which has been captured and commandeered, we now are left chasing our own tails over stuff like do viruses exist, right? And at some point you question everything such that you're completely paralyzed by the fact that you're not sure of any of the basics, either at the level of myth or the level of analysis. You just don't know what you've been fed that's garbage.

Speaker 2:
[37:24] Yes. So, you know, it's cliche to say history was written by the victors, but it seems to be the case. I guess what I keep coming back to is two things. That one, the lies must be really, really significant for them to go to such great lengths to preserve them. Or the fictions, where I would use them interchangeably in this case. And two, what else are they lying about? Because the answers, which is why, at least from my mileage is, I need to consider that everything I thought I knew may not be true. And it does require some epistemological humility, because I realize that I'm a middle-aged man who actually doesn't know anything. I went through the Prussian school system and took Rockefeller medicine, and there's this architecture that in modernity we grow up with. And to your point, you talked about it in the psychology frame, but you can apply this broadly in terms of all the institutions. So yes, we've all been fed the same lines. And I think at this point, and you have a very unique ability to frame a particular thing in very accessible, simple terms. And I love the Cartesian crisis. I think it's perfect. I think it's a perfect explanation of where we are at this particular moment. And again, my 9-11 friend was like, hey, welcome to the party, man. Where have you been for 20 years? And to which I said, well, you convinced me that that story didn't make sense. I didn't understand. I thought it was to start a war. And it was about money. And then I started zooming out. I'm like, well, they control the printing press. So they actually control the unit. They don't just control the money. They just find what value is. So it has to be bigger than just that. And then, you know, when I said to him, of course, as well, the JFK people wondered what the hell took you so long. So, you know, but I think the thing is that the group keeps getting larger. There's like a crack of light. And it doesn't seem like anyone's going to the other side.

Speaker 1:
[39:38] Well, wait a second. I agree with this completely until October 7th. I think what you're, you know, the picture you paint where people wake up and they don't go back to sleep is true in general. But the unique thing about what happened in the aftermath of October 7th was that it actually did pull a huge number of people back across the line. And A, that's just an interesting fact of history. And B, I mean, I would say we're in an arms race at the very least, no matter what version of October 7th, you believe. We are in an arms race where even if the enemy is just simply capitalizing on events, the enemy is getting better at recovering its unwitting foot soldiers by delivering events that are targeted at particular locations in your psyche and to your earlier point. I was raised with Never Again 2, and as you say in your essay on the topic, the fact of Never Again in a analytical Jewish home came with an analysis of the fact that it could happen here. Right? It can happen here is an essential thing because what it means, it builds an alert mechanism. You must be alert to the things that tell you it is beginning to happen here. Because why? Because the people who survived were the ones who didn't tell themselves, this is bad, but it will pass. Those people died. And the people who said, holy crap, and fled, they lived. So I mean, I'm painting with too broad a brush. But we have that alert mechanism. And I think somebody found it. And because it's not rational, what it is is developmental. It was built in in childhood, and for good reason.

Speaker 2:
[41:51] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[41:52] But because it exists, it's a vulnerability. Somebody built a back door into your operating system, and then somebody found it. And anyway, there's more to say there, but I'm interested in your reaction to that.

Speaker 2:
[42:06] No, my reaction is I fell into my own trap. Right? So because, yes, I thought the wind was blowing one way, and 10.7 stopped me in my tracks. And I think the mechanism you're describing simply in one word is trauma. Right? So what I know you call it Goliath, I'll call it the cabal. You know, I care less about the definition. I know we're talking about whatever this force is, right? That understands humanity in a very profound way, intends to, I believe, exploit the very best of us or our best attributes, let's say, empathy, and tap into our worst, which is fear and trauma.

Speaker 1:
[42:50] Right?

Speaker 2:
[42:52] You know, I think that I don't doubt because I grew up how I did that my family's trauma was very real. I don't doubt that for a second. I understand, you know, when they used to wake up in the middle of the night in nightmares and watching your own relatives die, there's that will fuck you up forever, right? And I'm keenly aware of that. I think what the trick is, is to take the real grievances, you know, the historical grievances, the generational grievances, you know, the kind that people carry like deep, deep in their body and maybe aren't even aware of or don't even verbalize and then amplify them and aim it everywhere. To the point where you're, you're literally not allowed to talk about certain things because you, because you're deemed as anti whatever, anti-Semitic in this case, you know, anti-woman, anti-trans and insert your, you know, the flavor of the day. I'm at this stage. And it's also interesting because the smartest people I know, the quote unquote smartest people, the most successful people as deemed by societal standard seem to be the most susceptible in my observation. And I think that's because they, they think they have the toolkit to figure it out. They read, they read smarter books than you do. So you can understand it.

Speaker 1:
[44:16] I want to, I want to build on that for a second. You know, the joke, you will have heard it many times that, you know, every Jewish holiday comes down to the same thing. They tried to kill us. They didn't succeed. Let's eat. That joke contains a deep truth, I think, which is this, people, children who grow up in a war have immunities that the rest of us do not have, right? If the bomb started to fall around you right now, your primordial circuits would kick in and you would find yourself, I don't know, quivering under the desk, not sure how to even think about your next move. But if you've had bombs falling all around you, you've watched people blown apart, you can metabolize this so that you can act in a coherent way, right? It's just a natural fact of your developmental experience. And for soldiers or maybe more to the point for special forces folks, they're put through a training regimen that breaks their primordial response so that they can function well under circumstances that would render an ordinary person paralyzed. So Jews have a set of circuits to be analytical, to be funny, to use all the tools at our disposal under the most abominable of circumstances. That's part of the weird fact of being a diaspora population that faces persecution regularly. What has happened here is that a people that has that capacity has been triggered to do something else. And I'm going to talk neurologically here in a way that may be just pure myth. I'm not arguing that this is the literal neurological fact. But there's something that happens when people who are ordinarily rational and capable are triggered by a deep, especially a childhood trauma or maybe a generational trauma, which is that they start reacting out of their amygdala, right? A primordial self-preservation circuit kicks in and sidelines your other capabilities. And I think that's harder to do because Jewish homes do talk about never again, and it can happen here. It's harder to trigger this reflex into this not very effective, but you know, baseline self-protective fight-or-flight circuitry. But I feel like it's happened, right? The population of Jews, I mean, I can't speak to Israeli Jews, but I can speak to diaspora Jews. You and I both know many. And I feel like the majority have been snapped into a primordial reflex, even though the developmental experience that most of us have is, you know, to be calmer and more rational and more capable under the circumstances that would put other people into that framework.

Speaker 2:
[47:48] I mean, trauma hijacks the nuance of everything.

