I'm Tom bill you and this is impact theory today. We're diving right back into part two with none other than Brett Weinstein. So as we, um, there's some way that you guys see that we can get on the ballot in time. When do you plan to announce, uh, who the candidates are?
And what does that, is that process of selecting those candidates, something that you pass off or do you have to have the unity, um, the unity party that, you know, has their own sort of version of the DNC that does this, like what, cause I will say I'm, I'm the guy that, um, you probably are aiming at convincing, right? Like I'm ready. I'm ready to be convinced. But right now I feel like if I wasn't obsessed with you as a thinker, um, I just wouldn't pay attention because I don't have enough details.
Yeah. So it's like, and if I'm saying that, like, uh, there's just not enough details here. So I'm just not going to think about it because I go to a pessimistic place. So they're never even going to be able to get on the ballot.
It's just too fucking late. Um, and that there is hopelessness in that, but I think that that level of sort of, um, just unquestioned hopelessness, right? I'm only processing through this because I'm sitting in front of you now, right? So otherwise I wouldn't, it just would be sort of background, like, oh, that'd be cool.
But, you know, we're just, it's just not going to happen in time. Um, how do we give the, the, you know, the optimism and the sense of like, shit, this could really happen. Okay. So there are a couple answers to the question.
One, I don't think there's any point in actually attempting to deliver a ticket if we don't have the groundswell that makes it plausible, because for one thing, what it does is it actually damages the people who we would name, right? Interesting. We, we want them empowered in order to empower them to, uh, to work on our behalf, they have to be drafted into this movement, which requires the groundswell. If we don't get the groundswell, then it doesn't make sense to do it.
However, here's the thing that I think you're looking for. Let's say that this plan fails and we're not on track by, uh, well, we can't actually say when, because we don't know how the ballots are going to be delivered. And therefore when voting is actually going to take place, but let's say we're not on track in time, but let's say that we have managed to, uh, to accumulate a movement of people that understands that we are now rolling the dice with all of the most dangerous processes on earth, right? A, the world superpower is now gambling with the possibility of civil war, right?
We haven't even begun to talk about what happens if we fragment, not only is there no geographical solution that suggests itself in this case, but, um, somehow we're talking about not only a nuclear arsenal, but we're talking about, uh, nuclear reactors that need to be carefully managed at how, you know, how is it transition to some other structure in which the United States ceases to exist going to work? So all I'm saying is the magnitude of the danger that we are putting the world in, even before you get to the question of what happens next, if the United States fails, because we tear ourselves apart. That empowers, um, China is China, the next, uh, you know, poll of the, of the world, single poll, um, you know, is it going to be Russia? What happens in the absence of a powerful United States?
We're putting the world in jeopardy here. So putting the world in jeopardy, the process seems to be moving incredibly rapidly such that we can have a discussion about whether or not there's going to be something to salvage in 2024 or not. Um, this is an amazing level of danger that we are putting ourselves and the world in in light of that. It seems to me that it makes sense for every person with ears to hear, um, that predicament to gather around.
Well, what is the chance that we can road to shore? Why wouldn't you take a shot at something like unity 2020? And here's the thing, if it fails to elect a ticket to the White House, it could still cause, um, all of the projects that aim for a better world to, to, uh, collect into one, we've got the open source movement, we've got the cryptocurrency movement, um, we've got makers, we've got game B, right? All of these things we've got IDW, all of these things aim to solve problems in the legacy world.
Why wouldn't they join together and understand that in effect, the entire game is, can we bring the things that we've learned in all of these different contexts into a structure that has the power to implement them or to clear the obstacles? So in essence, the answer to your question is whether we succeed or fail in 2020, we can succeed in creating the best hope for the future. Will it be enough? Nobody can guarantee that.
I certainly won't, but is it the best hope we've got? I haven't heard a better one. So, you know, what's holding us back from just simply getting behind this idea. It doesn't carry any ideological content that would cause anybody to look at it and say, Oh, that's not, that's not me, right?
