Jews with Heterodox Views: Joshua Stylman on DarkHorse

Bret Weinstein speaks with Joshua Stylman, an entrepreneur, investor and Covid dissident about societal manipulation and social engineering. The conversation focuses around a recent Substack piece by Stylman on “The Enemy is Not Each Other.”

Find Joshua Stylman on Substack at https://stylman.substack.com, on X at https://x.com/jstylman, and on Instagram at http://instagram.com/stylman.

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This episode is sponsored by:

Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club: Scrumptious & freshly harvested. Go to http://www.GetFreshDarkHorse.com to get a bottle of the best olive oil you’ve ever had for $1 shipping.

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Join DarkHorse on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com

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Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.

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Bret recommends you read:

The Enemy Is Not Each Other https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-enemy-is-not-each-other

The Authentication Layer https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-authentication-layer 

Transcript

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Hey, folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting this morning with my friend Joshua Stylman. OK, if I call you Josh, please do. 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 standup 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 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? 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That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping. So do you want to say something about your, your upbringing and where that places you? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words. It means a lot to me. Um, you are a very thoughtful person who clearly considers all perspectives. And this is a really nuanced one that we're, it seems like we're not supposed to talk about. Um, I have a tendency to talk about the things you're not supposed to talk about. So, um, you know, I grew up a progeny of Holocaust survivors. Um, half the, essentially half the family, everybody I knew, uh, was in the camps, everyone that lived, uh, my grandmother was the sole survivor of a town of people. Um, all six siblings, parents, neighbors, all gone. Um, I am named after her oldest brother who burned in a gas chamber. Um, 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, I understand certainly the trauma associated with that whole generation and those people, it was, it was passed down to me. Um, I heard never again from the time I was in the crib. Uh, 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. Um, we're, we're not raising our kids Jewish in any way. And yet somehow culturally I'm entirely Jewish. I think I probably identified more with Jewish as someone who watched Seinfeld. Um, then as someone who studied Talmud. So, you know, there's, but like you, and I think it's a really good, a really good framing. This is just who I am right now. Identity, our identity that we inherit is the one we just inherit. Um, of course I may identify as a Muslim tomorrow. Now I'll change that. Um, but for the time being, this is what it is right now. I guess I'm looking around and I'm watching, I'm watching the world go crazy across a lot of different areas, right? And 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 can enter that, but I'm watching sort of, let's all over simplify 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. Yeah. Uh, 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, you know, 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 nonstarter 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. He 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. 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 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 worldview, 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 pitbull, I know I need to kill it before it kills me. But did it dawn on me who 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 they're 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. Now, most of our reality is filtered through an LED screen. So at this stage, you know, the essay is really kind of about that. It's about the cage, certainly more than it is about about me being Jewish. Right. It's, you know, 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 going on now for forever, really. But you've been amplified over the last decade or so is the left and right political reality. Or, you know, and all the culture wars that fall under that, whether it's the trends thing or whatever. Based on what you just said, I sort of realized that during Covid. Right. When I and I think a lot of us have this experience in our own little mix of the world, some more public than others. Right. And I thought, you know, because it 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, you know, through the last few years. And you've certainly been influential in not just the 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, you know, whatever the case may be. We all have our own unique covid story. You would think as I'm a pretty reliable guy like, you know, I have a really good reputation in business and personally and over that I 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 here's a toolkit. Right. Here's here's Peter Breggans 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 I got played back to me through mutual friends or whatever was Joshua and 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 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 to my wife was up and, you know, she I woke up, I looked over and I was like, oh, my God, there was a terrible attack in Israel. And I just looked at her and said. Medical freedoms toast because it was instinctively I just knew. And I'm on a bunch of message boards and one in particular that was vibrant 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 we're a strange group because we've never gotten we never 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. You know, 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, you know, mockingbird all of it. Right. By that night, literally by that night, people quitting this message board in a huff ever reverted back to the 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, you know, we're two and a half years later and it's it's only amplified. 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, that had I mean, a coalition that had unusual capacity to fight power. You know, 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 twenty twenty four 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, twenty twenty three, 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's certainly, you know, I think it's incorrect. And 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 but anyway, I said it out loud and. You know, years later, I'm now trying to grapple with what 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. Yes, to all that, I can draw a straight line to a another tragic event and use one of the taglines, which was they hate us for our freedom. Right. So and it it it took me a minute. It took a dear friend of mine, who was also my red pill for Covid, to demonstrate that we're not going to get into the whole nine eleven 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 theorist version of the story. Right. And we again, we won't really litigate all that. But the. The fact that you're not even permitted to ask these questions without serious social consequence should be the reveal. 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 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, OK, 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 four 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, OK, 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 that instinct. 