Speaker 1:
[47:52] Yeah, nuance is not possible when you're reacting.

Speaker 2:
[47:54] It's not possible. Certainty is a whole lot cheaper than complexity. We can digest it in tiny little nuggets and the little slogans they provide for us, right? So, I mean, this is the core of, I think, the whole thing, right? And again, we're talking about this particular thing that was triggered. And I keep going back, and this might sound weird, but my little study group, remember when Kanye West came out and talked, and I mentioned this in passing in the piece, remember when Kanye West came out, it was in 2022, and the anti-Semitism seemed back in vogue. And I remember we had a couple of friends, like, my son, where's the Kanye shoes? Should he be allowed to? Which is also an interesting question unto itself. But our little study group was starting to, I guess at the core, the main thing we've been exploring is the notion of social engineering, right? And you and I may or may not agree on this point, right? I don't have your evolutionary biology lens, right? You've forgotten more today than I'll ever know in a lifetime about that.

Speaker 1:
[49:00] That's generally wrong, but thank you.

Speaker 2:
[49:03] It's not really. Like I'm a dude who sits in the woods and studies this weird stuff. But I have understood that much of what we see on the public stage, I don't want to go so far as to say it's entirely scripted, but it's certainly steered. And this could be a longer conversation than to itself, and I won't get into all the detail, but the gist is that there are people and organizations that have existed for at least a hundred years that have been seeding ideas into our consciousness, and they have evolved as the technological mediums have evolved, right, from radio, from print to radio to television, and now, of course, to that algorithm machine that is going to put us in our own little atomized unit, as I said. So as you think about how that evolves, I remember light bulbs started going off when Kanye was being anti-Semitic. Why is this happening now? We were in the middle of a lot of research on mind control and MKUltra, which again, might be a little out there for some of your audience, but it's a thing that's existed for centuries. It was perfected post-World War II in the United States. There's congressional record of this thing. We started digging into Kanye, and as it turns out, the guy, his trainer, who reported him had a very direct connection to Canadian Special Forces Psychological Operations Military, which sounds a whole lot like maybe it's related to mind control, at the very place where the MKUltra programs were created 60, 70 years ago. So, this is interesting. Is anti-Semitism about to come back in vogue? Then 10-7 happened. It's like, oh yeah, Kanye the Influencer was a party to this in some way, and maybe that's a coincidence, and that's not lost on me. I know when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but that one stuck out a little bit of a thumb, that it was a little bit ahead. By the way, same trainer allegedly convinced Elliot Page to become crowned. You start to see, I would say at the core, what I try to do is spot patterns. If you zoom out far enough, you can see certain patterns. I'm not sure what they all mean, but I sense that there's a bunch of signal around some of this stuff. I think on this particular issue, it is so deeply loaded for families like yours and mine, that we stick out like a sore thumb because we're willing to pull back some of the layers and say, Well, is that my genetic programming or my programming through my upbringing at the dinner table? Or is that what grandma told me? Or I don't know, or is it something else? And it's weird. It's really weird. Like again, to your point, like people who are really rational and understand the game, seem to slip right back into this one. And again, I just want to say for the record, which seems to be a misconception, whether it's technically a false flag or just a misrepresented story, and I don't know the detail on all this stuff, right? Whether it's Pearl Harbor or 9-11 or 10-7, there's clearly a manipulation of the truth and a suppression of a part of the story. I don't know exactly what it means, but I'm also not suggesting that it's fake. I know with all this stuff, all of them, there is real tragedy and there is real loss, and people really do suffer, like real suffering, death and destruction from all these false flags. But the thread through them all is that they're trauma events. I would even throw the assassination of JFK in there. In the mind control thing, I had a whole thing about OJ Simpson being the first one of these that we saw. Because if you recall, do you remember the division in the reaction after the OJ trial depending on your race?

Speaker 1:
[53:12] I am trying to remember. I think Heather and I were out of the country in Latin America. And so we saw something very different than Americans who were at home saw.

Speaker 2:
[53:24] What did you see?

Speaker 1:
[53:26] Well, I'm trying to remember it because neither Heather nor I speak Spanish well. So it's not like we're embedded in that culture in anything other than a superficial way. But we did see the kind of filtered reaction that makes it, you know, used to be newspapers that made it to, I can't remember. I think we were in, we were in Central America somewhere. But anyway, point is what I got from it, which may not be an accurate representation, was that the, the defense attorneys in the trial successfully and not without a certain amount of justification triggered a sense of righteous indignation amongst blacks and people who profoundly sympathize. Because what happened was, you had an actual Nazi sympathizer on the LAPD involved in the mishandling of evidence. And so at some level, it stopped mattering whether or not the evidence actually nailed him beyond a reasonable doubt, because the point is the whole thing was unfair. So even if you're guilty and then you're prosecuted by a unfair system that really is evidencing racism, then that becomes maybe the primordial concern. And so you had a kind of a jury nullification of a compelling case. And I will just add one other nuance, which is I think the prosecutors misunderstood a piece of evolutionary biology, which if they had consulted somebody who knew what they were talking about, they would have spotted coming, which is that they expected the femaleness of jurors to override the racial identity. And there's a very good reason that they should have expected that not to work. And anyway, so I obviously have my own frame. It's not what most people experience, but that's what I saw.

Speaker 2:
[55:49] Fascinating. Those were Jewish lawyers, right? I wonder that wasn't so easy. Fish in a barrel. Yeah, the point I was making, you have a really interesting perspective on that, that's certainly more evolved than mine. But the point I was making was that there was, I just remember the slit screen of a bunch of white people reacting and looking completely destitute over this as if the system failed them, and a bunch of black people jumping for joy as if they were vindicated. Which you went the layer back into the mechanism which may have caused that, which is fascinating. My point is less about the what happened and why. And was this a layer of social engineering on its own? When I think we got on the topic on trauma, I think about these big public events that are made for TV as big trauma vessels that are all delivered to us. And until 70 years later in 2001, that was our generation's JFK moment. We all knew where we were. You were out of the country, so maybe you didn't. But those of us living here knew where we were when the OJ chase was happening. And then it played out every single day. And it was, you know, that was before all the media was totally fractionalized, right? And there were mass media stories that everyone was getting, and everyone was getting the same version. And this was really, really interesting. And again, I won't turn this into a thing about OJ Simpson, although I think the topic is really interesting. You know, if you go back in time, right, just before that, there were some other things happening societally. And I look at a lot of this through the lens of pop culture, right? So I remember on the, you know, the sort of, you know, the black person side, I remember like Boys in the Hood and Gangster Rap. And that was, you know, I'm part of the first generation of suburban white kids to listen to hip hop. So I remember being really into that, really, you know, and listening to it ironically and thinking it was awesome. But I knew that that was people's real sort of lived experience using the parlance of our times. On the other side, I remember like Rush Limbaugh was on The Ascent. And if you remember film called Falling Down with Michael Douglas, which was like the, you know, the down and out, you know, white guy and like Ruby Ridge and Waco. And I don't know, I start to think about all these things in these clusters of how they happen all around the same time. And, you know, is this just emerging and then, you know, there's sort of an output and we think about these things because they happened or were they seeded into our, even subconsciously into our psyche to believe a certain thing. And then when there is an output, whether it's engineered or not, we react in a way that has been programmed into us.