That's, it has deliberately been pruned of ideological content so that it can, uh, it can cause these other things to gravitate to each other and isn't that the movement that we're looking for, one that understands, um, the, uh, the value of crypto and open source and all of these other things. I think the real answer to the question of what's holding us back is you don't have sex appeal yet. So like what, what is going to be the hook, you know what I mean? So part and, and I have not thought through this well enough to know if what I'm about to say is actually true or not.
I feel very confident about what I just said. You lack a hook that's sexy enough to get people excited, but there is, there's so much noise right now. Um, I, I can't tell you how much my YouTube viewing habits have changed in the last like three months. It is so surreal to me even to think, um, like now I'm, I'm just sort of almost like I'm watching news, right?
I'm looking for things that came out right now that are super contextual to what's happening in this moment. There's, there's a cacophony of voices. Um, and because I was a political and didn't watch news, I didn't even realize that, um, that news had become Kabuki theater and it's so weird to see, like, if I see the same thing being covered on CNN versus Fox, it actually looks like different things happen. I mean, it's so fucking bizarre and not having an allegiance in either direction.
I'm just like, this is fundamentally problematic. Like if you follow this out to its natural conclusion, you're just more and more and more polarized because there's this weird friction. In fact, um, I know I'm, I'm going a field of where I was originally headed, but this is actually interesting. So there's a weird friction as you adopt one narrative or the other of the same factual thing that happened, but one narrative feels right to you feels like you're now cheering for your team.
Yes, they're covering it in a way that speaks to me. There's friction in the other one because neither are true. So the other one isn't, oh, I'm getting to truth. It's you're asking me to actually adopt the opposing team's narrative, which already didn't resonate with me on a subconscious level anyway.
So now that I'm consciously looking at it, it really feels anathema to who I am. This does not feel good. I don't like this. So it is far easier to go from one interpretation to another.
If both had a sincere effort to get to the facts and one just missed something or, you know, that wasn't said as well as it could be. And so you could gravitate to, oh, I see this is actually what happened. Cool. I can make that leap.
But when the sense making apparatus is intentionally now so deep into the world of narrative, I can't cross that divide. And so that's what scares me is there's already people seek things that confirm the confirmation bias, confirm what they already believe. But that's a lot less problematic when the disconfirming evidence doesn't trigger some weird destruction of your identity in the way that now it forces you to because you have polarized narratives and how we get past that and have sex appeal is where like this starts to worry me. So my, we, we, you cannot let me end this interview without us talking about shutdown stem, which to me, when I look around and I go, okay, people with guns and riots and stuff, okay, that's all troubling.
But the one that scares the shit out of me is shutdown stem. We can get into why, but the ones people that attach themselves from what works, what moves you towards your goal, then it is it you can no longer in any effective way move forward. And that's what worries me. So when I think about what the effective way forward here is in this moment with unity 2020, you have to capture the imagination of people and you're competing against a narrative that gets people feeling like there's a dragon to be slayed and they're willing to run out the streets.
It's intoxicating. And even if like dude, I know you know, Mao's China, the, the revolution, the, the red guard that rose up and you had students actually killing teachers and dude, when I stop and think about what I was like in high school and this really bothered this really bothers me. I remember when Jordan Peterson said, when you look back on World War II, don't imagine yourself hiding, you know, a Jewish person in your addict, think of yourself as an SS guard and I thought, oh God. But when I think about me being 16 during the uprising of the red guard, I had to put dunce caps on my teachers and, you know, hit them with a stick.
I would have, dude, because it just, it felt so, I felt so right about everything at that age. Well, I get that. I have to say, I think Jordan Peterson is right. Although personally, I, there's not, I feel a certain amount of security that I wouldn't have ended up an SS guard.
No, no, not, not because I'm Jewish. Let's, let's put me in, you know, in a, in an, I don't know, area and skin or something. Somehow there's something about me that is so incompatible with a certain kind of authority that I just, it's impossible. Your movements would ever green make that hard to argue.
Yeah. Well, anyway, let's go back to the question of sex appeal for one. Um, here's the thing. There's a saying that I'm very fond of.