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 I don't want to get the hate now from talking to you about viruses in the first place. I'm making I'm making a point. Right. And it's do you want to clarify your position? My position is my position on most things, which is I don't know. And I you know, we 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 nine, like all the worst. Let's just say that I've questioned the wars, question the pharmaceutical industry. Although I'm I'm such a big jackass that when 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 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 Ducky working like 18 hours a day in a physical world business, trying to pivot to be an e-commerce company overnight. Homeschooling my kids. I'm like, we never had to wear masks because we, you know, we we live in the woods, which is now my full time residence. It was only a little later. I was 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 you know, as a covid dissident. It just makes me a fool and I'll own that. A friend of mine, I knew I knew the M.R.A. was a thing. And truly, I wasn't even paying attention to it. A friend of mine got me a copy of Breggett's book, which I had mentioned that I went from like zero to genocide in about five years ago. I was like, I'm going to do it in five minutes. Like this, 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 job, the way my buddy explained it to me, it's it's how did he say it? It's like trying to cure a headache with a gunshot to the face. Headache's gone. So except it wasn't even that good because even the claims of it being effective. But for me, so I was like, what the hell is going on? It took 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. And it all just kind of clicked. And then we started. I got together with like 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. So 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. And we started pulling back the layers like, oh, wait a second. This is a financial crime, first and foremost. And then, you know, now, you know, we know it's the greatest upward transfer of wealth, arguably in human history. This is, you know, we eventually you get to the great reset and we kept zooming out further and further like, oh, wait, Pearl Harbor is a false flag, too. And it's sort of like you go through any moment in history. And now, you know, I'm forgive the expression, but, you know, I've gone full retard. And I'm sort of 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 close. Oh, I 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. And so your ability to look at what you thought and say, yeah, got that one wrong. Don't love it. But it's causing me to reinvestigate other things that I was pretty sure of. That is 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? I won't. 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 that's probably a whole show into itself, although you should do a false flag show on DarkHorse, 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. 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 predicament so you can improve the quality of your life is not proceeding from what we know about cognition in a 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 don't know 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. 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. What are the fictions where I would use them interchangeably in this case? And two, what else are they lying about? Because the answer and which is why, at least for my mileage is I need to consider that everything I thought I knew may not be true and that it does require some epistemological humility because I realized that I'm a middle age 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 it's I think at this point, you know, 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, like, you know, my friend who my 9-11 friend was like, hey, welcome to the party, man. We're even for 20 years. And, you know, 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 of they don't just control the money. They they just find what value is. So it has to be bigger than just that. And then, you know, what I said to him, of course, is, 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. 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. Yeah. 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, too. 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 a 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 it's not rational. What it is is developmental. It was built in in childhood and for good reason. 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. No, my reaction is I fell into my own trap. Right. So because, yes, I thought I was going to be a bad guy. I thought the wind was blowing one way and ten seven stopped me in my tracks. And I think the mechanism you're describing simply in one word is trauma. Right. So we 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 the whatever this force is. Right. That understands humanity in a very profound way and tends 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. Right. 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, you know, 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 somatic. In this case, you know, anti women, anti trans 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 I understand it. 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 going to talk about that. 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, that 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. I mean, trauma hijacks the nuance of everything. Yeah, nuance is not possible when you're reacting out of trauma. It's not possible. Certainty is a whole lot cheaper than complexity. We can digest it in tiny little nuggets and the slogans they provide for us. Right. So, I mean, this is this is the core of, I think, the whole the whole thing. Right. And again, we're talking about this particular thing that was triggered. And I keep going back and this is this might sound weird. But my little study group, remember when Kanye West came out and talked and I mentioned this 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 wears the Kanye shoes. Should he should he be allowed to? Which is also an interesting question unto itself. But, you know, our little study group just 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. And I don't have your evolutionary biology lens. Right. You've forgotten more today than I'll ever know in a lifetime about that. Generous and wrong, but it's not really like I'm a dude who sits in the woods and studies this weird stuff. But I 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 unto itself. And I won't get into all the detail, but the gist is that there there are people and organizations that have existed for at least 100 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, you know, 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 how that evolves, I remember light bulbs started going off when Kanye was being anti-Semitic. Why is this happening now? And we were in the middle of a lot of research on mind control and MK Ultra, which again might be a little out there for some some of your audience. But it's it's it's a thing that's existed for centuries. It was perfected post World War Two in the United States. That you know, there there's congressional record of this sort of thing. We started digging into Kanye and the as it turns out, like the guy who who 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 MK Ultra programs were created, you know, 60, 70 years ago. So this is interesting. Is anti-Semitism about to come back and vote? And then 10-7 happened. It's like, oh, yeah, Kanye, the influencer was was a party to this in some way. And maybe