Speaker 1:
[58:39] Yeah, we're predisposed to a reaction. So even if it's actual events unfolding, the reaction is inorganic.

Speaker 2:
[58:47] That's right. And I've come to believe, I want to go deeper on your thoughts on the emergent thing. Because I think that, from what I've heard, and I haven't listened to read your whole catalog on this, but I've heard you say things like there's emergent behavior that's happening. And I certainly think the reaction is emergent based on our own experiences growing up, our media diets, our relationship with the world, our neighbors, our friends, whatever, right? But I think there's a kernel that's seeded. And I think anyone who gets into this social engineering stuff and starts looking in understands that, yeah, there were certain things that were plugged in well, and usually through the various tentacles of politics and culture and even science. And it's really, really unnerving when, you know, because as a species, and you'll probably correct me and tell me the reasons I'm wrong, I think we're mimics, right? Like I'm a father, so I could have theoretically, I could have taught my kids from the time they were very little. You know, we eat dinner and then we go outside and we go cuddle with the trees. That's part of our routine. That's what we do. And they just lived with me and they didn't have other outside influence. They would probably go cuddle with the trees because that's what our family does. And I just wonder how much of this, and I'm not saying everyone's in on it because I understand that that would be an impossibility, but I do think there are people playing their roles. And I do think at the very top, there are kernels being planted. And maybe they're loose. They're steering us in a very particular direction across a bunch of different topics. Again, I've heard you and Heather talking about the trans stuff. And I think that's maybe the most obvious example. Because for millennium, there was no question about, it was not offensive to say are you a man or a woman? And somewhere along the line, and you can look at the charts and it just sort of spikes somewhere, that became a controversial topic. And that's insane. I mean, I see that.

Speaker 1:
[61:12] It's like a flex.

Speaker 2:
[61:14] It's a flex. And that's not to take away, I know gender dysmorphia is a real thing. And that's not to take away someone who legitimately feels like they're trapped in the wrong body. My heart aches for someone like that. Because I know that that's, you know, that's its own version of trauma. But like my wife, we fled Brooklyn and, you know, live in the Hudson Valley in New York now. And my wife went for a walk with one of her friends from Brooklyn, not that long ago. And this person said that in their daughter's fancy private school, 50%, that's five zero percent of the freshman girls in high school identify as something other than a girl. So, in our day, those kids would have painted their nails black and they would have been called goth or something. And like the next semester, they'd come back and try something new on. And that's like, I don't care, ultimately. Except when you start getting to the intervention level, right? And again, back to the topic, right? It's more about the us and them thing. So, like that, that's the nuance that I'll present. I guess trans people are people. It should have all of the rights of human beings and all of the empathy that they deserve. But at the same time, we're not going to rewrite the rules of society. But that is not an allowable position to hold in some sections of polite society.

Speaker 1:
[62:41] Well, the reason that that one is so important is that it's not even the rules of society. It's the rules of biology and they have nothing to do with humans at all. They go back 500 million years at a minimum. So, I say it's a flex because the point is if you can break people's ability to identify reality at that level, you've got amazing capacity. But to your larger point about things being seeded, I think the important thing is to realize there are those who will want to dismiss these patterns as entirely emergent. Those people are clearly wrong. There may be cases, but there is a degree of orchestration of events, right? The false flags that are very clear, like Tonkin Golf. Those are created events for a purpose. Then there are other events presumably where something organically happens, but either in the run up to it, something has been seeded or they're steering in the aftermath. But point is the majority of all of these things is an organic response to inorganic things. I went back and I watched Wag the Dog sometime in the last year. I wish it had been a better movie. There's a part of me that is now... I even wonder if it was not a better movie because that makes it harder to understand what's going on. But the idea that, if you'll remember, you've got a phony war and support is somehow generated through the phony story of a downed airman who's sending messages to his mom by ripping holes in his shirt that are in Morse code and his name is something like shoe, like S-H-O. And they cook up a song about something like an old shoe, like a song from the 20s or something, and they put it in the Library of Congress so that it's discovered. And the point is, oh, this is, somebody scripted this carefully behind the scenes, but the reaction of the public is not scripted. The reaction of the public is predictable.

Speaker 2:
[65:18] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[65:19] Right. And so, we, the predictable public, are constantly being jerked around by, at best, people taking advantage of organic events, and often people creating events or seeding things in advance of events. And the skills, I think skills that you and I both have, where we're willing to question all of those levels, did the event actually happen, okay, it happened. Did it happen as part of a plan? Was the timing chosen? Was the nature of the event chosen? Was the reporting of the event written before it happened? Those are not easy questions to ask. You call your own credibility into question when you do. But from the point of view of building a model of the present that actually works, you have to have that skill set, which means you have to be able to stare down the stigmas and suspicions that come back at you when you start to question that which others feel, or de facto feel, are sacred.

Speaker 2:
[66:29] You have to get really comfortable in your own skin and being very, very okay with being ostracized in your social groups, in your professional groups. Again, I'm very lucky that my family and friends, my closest friends, all trust me and know me, and they can call out that I sound like a lunatic, but laughing. And in Covid, I remember thinking, like, I hope I can look back in a year from now or five years from now, and it'll be like, oh, yeah, that was just the time Josh waved out. And I hope to be wrong about all of this. But when the evidence all points one way, it's really, really hard to come to terms with that. And there are some people that I know, and I'm sure you have a similar experience, that I feel like are gone. They're gone forever, and they're not coming back. And I, rather than trying to maintain those relationships, I've taken the approach that I will honor the memory of what we had, but we no longer look at life through the same frame in any way, right? Like we are living completely, completely fractured realities, where, you know, I say north, and they say south, and not because I said it, because that's what their, you know, that's what their media intake is telling them, even if it defies their own eyes and ears. That's the scariest part to me.

Speaker 1:
[67:54] Well, it's a zombie movie where, you know, the fact that the body of somebody that you knew and loved has come to your door, you know, because they've been taken over by the thing, it's not the same person, you know, or, you know, the example I've used elsewhere, you know, is a rabid dog. It really doesn't matter what your relationship with that dog had been. It's now a rabid dog.