It's a hopey saying we are the ones we've been waiting for, right? And I think it's just impossibly deep actually. And so here's the thing, you're, you're a guy who's trying to build a new Disney, right? You're the sex appeal guy, right?
You know, we're in danger. That's part of why we're having this conversation. So the question is, what is the answer to that? I know full well that you're right, that at some level, what I have deployed reaches a certain number of people who were ready, but it doesn't reach a large enough group.
Now it's not that there's anything wrong with the idea. I'm sure of that, but you're right. The question is, can you deliver it narratively in a way that people get instantly? They understand what it is, why they have to be part of it.
And it seems to me that this is the same, the same question we were dealing with earlier, the dynamic tension that really is where all magic comes from, right? You need an idea that'll work and you need somebody who understands narrative and sex appeal and all of that so that it can, uh, it can live. And, uh, how do we do it? Yeah.
As a sex appeal guy, I will tell you, you're never going to get it off the ground without real people because you're asking me to get excited about a faceless idea. And, um, we've, we're seeing now with some of the movements going on that are creating madness. You can do it. Um, and I think over a long enough time period, you could get people behind this idea.
But if you think about the current wave of madness, which I don't even know what name to assign it, but it started in the 60s, 70s. I mean, this has been going now for 40 or 50 years and it was a long game strategy and it's worked really well, but you talk about, and this is so important and so powerful that the, so when I public speak, my, my message is almost always revolves around, um, humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. And the way that you say that is we've offloaded a lot of our abilities, not too genetics, but to culture and by putting in the software layer, we're able to change very rapidly. So if I had a gun in my head and you said, dude, you know the mechanisms that are at work here, what do you do?
I say, I need people and I need people with personality. I need people with charisma. Um, when Barack Obama came along, ignore the effect of the policies, when he got elected man, it was fucking electric and I was over the moon. I loved the slogan, um, the whole notion of hope, um, having, uh, a person, you know, I mean, we're, we're still shouting distance from the civil rights movement.
And in what was it 42 years later, you have a black person. I mean, I was like, fuck, yes, man. Like that was so thrilling to me. And when Coleman Hughes and I were, um, talking not too long ago, I asked him, like, who do you think could have led us?
Who, what president would you want leading us through this moment? Now, he's someone who's been very critical of Obama. And he said, Obama, and I was like, fuck, you might be right. Because, you know, in this weird world where moral authority is like, you almost just have to take that off the table and he's such a powerful order.
So you need an order who actually you need a dual set of orders, who I can see actually functioning together that I don't think they're going to get into a stalemate that I believe have like their, they've got that tough nut, hardcore motherfucker. But at the same time, like, we're, we're going to fight for people and lift them up. And, and I have to believe that they can coalesce and work well together, which is another fear that if I have, I'm sure many other people have, which is like, dude, my wife and I run our company together. Now, when the lawyer set it up, I said, create the ultimate divorce nightmare.
I do not want 51%. I want 50%. My wife's going to 50%. And yes, that means that we could hit loggerheads and this could all blow up.
But because my highest value is my marriage, I want to send a very clear sign to my wife. I don't need authority over you because she was like, no, no, no, you take the 51%. I was like, I don't need that. I'm going to be able to convince you.
You're going to be able to convince me because I want to listen to you. I want whatever best idea. And in, in our wedding sense, we are both patriots. We care about this business.
We care about this marriage. We're both willing to do what is right. Let's talk about what is going on in your closet. This time of year, most people realize half of what they own isn't even worth keeping.
Things that look fine in the store, but they don't hold up pieces you keep. But never reach for it. I know that one all too well. Spring is when you see it all clearly.
You don't need more. You need better. That's where Quince comes in. I picked up one of their cashmere sweaters and the quality genuinely shocked me.
It's incredible. It's incredibly soft, well made. You can feel the difference immediately. That's 100% Mongolian cashmere for you.
And that is the same material luxury brands charge a fortune for refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns now available in Canada as well. Go to QU I N C E dot com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash impact pod.