that's coincidence. And that's not lost on me. I know when you start, you know, when you have a hammer, everything kind of looks like a nail. But but that one stuck out like a little bit of a thumb that it was a little bit ahead. By the way, same same trainer allegedly convinced Elliot Page to to become clear. So you start to see, I would say at the core, what I try to do is spot patterns. And if you zoom out far enough, you can see certain patterns. And I'm not sure what they all mean. And but I sense that there's a bunch of signal around some of this stuff. And 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 things that because we're willing to pull back some of the layers and say, well, is that my is that my genetic programming or my my programming through my upbringing at the dinner table or, you know, is that 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 there is real loss. And people really, really do suffer like real suffering. Death and destruction, you know, from all these false flags. The thread through them all is that the trauma bets right now, even throw the assassination of JFK in there. You know, in the mind control thing, I had a whole thing about OJ Simpson being sort of 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? 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. What did you say? 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 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 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 that's what I saw. Fascinating. Those were Jewish lawyers, right? So one of the ones that was 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 I remember the split screen of like 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 which is fascinating. My point is less about the what happened and. Sort of what why and was that was this a layer of social engineering on its own? You know, when I think we got on the topic on trauma, right? And I think about these big public events that are made for TV as big trauma vessels that we all that are all delivered to us. And, you know, until seven years later in 2001, that was our generation's J.F.K. 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, you know, when the J.F.J. 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 this was really, really interesting. And again, I won't turn this into a thing about O.J. Simpson, although I think the topic is really interesting. You know, if you go back in time, right, just before that, there are some other things happening societally. And I look 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 and 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 a film called Falling Down with Michael Douglas, which was like the, you know, the the down and out 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 ceded 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. Yeah, we're predisposed to a reaction. So even if it's actual events unfolding, the reaction is unorganic. That's right. And I've come to believe. I want to go deeper on, you know, your thoughts on the emergent thing, because I think that from what I've heard, I haven't 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. Right. Based on our own our own, you know, experiences growing up, our media diets. You know, our relationship with the world or neighbors or friends, whatever. Right. But I think there's a kernel that's seated. And, you know, I I think anyone who gets into this social engineering stuff and starts looking in understands that, yeah, there was there were certain things that were plugged in. Well, and usually through like the through the various tentacles of like politics and culture and even science. And it's 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 my, you know, they if 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 think 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. And again, I've heard I've heard you and Heather talk about the trans stuff. And I think that's maybe the most obvious example, because for a millennium, there was no there was no question about, you know, it was not offensive to say a human or a woman. And somewhere along the line and you can look, you know, you can look at the charts and I just wrote a spike somewhere that became a controversial topic. And that's that's insane. I mean, I see that's like a flex. 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. And 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 from Brooklyn not that long ago. And this person said that in their daughter's fancy private school, 50 percent, that's five zero percent of the 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 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 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 and should have, you know, 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 like that, that is not an allowable position to hold in in some sections of polite society. 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 it really 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 seated, 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 seated or they're steering in the aftermath. But point is, the majority of all of these things is. An organic response to inorganic things. And. You know, 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, you know, 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. Yeah. 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? OK, 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. You have to get really comfortable in your own skin and being very, very OK 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. Right. 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 they're you know, that's what their media intake is telling them, even even if it defies their own eyes and ears. That's the scariest part to me. Well, it's a it's a 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, if 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. Do you remember? Did you read or watch Game of Thrones? Of course. So I feel like when I see people arguing about, you know, candidates, politics or what are like stupid culture stuff, I feel like they're they're on Westeros. Right. And they're they're arguing, you know, 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 it came 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. 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. Correct. Thank you for clarifying. Are you are you familiar with the Tavistock organization? A little. Yeah. So I feel like this and this is probably a whole show into itself. So I won't 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 is 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. Right. It started like World War One with shell shock soldiers. Right. What we now call PTSD. And there's a there's a George Carlin bit in there somewhere. But the you know, 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. Like 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 to, you know, 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. And I wonder that I still have, frankly, all people should be created equal. That's a really important one. Right. And even like, you know, when I learned, say, Gloria Steinem was affiliated with the CIA. Right. Don'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. That understanding like, you know, Laurel Canyon, you mentioned, you know, Gulf Tonkin, right? The commander of the ship of Gulf of Tonkin, who's to lead that thing. I think it 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 OK. This, you know, this guy is rejecting his military father. And the list goes on and on and on like, you know, David. 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 seated 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. So that's an unusual toolkit. 