Speaker 2:
[68:23] Brett, do you remember, did you read or watch Game of Thrones?

Speaker 1:
[68:26] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[68:27] So like, I feel like when I see people arguing about, you know, candidates, politics or what, or like stupid culture stuff, I feel like they're in Westeros, right? And they're arguing the order of the day. And I just see the white walkers coming. Like they're getting past the wall and they are multiplying. And there needs to be, and this is why I think, again, back to the topic, I think that's why 10-7 was so important, because there was a resistance building up that was maybe the most beautiful organic thing I've seen in my lifetime. Learning what I've learned about social engineering, like these were the real dissidents that understood what was happening.

Speaker 1:
[69:09] So you're not, just to be clear, because people are going to misunderstand what you said. The dissidents are the dissidents in the West who had fought Covid and then 10-7 destroyed their ability to understand each other.

Speaker 2:
[69:23] Correct. Thank you for clarifying. Are you familiar with the Tavistock organization?

Speaker 1:
[69:30] A little, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] So I feel like this, and this is probably a whole show into itself, so we'll just touch on it for a moment, but I think it's really, really important. And to me, I didn't know much about them. And this was like the, I think this is one of the most important organizations in the world that almost no one has ever heard of. It started World War I with shell shock soldiers, what we now call PTSD. And there's a George Carlin bit in there somewhere. But the gist is they were, the exact phrase was, they figured out how to create psychologically controlled environments designed to give up firmly held beliefs under peer pressure. That is literally what this organization studied. And they got some of the best behavioral psychologists in the world and the Frankfurt School and all these brilliant minds together, again, under the guise of working with soldiers. And then it turned into a whole bunch of stuff, including mind control and others. And I now start, this is why I'm really obsessed with the culture piece. Because there are certain things like firmly held beliefs that I have, right? That I wonder, that I still have, frankly, all people should be created equal. That's a really important one, right? And even like, when I learned, say, Gloria Steinem was affiliated with the CIA, right? Doesn't make her bad, but it does ask some, it does propagate some questions for me about what that agenda was, right? The whole entirety, and this was, this was a big one for me, the understanding like, you know, Laurel Canyon, you mentioned, you know, Gulf Tonkin, right? The commander of the ship of Gulf of Tonkin, who led that thing, I think he was an admiral. His father or his son was Jim Morrison. Right? And that's one example, and that could be, in fairness, that could be, okay, this guy is rejecting his military father, and the list goes on and on and on. Like, you know, David-

Speaker 1:
[71:32] At some point, the number of data points is too many to be easily explained away. And I will say that the- sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but the problem with theorizing about conspiracies is A, you have to have the proper toolkit. You can't come up with a conspiracy theory. You come up with a hypothesis, and then it makes predictions. And if it's actually true, eventually it matures into a theory. But it is proper to say, theorizing. But the problem is that the rules of logic, Occam's razor does not function well in the land of conspiracy because there's always a cover story where the dots are meant to connect and tell a simpler story. And so conspiracy theorists who are good at it have to not fall into connecting every dot because some of those dots aren't, some of them are noise, and some of them are seeded to create an impression. And the zone gets flooded with false conspiracy dots that are meant to be connected by those who aren't very good at it. And so that's an unusual toolkit.

Speaker 2:
[72:35] Yeah, we definitely need the, that we need to understand that we are being manipulated at all times, right? So that's, I think that's an important part of the toolkit. We need to actually learn stuff, which is really, really hard for some of us because we didn't know anything about history, about science, about civics, whatever the topic, right? We need to be able to have the ability to hold competing thoughts in our head. We need to learn how to go to primary source material and not get the filtered version of everything. In many instances, certainly for me, I needed to rewire my assumptions of what I thought to be true. You're doing a basic algebra problem and they're the givens. What if your givens are totally wrong? Your everything flows downstream from there. I think there's another topic that I'm particularly interested in. There's a writer named Jason Horsley who calls it the parasocial layer. We saw it in Covid. There's this notion of taking public figure who doesn't know you, but you know them and you may play this role for someone as a public figure, and you tend to outsource your thinking to that person. Why wouldn't we? We live in a society where you can get door dash in two seconds, and you can get over. We outsource everything. Of course, we're going to outsource our thinking. I think the distinction from maybe the old days and our parents' generation to today is like, Walter Cronkite used to get on TV, and of course, we now know that was like Mockingbird, media era, not to pass judgment, particularly against Walter Cronkite, but everyone at least heard the same propaganda. Go further back, go back to like, you know, Caesar era. The town crier would come and say, hear ye. Everyone probably heard a whole bunch of bullshit, but at least they heard the same bullshit. So they had a common frame. They had empathy for each other. Today, we've got these lines. And wait a second, Bret, didn't you just go on the Tucker Carlson show? You're a Jew. How dare you? He hated the Jews. It's so stupid, right? And I certainly have opinions on some of these people and some of these topics. I am far less interested in the messenger than I am what they might have to say and understanding, back to your point, like what their toolkit is. So what are they presenting and why? Are they showing their work, right? Don't just tell me what you think, show me your work and why. And I think to your point about, like, the, you know, how do we operate as conspiracy theorists in, you know, in this weird era of the Cartesian crisis, we have to either decide to roll up our sleeves and try to understand the world around us. Another option is to just unplug from it all and go outside and look at the sun. And it's probably the way healthier option. And I aspire to do that, and I can't always bring myself to it, or be a muppet. And know someone's controlling your strengths and just not care. So I'm probably oversimplifying. There's probably flavors of all of those things.