The people who win, they're not smarter. They just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now on business, psychology, leadership, books that have already changed how the best operators think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have.
This is a bandwidth problem, not a discipline problem. And that's exactly what Blinkist was built to solve. It takes the world's best nonfiction books and distills them into 15 minute summaries. You can read or listen to it's got over 9000 titles.
We're talking atomic habits, thinking fast and slow, the hard thing about hard things books. You know, you should have read by now done in the time it takes to drink your coffee. And because it's built for mobile, your commute becomes a classroom. Blinkist also sends you personalized recommendations.
So you actually build a daily learning practice instead of just planning to do one. Start your free trial and save an extra 30% go to Blinkist dot com slash impact. Again, that's Blinkist dot com slash impact. Start learning aggressively today.
It will change your life. Let's talk about who's profiting from your personal information. Someone is making money from your data every single day. You just don't see the transaction.
Data brokers collect your personal information and sell it for profit, your address, your phone number, your email, your social security number, yikes. It's bought and sold constantly without your knowledge or consent. Scammers buy it for identity theft, spammers buy it for targeted harassment, criminals buy it to find you. And the crazy part is it's completely legal.
The solution is in cogny. In cogny tracks down your data across hundreds of data broker sites and removes it automatically. You authorize them once, they handle everything else. They remove your data and keep it removed with repeated requests.
Plus with custom removals, you send them any link where your data appears and their team will remove it. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Go to incogny.com slash impact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan. Try it risk free for 30 days.
That's I N C O G N I dot com slash impact and use code impact. Now finding that into people is going to be crazy hard, but if you could find them and then we had somebody to rally around somebody that could inspire us, give us chills right when they're up there and they're like, because there is a Martin Luther King's I had to dream speech, put to music. Dude, it's unbelievable. And if we had somebody that can rally like that, I will make the assumption you've read Long Walk to Freedom.
No, oh my God, you're going to love it. Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom fucking blew my mind and it made me ache for the fact that I read that after he died. And I was just like, I need to know somebody like this. So if we had a leader look, you've talked about this, I'm literally seeing from your him book, we need this dual pair of leaders to be inspiring, to give us the chills, and it has to happen right to fuck now, which is why I'm like, I don't see how you pull this off.
I get why you're not naming them, but I don't see how you pull it off unless you do. Well, in some sense, I think you're pointing to the right answer, which is what drives this is patriotism in the best sense of the term, which means that the people you're talking about have to be willing to take the risk. And I don't think it's a huge risk. I think people in general understand that we're in a very tough spot and therefore anybody who takes a shot at doing something on our behalf is is worth honoring, even if it doesn't work, but somebody has to take the reputational risk of saying, actually, you know what, long shot as this may be, we're in dire straits and I'm stepping up.
So I guess the question is, if I accept your framework and I think your framework is largely accurate, then maybe it's time. I don't think it's so hard to find people who could inhabit the role. We have a list of people on both left and right who I think make for compelling pairs. The question is, is anybody ready to step up in a dangerous moment without the guarantee that the groundswell will emerge?
In other words, are they willing to proceed the groundswell rather than follow it? Why has it become a meme to say that America is collapsing like the Roman Empire? Growth has petered out, we borrowed from the future, we can't do that anymore, and now we're getting tribal? Yes, but I don't believe that it is hopeless.
If I'm honest, I believe we will probably screw it up and it will become inevitable. Yeah, but there's a reason that I'm taking the risks that I am to talk about these things in public, which is I believe we still have the potential to rescue Western civilization and probably, if I'm honest about it, to present a 2.0 version that is capable of dealing with the novelty that the 1.0 version is straining under. The key thing is human beings detect the failure of growth because the failure of growth is not an economic fact. It's a fact of resource scarcity and it has applied to all of our ancestors for three and a half billion years.