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, 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 you know, the filtered version of everything. And in many instances, certainly for me, I needed to rewire my assumptions of what I thought to be true. Like, you know, you're doing a basic algebra problem and they're the they're the give ins. What if you're given totally wrong? Your everything flows downstream from there. And then I think there's another topic that I'm particularly interested in. And there's a writer named Jason Horsley who calls it the parasocial layer. And it's, you know, we saw it in COVID. Right. There's this notion of taking like public figure who doesn't know you, but you know them. And you may play this role for someone right as a public figure. And you tend to outsource your thinking to that person. Right. And why wouldn't we? Right. We live in a society where, you know, you can get door dash in two seconds and you can get over. Yeah. You know, we outsource everything. Of course, we're going to outsource our thinking. And I think I think the distinction from maybe the old days and our parents' generation to today is like, you know, Walter Cronkite used to get on, you know, TV. And of course, we now know that was like mockingbird media and not to pass judgment, particularly against Walter Cronkite. 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, here, everyone probably heard a whole bunch of bullshit, but at least they heard the same bullshit. So they had a, they had a common frame. They had empathy for each other. Today we've got these lines and wait a second, Brett, didn't you just go on the Tucker Carlson show? How you're a Jew. How dare you? He hates the Jews. It's so stupid. Right. And, you know, 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, 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 and, 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 try, 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. But well, I think there's a 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 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. 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. 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. I should never 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 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 been 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 truths, 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 was like 2021. So no, there is no danger. Any climate scientist worth their salt understands this. And 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 align 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 loosa 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. There, these people, I believe some of them, and the hard part is figuring out who, you know, and again, I don't really care, right? Who they are. 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 pie-piper strategy happening here, that there are some folks that are sort of luring us to follow, you know what? 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 a mirror of one another, but you're sort of at the root of the basic of like, all right, this is, you know, good guys and bad guys, and we're going to take it at face value. The second layer is, all right, you woke up 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, you know, 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 some of their upbringing or schooling might be. But I think it comes down to like, are you evaluating evidence or are you following characters? 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 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. I'm there's a lot of layers to this. And this 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. Well, you do it. 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 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 there was 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 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. So somehow we got to ignore the cynics. If people got everything right from the get go from a model, OK, 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 bet it 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. 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 fellow pessimist. 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 percent sure I understand what's happening here around these party lines. And I personally think voting is like Santa Claus for grownups. And I came to that conclusion over a long period of time. And I don't say that lately. 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 to 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 that I didn't know. Like if you're my age and you grew up in this part of the country, you have a 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 and was opportunistic. And I've come to believe that that's just silly. Right. There's a lot in his in his background in 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 he's the heel or 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 they like when you are doing, you know, you know, you're doing a lot of things. 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 it's this was like the only yes, it's our only other choice because the system is never 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 it. I won't get into all the details. If you remember, like when he famously tweeted Kofi Fe. Oh, yeah. So I'm one of my interests is I'm trying to understand like technology and its role on, you know, our bodies and stuff like that. You know, 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 airbuds. So that all our friends are not going to get brain cancer. Like, well, you know, grandma was told to smoke cigarettes. So we don't know. I was I came across this 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 a cobalt, a vanadium and double bonded iron, which just so happens to spell Kofi Fe. Oh, like this is so it's not a one off thing that draw me to this conclusion. But, you know, I know his 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. Right. So and I don't know what it means. But I know I know it's not what they told me. Right. And 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. Right. That's what that is the hero of the world. Right. And that, you know, it's the Q story, basically. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I've got a good friend who is not who is not the archetype to I thought Q was. Right. He's like a 60 year old brilliant doctor from New York City who is not like some dude living in the woods and, you know, wherever who is all in on the Q story. And anytime something happens in the news, including the current Iran war, which, you know, 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 it's fast. 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 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 it's not just opposite. It's fractured across a landscape of, you know, it's a collage of takeaways that are all predisposed based on who we were five minutes before we heard it. 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 are 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 nonstarter. 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? Well, first, I'll just acknowledge that I hope you get a comment that Brett Weinstein and Joshua Steinleman are declaring it's not the Jews. So I really hope you get that comment. I think there's this notion that there's an ancient setup here, right? Half-Yud, I think it's called, where it's the court Jew, essentially. So like going back, Christian nobility and medieval, in medieval Europe had Jewish financiers as the front. And this is a thing, and that system works great until it doesn't. And then eventually, the scapegoat mechanism kicks in. And historically speaking, the rage has gone to the Jews, not the structure. And again, that goes back to the comment I made earlier about the 109 country thing. 