Speaker 1:
[75:55] Well, I think there's a taxonomy here that we could productively at least put on the table. I've come to the conclusion very much in line with what you've just said, that it's probably more important that we read the books in common than that we read the best books. That everybody having their own experience of how to think is deranging in a way that's not sustainable. And I'm not arguing that you should read garbage books. But the point is the top quality books may not be as important as having the same set of songs, the same set of stories, the same version of events, so that you can just simply function. But I want to point out that this parasocial thing is actually much worse than that portrayal makes it out. So somebody proxies their thinking to you because they see you on a screen and you seem to be making sense. That's not the craziest thing to do in the world. In fact, it is how normal thinking is done. And this is in fact exactly why Descartes had the crisis that he had was that he realized that almost everything that he thought was a fact he was taking on some kind of cryptic authority. Somebody reports it as a fact and you take it in and you build on it. And my point would be that our relationship to somebody who seems sensible on a screen is not unlike the relationship of scientists to the version of their field that's presented in the textbook. And I know as a biologist, the textbook is wrong on many, many issues where we refuse to acknowledge that it's just a model and we refuse to update it when the evidence becomes overwhelming that the model is in fact more counterproductive than it is informative. And so anyway, we have this relationship to truth necessarily that is based on a cryptic kind of authority because we don't have a choice. We can't run all the experiments ourselves. Most of us wouldn't know how to do it and you just don't have nearly enough time to cover almost any of them. So that parasocial relationship is normal functioning. And what I would suggest is that we have various different categories. There are things that are true that we know presumably. There are things that are approximations of truth that are good enough for us to make progress. There's stand-ins for the truth, you know, like the traditional version of cell biology that's presented in the textbook. There's a lot of truth in it, but it's not true as presented. But you can do a lot of good work if you just simply say, okay, here are the assumptions and I'll go forward. But at some point, the wrong part of the assumptions becomes overwhelming and the model starts misleading you and you should abandon it. And our resistance to abandoning it means that what we have are fictions that stand in for approximations without being true themselves. And so that's what we're seeing in the social layer, is our understanding of where we are in history and what's going on is maybe mostly fiction, serving somebody else's interest at our expense. And that is an emergency. That's not you're dealing with an approximation and you should understand that. That's you're dealing with lies serving someone else's interest at your expense. And it can result in you contracting a surgeon to sterilize your child thinking that you're doing something good for them.

Speaker 2:
[79:46] Okay, so a couple of quick reactions to that. So first of all, I agree with you. And yes, you should be able to trust your doctor as the expert in a particular thing because we cannot all be expert in probably any more than one or two things in our lives. You can go. And I remember like when I started waking up during Covid and exploring mRNA and reading science papers, I had never done that before. If I were to look through deep, deep, direct research, like most people, I would read the headlines about it, right? Or even the whole article, right? And that was some. And now as I've met, you know, some of the really crappy people that cover themes like this, you start to understand why you shouldn't trust their judgment. There's some really good ones too. And I've had the great fortune of coming across some over the last few years. The problem with some of it, and I think climate is probably the biggest example, is you don't get the whole story. There may be truth, there may be actual things that are happening, but there's a whole other perspective that you're not aware of. Right? And in our little study group that I mentioned, there's a climate scientist who's like a dear friend of a dear friend. And we went out for some drinks. And I was like, all right, dude, are we in peril? Tell me. This is like 2021. So no, there is no danger. Any climate scientist worth their salt understands this. But if I say that publicly, I lose tenure at university. And I got to the whole thing about how he's a coward. He's got to speak out, but he's got kids to support. I get it. And not everyone is wired that way. So I think that's, there's one thing of like the lying by omission even among partial truths. I think the other thing, particularly as it relates to some of the current events, and particularly as it relates to the topic that spawned your interest in talking about this, is at this moment in time, there are a lot of influencers, and I'll use that term in the loosest sense. Some of them are journalists, some of them are politicians, some of them are just public figures because they are, and I'm not quite sure why they are, but they have ascended to have a really large voice. These people, I believe some of them, and the hard part is figuring out who, and again, I don't really care who they are ultimately. I do, but it's not even something I talk about or write about because I'm less interested in the individual heroes and villains, and I'm more interested in just getting to the root of the truth. But I think there is a little bit of a Pied Piper strategy happening here, that there are some folks that are sort of luring us to follow, and again, I'll cite Jason Horsley, I think is the architect of this particular term, but the second matrix, right? So if the first matrix is the New York Times reading, or Fox News listening, like I'll use those as mirror of one another. But you're sort of at the root of the basic of like, all right, this is good guys and bad guys, and we're going to take it at face value. The second layer is, all right, you will go from mainstream media and there's this thriving alternative media ecosystem. And oh yeah, my flavor is Candace Owens, and you must like this person over here. And again, it doesn't matter. And I'm not questioning Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or any of the individual people, because I'm more interested in following their train of thought and what they have to say, and what facts they're going to reveal. Privately, maybe with my friends, I'll question what their upbringing or schooling might be. But I think it comes down to, like, are you evaluating evidence or you're following characters? And that's the truth, ultimately. So if you're just following the characters, in particular, I think there's a particular danger in people that were right about a lot of stuff, because were they building their credibility over a period of time? And if there's anything I've learned about, I'll call it this game being played, right, or about Goliath as you'd frame it, right? They have a bizarrely long time preference. Right, so something pops up, and again, I'll go back to the Kanye example. Maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist, and I'm seeing things that don't exist. It's like a year before 10-7. That was, it wasn't even that long. You could look at other examples of things being seeded in our consciousness, and something happens later. And again, you rightly point out that could just be capitalizing on someone's pre-existing belief on a real event, or it could be something else. So, I don't know, there's a lot of layers to this, and this psychological operation runs so deep that even talking about it now with you, I must sound like a raving madman, right? Like it's, there are things that I say to people in my life that if someone said them to me pre-2020, I would have told them they sound like a lunatic. But I take really good notes, and I'm happy to share them always.

Speaker 1:
[84:41] Well, you do a very good job of making it clear how you've arrived somewhere, which is actually brings me to my point in response to your last point. I'm particularly concerned there's a stripe of dissidents that wants to go after those of us who got things wrong along the way. And the problem is their point is, look, being right is the point of the exercise. Why would you listen to somebody who didn't spot this or that? And here's my concern. There was a way to get Covid right from the beginning. It involved, well, maybe there are two ways. One way is to just be a cynic. If you disbelieve everything reflexively, you nailed Covid. Because it was garbage at almost every level. That does not establish that you have insight. You have one insight. There's a lot of bullshit out there. And if you bet against things that are being said publicly being true, you just rack up some wins. But what you want is a track record. And a single correct call, they're always lying, is not a track record. You know, it may be a decent... It's a good heuristic, no. It's a good heuristic if what you're trying to do is not get suckered. But it's paralytic and it's not insightful. So I'm not arguing that there's nobody in the category who got it all right, who did so from a deep model. There might be. But in general, you don't want the cynics to shout down the people who learned painful lessons and got smarter over time, because the people who learned painful lessons and got smarter over time have a model that's actually useful.

Speaker 2:
[86:38] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[86:39] So somehow we got to ignore the cynics. If people got everything right from the get-go from a model, okay, those are people I want to listen to. But it's hard to distinguish them from the cynics if basically what they did was the cynics batted against everything just because it's a reasonable guess. And the people working from a deep model arrived at each of these conclusions based on something important.