So it's not that growth didn't get invented in a modern economic context, economics formalized, and understanding of something that is as primal as anything else. What must be true in order for us not to descend into this other phase, the phase where musical chairs, the music stops and there are way too few chairs in which blood is thicker than water and that's the rule that governs the day, the way to avoid that fate is to A, recognize that it predicts a great deal about the noises people will make as it's happening. So I'm watching the shocking rise in anti-Semitism and I'm thinking it's right on time. Why?
Because when I did my work back in college about Hitler as a rational monster, I understood that the targeting of Jews was a predictable phenomenon that Jews because they live as a diaspora are and because they succeed as a diaspora are an obvious target when the music stops get very concrete about that. Why does being in diaspora, which people that aren't familiar with that, you're an outside group living in another country. So people often refer to the Chinese as being part of a diaspora because they have a strong sense of the homeland but yet they may live somewhere else. So let's say you've got a population and it's industrious and capable for whatever reason.
I would argue that those reasons are largely cultural maybe entirely so but it accumulates some wealth that achieves some position in society and then the racist impulses return and one way that you can generate growth for a population is to come up with an excuse to transfer the wealth of another population. So the obvious thing to do is to say well you know geez the reason that Germany lost World War I was a Jewish fifth column and the sorry state of Germany today is the result of being stabbed in the back by these people. I mean maybe they shouldn't even be called people, maybe they're vermin, they're disease, they're disgusting, right? You start making those noises and you justify a significant transfer of wealth from one population to another but and this goes back to the question about the founding fathers obviously the time period is different but if you imagine that Germany prior to the Holocaust was a place that involved a few lineages and then one lineage starts playing against the others, right?
Well you create growth for the one lineage without having to invent a new technology or discover some more efficient way of accomplishing something it's phony growth. What is it made of? It's made of the stuff that the people that you're killing are leaving behind. It's made of their homes, right?
You're creating something that feels like growth for one population by targeting another population and when that happens inside of a landmass we call a genocide and when it happens across a border we call it war but they're the same process, right? You're completely excused to attack some population that can't defend itself and you create the appearance of growth through theft, right? I mean if you had a company and it could steal from some other company it would feel like oh well the value of this company just rose and the point is yes you took stuff from somebody else. So I knew that at the point that the growth ran out you were going to get rabid anti-Semitism and frankly it precedes other forms of virulent racism but you're going to see those two and I know where this heads you're going to come up with excuses for doing away with people who aren't entitled to what they have and that does end in genocide.
So you know I think the bad news is this is where we are in history. The good news is we actually have much better tools than we did when this happened previously to understand what's taking place and to change course but the way you would have to do that is you would have to create a mechanism whereby the population was immunized from the immediate sense of peril that comes when you run out of new ways to generate well-being, right? When growth is not a sustainable process and the fact that our institutions pretend like all you've got to do you know is keep the thing pointing in the right direction and there will always be plenty of growth that's not true. Growth comes from somewhere and it does not come from that somewhere regularly.
You cannot just create a system that hums along and is always making new stuff. There's boom and there's bust and you can't afford to have the bust triggering these genocidal impulses which is what they will do if you don't figure out how to address the question. Okay so right now we have two wars going on one in Ukraine and Russia, one in Israel, Gaza. Are they both the genocidal impulse?
This is tricky. I will say something is going on in Ukraine and if there's one thing I know it's that I don't know enough to understand it. Okay there's the obvious part of it, right? There's Russia having attacked a sovereign nation and now a generation of young men have been sacrificed to this battle.
So I have nothing but compassion for the Ukrainian people in that circumstance. But I also know that there was a question about NATO expansion and NATO behaved in a way that did not allay Russia's fears and more to the point. I know that my own government is in the hands of people who had their hands on stuff inside of Ukraine utterly mysteriously before this war broke out. Why is the son of the president involved as some kind of energy expert inside of Ukraine?
This is a story about things I don't know, right? So I don't, I can't say how genocide maps onto the conflict in Ukraine. I can say it's a complicated puzzle. Israel and Gaza, the unspeakable truth is that you have innocent people trapped on both sides of that conflict and you have a genocidal influence on both sides of that conflict.