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 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 kind of going through, there's a lot of layers here, and there's a whole other conversation just about the Holocaust, which is the third rail. And I'm already in my little local community considered anti-Semitic for a lot of reasons, which is awesome. But 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 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 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, I think that's not the question I'm really asking, right? What is the question? So what's particularly interesting in this 1891 thing was that, as I understand it, most American Jews actually opposed this. So there was this sort of 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's this all designed to serve? I think is the most important question in this framework we can all think about, Qibono, who benefits? So you could think about even like your day-to-day life, right? 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. And 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. And I'm listening to this guy who was, 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, like 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, you know, Bill Soros or George Soros, right? And the other side is just in denial about that over-representation. And I guess the nuance 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 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 or music. So when you look at the over-representation in banking, going back to the beginning of, you know, the federal reserve from 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, putting people, 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 put myself in that position. I wonder what would my conclusion be? What I think it was to do is 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. 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 Jews in these stories that connect to the controlled architecture. But that 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. You certainly are. And 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 sorted into itself. 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 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. And by the way, in that particular election, 60, 60 candidates were killed that were running throughout. 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. And to me, it's like quite obviously someone wants to present that as the Jews. Even what's his name, Javier Millais is not Jewish. And his first official foreign visit was to Chabad. 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, we are not, you and I are not getting the people off the hook. I think I use 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 like point, you know, point at a visible minority in power positions and amplify. And then stroke two, and I think this is where we are now. And this is this is the danger is use the resulting in this case, anti-Semitism, right? Use it to justify more surveillance, more censorship, more spruce restrictions, like all that stuff, because we need to be safe. And you know, I have a friend I mentioned, I met, I touched on this in the piece, I have a friend like, like, aren't, aren't, are you nervous about anti-Semitism? Like, I if I named the top hundred 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, I, it feels really manufactured to me in a lot of ways for the regular people. 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. No, I was just gonna say, I'm sorry to interrupt. You're also a different thing. You and I are different. You're a public figure. That's true. 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. Right. Whereas I'm just some dude sitting in the woods like, it's a very, it's a very different thing. Yeah, I suppose. All right. So 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. And it's very hard to dis... It's very hard to diffuse it. Right. It's a bomb that you can't touch in any way or it goes off. And 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 mot. 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 that they're 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 anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug, of the system, that those who are attempting to gain power are using this as a kind of cloak that just seemed very resonant for me. Well, thanks for noticing. I called it the barbell, which I think is a pretty good metaphor for this, right? It's like two heavy ends that crush the middle. So both extremes, I think, need the same lie, and they're working the same street from the opposite corners, right? Like the hardliner, including some people in my life, a koi needs all Jews to equal Israel, right? Of course, you're Jewish. You must support Israel. And the person who doesn't like Jews, and I actually don't like the term anti-Semitic that will use it. I think that's like just as an aside, I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, right? 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. So to me, that is akin to using the term anti-vaxxer for a experimental gene therapy, right? And it also demonstrates the power of language and how we all wind up in the cage, in part because of the language. So both extremes need this lie, right? And then it's sort of plays out in this way where they're taking us to the same place. And I remember after 9-11, the same thing happened with Muslims, right? And 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. And 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. And 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 they, 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 I alluded 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 financial engineers playing both sides and hoping they're going to come out the winner or knowing they're going to come out the winner because they've hedged or something else. We can save that, we can have a longer conversation about that. But I will say as well, if you go back and I came across this newspaper clipping that said, 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 you're looking for. And I start, someone mentioned this to me, that there was 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 Jews to Israel, which on the tone 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 why did this happen? And 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? It could be. It's also a talismanic number with a six with six euros, 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 not the only data point. There's like a lot more to this. And I can send you a reading list offline, but 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, on a Nazi Germany as a thing. That's like a matter of fact. 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 merge 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 to point toward it. 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. 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, you know, your possible assessment of that may be spot on. All right. Good. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I want people who have had their interest piqued to sign up for your sub stack because you're such a clear headed thinker and writer. It's well worth your effort. So what is the name of your sub stack? Well, first of all, thank you. It's a lot. Stylman. S-T-Y-L-M-A-N.substack.com. All right. I'm on Twitter at J Stylman, although I'm heavily shadowpan there. And I do stupid stories on Instagram all the time, just at Stylman. S-T-Y-L-M-A. Cool. Well, Josh, it's been a pleasure and there's lots more for us to talk about. I hope we'll get back to it sometime soon. I hope so. Thanks so much, Brett. Really appreciate the time. All right. Thanks for joining us.