Speaker 2:
[87:08] I struggle with this because I look at my own blind spots and how I've gotten suckered at various times and not just go over various things in my life throughout the years. And I'm a failed pessimist, right? I'm an entrepreneur. You sort of have to be blindly optimistic in some way. And you also have to hold a deep, deep level of cynicism for power that I thought I had. And it was impossibly humbling to realize that I wasn't nearly cynical enough. But that doesn't also mean you have to be a doomer, right? And I know around the time of the election, there were people in my life and some people that we mutually know who would say things to me like, hey, you're being a black pill. And I would say no, just because I'm not 100% sure I understand what's happening here around these party lines. And I personally think voting is like Santa Claus for grownups. When I came to that conclusion over a long period of time, and I don't say that lately, right? So when I got to that conclusion, that also doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a doomer, and I think the world's going to end. It just means that I don't want to rely, I don't want to outsource my agency to someone else who is going, the cavalry is going to come and save me. Right? And again, I know I don't know, right? As it relates to the current administration, I had this mental frame. You know, I didn't know, like if you're my age, if you grew up in this part of the country, you thought you had a sense of who Donald Trump was, right? He's a, you know, I knew the Woody Guthrie song about his father. Like, you know, he's this second generation real estate guy who saw something, it was opportunistic. And I've come to believe that that's just silly, right? There's a lot in his background and his history. And he's sort of like the Forrest Gump of the Cabal, right? Like he's somehow connected to everyone always, and has always been around. And I didn't notice it at the time. Now let's think it's sort of one of three things. He is either like we're watching a professional wrestling match, and, you know, he's the heel, or, you know, that's one option, like he's the heel and he's on their side and has been on their side the whole time. And they, like when you were doing, you know, Rescue the Republic because you saw a genuine threat, which was real, I wondered, like, is this, is any reasonable person that understands and understands, like, that didn't forget everything that just happened in the whole world, is this like where we're being led, right? And this was like the only, yes, it's our only other choice because the system is never been broken anyway, and that's a long conversation, but that's sort of one, right? Two is maybe he's a dueling bad guy, right? And he clearly knows a whole lot more than I ever understood. And he also speaks in riddles and like weird stuff, like I won't get into detail, but you remember like when he famously tweeted Ko-fi-fe?

Speaker 1:
[90:08] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[90:10] So one of my interests is I'm trying to understand like technology and its role on our bodies and stuff like that. Our kids are mad at us because we make them put these little devices in Faraday bags at night and we don't let them wear air buds. I said, Dad, all our friends are not going to get brain cancer. I'm like, well, grandma was told to smoke cigarettes, so we don't know. I came across this bond that allegedly protects you from 5G radiation. I don't know if this is true or not, so I'm not going to present it as a truth, but it was on like an official science thing that was like cobalt, vanadium, and double bonded iron, which just so happens to spell ka-fee-fing. What the hell? This is so weird. It's not a one-off thing that draw me to this conclusion, but I know his uncle John, as in Donald J. Trump, was like the guy who exclusively got all Tesla's papers. There's just a lot of weird stuff. I don't know what it means, but I know it's not what they told me. The third option, which I think would be the funniest from my vantage point is like a New Yorker, is that he's the hero of the world. That he's the hero of the world, and that it's the Q story, basically. And I've got a good friend who is not the architect who I thought Q was. He's like a 60-year-old brilliant doctor from New York City who is not some dude living in the woods and wherever, who is all in on the Q story. Many times something happens in the news, including the current Iran War, which I'm not qualified to get into a lot of detail about. He gives me the map of why this is going to save the world and why we are defeating the globalists. And it's almost like a case study. It's fascinating to me. I can still hold a percentage chance on my head that maybe he's right, although that window maybe is closing. But it's fascinating how people can watch the same events and have totally different takeaways. And it's not just opposite. It's fractured across a landscape, but it's a collage of takeaways that are all predisposed based on who we were five minutes before we heard it.

Speaker 1:
[92:32] Yeah, I agree with this and it fits very well with the argument you make in your piece, which I want to return to as we wrap up here. You lay out a case in your piece that I had not heard or put together before. So there's a lot in your piece that resonates. You wrote it very well, but I feel like I could have written something that would have made the same points. But this one I would not have written, and it made a lot of sense to me. I want you to articulate it, and it has to do with how to think about the role of Jews as we're watching power do its thing, and all of these Jewish names clearly associated with it, Zionism clearly associated with it. And anyway, you want to lay out your case because I've been fighting the battle of, look, anybody who says the Jews is obviously just wrong. Right? You and I are Jews. You and I are not involved in some conspiracy to control the world. Therefore, it ain't the Jews. That's a non-starter. But what do you make of the presentation that is delivered to the public where you see an unmistakable pattern of Jews involved in steering the US, steering world events, some kind of control architecture?