It's something I have not, I don't think I've said that publicly. I've implied it and I've hoped that people would get it and I've been told by both sides that I'm a terrible person. But what I said at the beginning of the conflict was that it was threatening to drag the entire world back into lineage against lineage violence. That if we want to save the West and save the world, we have to rescue the Middle East from this predicament because I don't think either side is being irrational.
I think they both understand that they are in a fight to the death and in a fight to the death, the rules are quite different than you would expect. So there, there are clearly a majority in Israel who wish to be part of the modern world would like to get along with their neighbors. I believe that is clear. I cannot say the same thing about the leadership and I am particularly troubled by the fact that Netanyahu himself, who I must say engaged in absolutely alarming behavior during the pandemic, also appears to have been a facilitator of Hamas in advance of October 7th.
In what way? What I've seen is video that appears to be Netanyahu advocating for the cynical fueling of Hamas for the purpose of dividing the Palestinians. Now my feeling is whatever that was, everybody who participated in any way in making October 7th occur has no business anywhere near any kind of power. This is the last person that should be in charge of a military engagement in Gaza.
And I don't know what his motives are. I honestly can't say all I can say is that he appears to be a madman and Netanyahu. Yes. Do you think that Netanyahu is responsible for October 7th?
If what I have seen that I believe to be credible evidence of his arguing to fund Hamas, if that is accurate, then he is responsible in some way. In like a conspiratorial, Hey guys, here's the money. I know you're going to do it kind of way. If we believe in the consent of the governed and somebody else from outside the governed acts to choose your leaders and those leaders behave badly and you suffer mightily because of the bad behavior of leaders that somebody else chose for you, you're responsible.
Do I know what he was really thinking? How would I know? I couldn't possibly be more of an outsider to this. Is this a hypothesis or a thesis?
No, it's an extrapolation. I don't know how it could be any clearer. Palestinians are people. I believe that the right that allows me as a governed person consent over that process of governance extends to all people or it should.
Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever. You put an asset to work. It generates more of itself over time.
The curve bends way in your favor. Every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works. Most gold owners though have completely opted out of it. Monetary metals changes that equation.
They've built away for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars but in more physical gold. Up to 4% per year more ounces stacking every single month compounding in one of the only assets that can't be printed inflated or debased and storage and insurance are included by the way. So hidden fees don't eat your yield. The average person is passively absorbing inflation.
This is how you compound your way out of it. Click the link in the show notes or visit monetary dashmetals.com slash impact to learn more. This is a paid advertisement. Do you think it matters where we define a people?
Is that a relevant part of this or it's just it's a practical question but you know this is this is going to drag us because I don't know if you're saying that based on the UN charter which talks about a people and there are certain protections afforded to them or if you just mean look any group of people whether it's somebody in a city or whatever. Look if you're going to be governed you have a right to consent in the consent of the governed sense of that term. I believe people have a right to self-determination. I am not an expert on Palestinians or the Palestinian mindset.
I do not know what the people of Gaza would have done without Netanyahu's meddling. Maybe it would have been the same thing. I don't know what Israel is supposed to do in light of this absolutely barbaric attack. But I do know that whatever engaged in that attack put Israel in a bind.
There was no way for Israel not to respond to that attack. The brutality was calculated to make it impossible for Israel to choose. It was calculated to bring about a response that would be overwhelming because somebody thought that was a good idea. Presumably Hamas thought that would be a good idea.
Now Hamas should be wiped from the earth. There's no question about that. These are terrible people. Whatever they were thinking these are terrible people and eliminating them would make the world a better place.
That's obviously not the same thing as the Palestinian people and given the way Hamas embeds itself what is real supposed to do is not obvious. But if there's one thing that is obvious Netanyahu shouldn't be in charge of it. So that was born to the question as to whether or not there is a genocidal impulse that we can actually put to bed through conversation by getting people to understand what it is, pulling into the public consciousness and by doing so eradicate this kind of thing. Well let me let me add one thing just so it's clear.