Speaker 2:
[94:06] Well, first, I'll just acknowledge that it's, I want, I hope you get a comment that Bret Weinstein and Joshua Stylman are declaring it's not the Jews. So I really hope you get that comment. Yeah. I think there's, and this is, there's this notion that there's an ancient setup here, right? Haffyude, I think it's called, where it's the court Jew, essentially. So like going back, you know, Christian nobility and medieval, in medieval Europe had Jewish financiers as the front, right? And this, this is, this is a thing. And that system works great until it doesn't, right? And then eventually the scapegoat mechanism kicks in. And the rage, historically speaking, the rage has gone to the Jews, not the structure, right? And then, you know, and again, that goes back to like, you know, the comment I made earlier about the 109 country thing, right? So it's the, oh, yeah, why do you think they've been kicked out of 109 countries? And I think the people that I said were like, yeah, why do you think we've been kicked out of 109 countries? Are the people like you and I that didn't get the memo, right? So Arendt called it the appearance of power without its substance, right? And I think that's, I think that's a particularly interesting quote that I put in the piece. It's like, it's visible enough to blame and never protected enough to survive, right? And if you keep, if you keep kind of going through, like there's a lot of layers here and there's a whole other conversation just about the Holocaust, which is the third rail. And, you know, I'm, I'm already, you know, in my little local community considered an anti-Semitic for a lot of reasons, which is awesome. But in 18, it's very well-documented, like in 1891, before political Zionism was even a thing, there were Americans who were non-Jewish and I think Christian, Rockefeller and JP Morgan and, you know, the sort of, you know, Bill Gates and whoever of that time. Editors of The New York Times and The Post and all of the same media publications we're talking about, they signed something called the Blackstone Memorial. And that was pushing for Jewish immigration to Palestine. And I didn't know this. This never, this never was on my radar. I don't even know if my family knew about it. I grew up hearing about the importance of Israel as a thing. And reflexively, even in the last few years, if I question Israel or question 10-7, how dare I, I often get back, well, do you think Israel is a right to exist? Which is that pre-programmed response. And it's like, well, I think that's not the question I'm really asking. Well, what is the question? So what's particularly interesting in this 1891 thing was that, as I understand it, most American Jews actually oppose this. So there was this scapegoat infrastructure that was being built, and it was by the financial elites. And you touched on something earlier. I forget the exact way you said it, but who is this all designed to serve, I think is the most important question in this framework we can all think about, qui bono? Who benefits? So you could think about even your day-to-day life. I was at the bank recently, and someone was just yelling at the teller. I was annoyed that I had to go to the bank in the first place. As it turns out, I had a similar issue to the person that was yelling at the teller. This poor lady is just trying to do her job, and she works for JP Morgan. I'm listening to this guy, and I understand he was frustrated. I'm like, you're not mad at this lady just trying to help you that clearly doesn't want to not help you. You're taking it out on this particular thing. And I don't know, there's clearly a visible layer, and I've seen both sides of it, right? So you see the one side of the like, oh my God, look around, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Fink, and Bill Soros, or George Soros, right? And the other side is just in denial about that over-representation. And I guess the nuanced point of view is like, the over-representation is so obvious, right? And again, I'm really hung up on the culture thing, because I think it's important, particularly in an era where, you know, you said read the same books. I know a lot of people that don't read books at all, right? And they get their entire worldview shaped by the social programming that exists on Netflix, right? Or, you know, Hollywood or music. So when you look at the over-representation in banking, going back to the beginning of, you know, the Federal Reserve before, when you go to Hollywood, when you hear names like Jeffrey Epstein and, you know, Harvey Weinstein, and if you grew up in a place that was not around Jewish people like you and I, putting aside our own homes, but even if you, you know, I have lots of friends who were, you know, Christian or whatever, but they grew up around me and other friends that were Jewish, if you grew up in a different way, and those are the only names you heard, like I've put myself in that position, I wonder what would my conclusion be? Would I think it was the Jews? I like to think I'm above that, but I don't know. I don't know. I kind of get how that plays out, and we're seeing it in real time. So I'll pause there and let you react for a moment.

Speaker 1:
[99:26] Well, I just want to make sure people understand the model that you've described, and you do describe it very well in your piece. Your model is that there is a distinct over-representation of Jewish issues in these stories that connect to the control architecture. But that actually creates a convenient mirage, that it's hard to look away from it, and that if you look for the countervailing evidence, the names that aren't Jewish that are also involved in these power structures, that effectively this, it actually is a mirror for what we've been describing in much of this conversation, where there are dots that will connect for a purpose. In other words, it makes a convenient scapegoat, which is not to immunize any of the terrible people involved. It doesn't matter what population they come from. They're involved in a diabolical, I hesitate to use the word conspiracy, but a diabolical conspiracy against human freedom. And many of them are Jewish. But that that's not the fundamental nature of this thing. That's the thing that allows the power structure to remain intact and escape out the back door as people become wise to what's being done to them. So I thought that was a very, I hope I'm representing it accurately.

Speaker 2:
[100:54] You certainly are. And that most recently, it has popped up in politics. And a few of the examples I cited were like Zelensky and one of the most consequential. And his whole arc is all stored into himself. But in one of the most consequential wars that's going on that might reshape the geopolitical landscape, that's interesting that he's the guy. And, you know, the president of Mexico is a shine-bound. I actually looked up the odds of that. It's like 0.5% chance. It's just based on the population, let alone the stereotypes of the population. So and by the way, in that particular election, 60 candidates were killed that were running for.

Speaker 1:
[101:40] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[101:41] So, you know, and depending on your frame, you either think, oh, it's quite obviously the Jews, or how dare you say it's the Jews, right? And to me, it's like quite obviously, someone wants to present that it's the Jews. Even, what's his name? Javier Mele is not Jewish, and his first official foreign visit was to Chabad, right? That's just weird. At some point, all this shit just becomes so weird. And of course, I think the phrase I used in the piece was, you know, for the people, you and I are not getting the people off the hook. I think I used the phrase, they have their boot on the neck of humanity because it's true. But what I'm particularly interested in is, I called it the two-stroke engine, right? And step one is manufacturer blame, right? Again, not letting the individual players off the hook, but pointed a visible minority in power positions and amplify. And then stroke two, and I think this is where we are now, and this is the danger, is use the resulting, in this case, anti-Semitism, right? Use it to justify more surveillance, more censorship, more spree restrictions, like all that stuff, because we need to be safe. And I have a friend, I touched on this in the piece, I have a friend, I was like, Arch, are you nervous about anti-Semitism? Like, if I name the top 100 things in the world that concern me right now, anti-Semitism does not get on the, it's not on the radar at all. And that's not to say that there is not, it's not in vogue and that's not a thing. I don't know, it feels really manufactured to me in a lot of ways for the regular people.

Speaker 1:
[103:31] Which doesn't mean it's not frightening. I agree with you that there's something about it that is inorganic. But the emergent part does frighten me, that people are watching dots, connecting them, reaching conclusions that are not nuanced and that that is putting me and my family in danger in a way that I didn't expect ever to be in my lifetime. I knew it was a possibility that it would happen, but I'm shocked at the speed of it. But I wanted to, go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[104:01] No, I was just going to say, I'm sorry to interrupt. You're also a different thing. You and I are different. You're a public figure.

Speaker 1:
[104:05] That's true.

Speaker 2:
[104:06] You're a public figure who's putting yourself out there, making strong points about really nuanced topics that don't land if you're stuck in this paradigm. Whereas I'm just some dude sitting in the woods. It's a very different thing.

Speaker 1:
[104:23] Yeah, I suppose. All right. I wanted to just put one more set of things on the table. Part of what's bugging me and what I think made your piece seem like such a relief was that there is some sort of a Jedi mind trick around antisemitism, Zionism, things in this area. It's very hard to diffuse it. It's a bomb that you can't touch in any way or it goes off. What you want to do is diffuse it. But the idea is we've formally seen anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Oh, wow. That's an incredible claim. What is Zionism? Well, Zionism is two things, and the definition will dodge and weave between them so that you can't get your hands around it, right? Zionism is either Israel's right to exist, which we could get into what that even means, but that's the safe version. That's the motte. And then the Bailey is that Zionism is some expansionist program in which Israel has all kinds of special rights, not just a right to exist, but a right to expand or something like that. And so one of the things I got from your piece is that Zionism is not fundamentally a Jewish project, that in fact it was opposed by many Jews. I now see one of the most interesting threads in my feed, who knows how realistic it is, but the number of Orthodox Jews who are vocal opponents of at least modern Zionism and presumably historical Zionism is shocking. So why is it if Zionism is effectively some natural extension of being Jewish, that you have these folks who have Jewishness at their absolute core, are trying to raise objections? So anyway, the upshot that I get is that in some sense, not only is it crazy to argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, or that Israel has some built-in right not to be criticized. So Zionism, at least as it is being applied by those who are proudly using that term, I feel like it's actually a threat, not only to Israel, which it is putting in jeopardy, but also to diaspora Jews, who should not be required to embrace what turns out to be a very aggressive and non-fundamental position on Israel and its behavior. And to just finish this out, I have the sense that the public, so we tend to think about the trauma of the Holocaust as a feature of Jews. But I'm thinking actually that I'm watching another kind of Holocaust trauma that is very much in play here, and I want your take on it. The trauma is the West waking up to what took place during the Holocaust, had a trauma of its own, right? There's a kind of shame and fear of such patterns, and this overarching desire to avoid anything that leans in that direction, which is of course good. But what it means is that those who want to control the narrative have a built-in, just as you can trigger people to resort to their amygdala and stop thinking, right? If they're Jews, you can get them to stop thinking based on a particular pattern that calls forth the events that preceded the holocaust. You can also get the public at large to respond out of their amygdala with accusations that you're participating this time, and that those two traumas are being played in tandem, and the model that you put forth in your piece where the antisemitism is a feature, not a bug of the system, that those who are attempting to gain power are using this as a cloak, that just seemed very resonant for me.

Speaker 2:
[109:18] Well, thanks for noticing. I called it the barbell, which I think is a pretty big metaphor for this. It's like two heavy ends that crush the middle. Both extremes, I think, need the same lie, and they're working the same street from the opposite corners. Like the hardliner, including some people in my life, equate, needs all Jews to equal Israel. Of course, you're Jewish, you must support Israel. The person who doesn't like Jews, and I actually don't like the term anti-Semitic, though we'll use it, I think that's just as an aside. I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. There's really nothing Semitic about my background. That's a whole can of worms and people don't like when you talk about it. But it's pretty damn true, and I think all the DNA testing pretty much proves that. To me, that is akin to using the term anti-vaxxer for a experimental gene therapy. It also demonstrates the power of language and how we all wind up in the cage in part because of the language. Both extremes need this line, and then it plays out in this way where they're taking us to the same place. I remember after 9-11, the same thing happened with Muslims. It's a really good trick they pull because any person with a more nuanced or complex opinion that sits in the middle of the barbell, gets crushed. I think right now, you and I occupy that space. The Holocaust is a way longer conversation because there's way more to that story than I ever knew. That's not to say I'm not a Holocaust denier, which I know is one of the other terms they like to use because I understand the trauma that I witnessed firsthand from my family, that something happened. I think, and again, sort of like, whether you want to call them false vibes or conveniences or whatever, there were real consequences. I think the reasons for them are not exactly what we were told. And, you know, I allude to some of this in the piece. There's a writer named Anthony Sutton who does show his work. If you pull back the layers on who funded this, at best, you've got, you know, financial engineers playing both sides and hoping they're going to come out the winter, or knowing they're going to come out the winter because they've hedged, or something else. We can save that, you know, we can have a longer conversation about that. But I will say as well, if you go back, and I came across like this, came across this newspaper clipping that said like, you know, we need to, we need Jews to migrate to, I have this weird habit, I go through old newspaper databases because it's not like Twitter where they even know what they're looking for. And I started, someone mentioned this to me that there was like a headline of like, six million Jews will die if we don't get the Jews to Israel from pre-1920s. And I found it. And then I found another, and another, and another. And they all talk about six million. I found like 50. And then I found someone had a book that had way more than that. And it was all different reasons, too. It was like, you know, Ukraine Jews must migrate to Israel. There was this thing, this movement happening, that we must get used to Israel, which on its own is interesting. But the constant threat of the six million was a very, very specific number that if you now get to my mind is like, well, that's, that's, why did this happen? And, and there's a lot.

Speaker 1:
[113:02] Let me ask you, I've, of course, encountered that same argument. But my question is, is that number not a natural extrapolation from an estimate, good or bad, of how many Jews were in Europe? Or Eastern Europe?

Speaker 2:
[113:18] It could be. It's also, it's also a talismanic number with a six with six zeros, which if you're interested in some of the weird mystical stuff, which I don't sense you are, is maybe a thing. And again, I think the takeaway for me is, I don't know. By the way, that's, that's not the only data point. There's, there's like a lot more to this. And I can send you a reading list offline, but there's a, there's a bunch of stuff here that again doesn't, it doesn't mean real people don't suffer, including my family and yours. It doesn't mean that there aren't massive consequences at the macro level coming out. But there may be some intentions that I know I never understood. Like I never understood the role, I never understood the role of the bankers, you know, in Nazi Germany as a thing. That's like a matter of fact.

Speaker 1:
[114:11] So let's go back to the number. Now, I asked a Holocaust scholar that I know well, how robust this number was and how we know. And what he came back with was very compelling. His point was effectively, we know it because this is the number of people killed. I can't speak to the clippings that you were looking to ahead of time, or ahead of the Holocaust. But the point was many different independent lines of evidence can emerge near this number, you know, within 500,000 or so. And so that put my doubts at ease because that's exactly the way evidence works. You know, if it all came from one source, you could say, well, how good is that source? But if multiple different things result in you calculating the same number, then the point is, okay, that number probably is what it looks like. So anyway, I don't know that there is anything down that road. But if there is something down that road, it has to overcome multiple independent lines of evidence that point toward it.

Speaker 2:
[115:26] Yeah. And to be clear, I know there is a train of thought that questions the number. Like a lot of things, I know I don't know and I have never gone down that rabbit hole. That's less interesting to me for whatever reason. The thing I'm more interested in is the foreshadowing of the number, although your assessment or your possible assessment of that may be spot on.

Speaker 1:
[115:50] All right. Good. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I want people who have had their interests peaked to sign up for Substack because you're such a clear-headed thinker and writer. It's well worth your effort. So what is the name of your Substack?

Speaker 2:
[116:12] Well, first of all, thank you. It means a lot. Stylman, stylman.substack.com. All right. I'm on Twitter, Jay Stylman, although I'm heavily shadow banned there. I do stupid stories on Instagram all the time, just at Stylman, S-T-Y-L-M-A-N.

Speaker 1:
[116:29] Cool. Well, Josh, it's been a pleasure. There's lots more for us to talk about. I hope we'll get back to it sometime soon.

Speaker 2:
[116:38] I hope so. Thanks so much, Bret. Really appreciate the time.

Speaker 1:
[116:41] All right. Thanks for joining us.