We are all the product of genocents. That does not track for me. Human history is long. People killing their competitors is common in history.
Most of it has been lost. It wasn't recorded. You're just saying we are the we're the ones that won. Yeah we're here and we are also it is fair to say all the product of multiple rapes.
Human history is very long. Give me a percentage of what percentage of people do you have are downstream of a rape. I think all of us literally 100 percent. Yeah I think you as soon as you realize how long a period of ancestry we're talking about the chances that there's not a rape somewhere in each of our backgrounds is approaching zero.
That's dark. It's dark but it's also yeah it's dark look at it but once you have looked at it realize what that means. The potential for rape and genocide is something we all carry. We are also capable of getting past it.
There's so much hope in that recognition. Once you realize that you are not condemned to live this reality just because it had a significance in ancestral times that's where liberation comes from. We don't have to live that way. We can actually sit and write down our values and we can say what is the system that actually makes us realize those values at the highest level.
Right? What would we like to happen with rape? Well we would like it to go to zero. Likewise genocide.
That's what it means when we say never again. So when I say that there's a genocidal impulse on both sides we are seeing the predictable outcome of a zero sum game in the Middle East that is triggering potentials that we all carry. Right? We can see exactly why we have to take these potential seriously in this conflagration and the right thing to do is actually not beat each other over the head each side accusing the other side of genocide.
The correct thing to do is to recognize this was predictable and we have the power if we'll stop ticking around with nonsense. We have the power to make the future better than the past. And I'm with you and look this has just become an interview where throwing out a platitude of I hope everything's going to be okay just does not feel right. So I will ask the more revealing question.
It is not agreed upon as to whether what's happening right now is genocide. And there are several things you feel like nobody's listening to you screaming from the rooftops and people just aren't getting it. I have a very similar sense when I talk to people about somebody's frame of reference the whole life beer goggles that will control how they interpret what people are calling facts and people oft quote Ben Shapiro and say facts don't care about your feelings. Bro we cannot agree on what the facts are or certainly we can't agree on what the facts mean.
And I actually don't think people are playing a game. I think people don't understand how distorted all of our worldviews are that we actually see only the distortions. And to us you're going to get people that look at this and go obviously what's happening in Gaza is a genocide. Obviously and you're going to get people that obviously that's not genocide.
It's crazy. I can't even believe we're having this conversation. And each side thinks the other is trying to play a linguistic game or something like that. And they're missing what I think is the real truth which is they see the world so ferociously in one way.
There is literally nothing that you could show them. And I mean nothing. That would make them go oh I see your point. And because there is literally nothing that you could show them like let's set the Jews aside for a second because this just gets so weird so fast especially right now in Rwanda.
Like almost a million people were hacked to death with machetes in like six weeks. So that's insane. And it keeps happening. Now I've not researched the Rwandan genocides for all I know they were both like yeah this genocide and it's completely justified which then just enters another problem which is yeah genocide what's the problem.
People really become convinced I am doing God's bidding. I am doing the just and right thing in what I'm doing. And the only way that I see getting to the other side of that is everybody has to wake up to one simple fact ideas control everything. And what I mean by that are you believe certain things to be true.
You confuse it for objective reality which is physics but you believe certain things are true. Call it is then you have a set of things your values that you believe ought to be true. And so now you have is which they confuse for objective reality and ought which they often confuse with just self-evident or divine whatever and like this is non-negotiable. And both of those things will be ferociously debated by the other side who sees the truth of neither.
They have their own is and their own ought. And so until we all go I know I'm in the grips of a delusion. I cannot see things clearly. And so we all have to come to some set of shared values and then you build up from that.
If we can't share values I don't know matter how much you talk about genocide. You will death loop because people decide step by saying but this isn't genocide or genocide is right. Yeah it is genocide but it's what we have to do. That was a very good summation overlaps many things that I also believe.
I think distinguishing between beliefs and values is crucial. What you're saying with respect to we are all suffering a delusion. I agree is correct. I call this the Cartesian crisis.
And I think we are knee deep in it and it is if you understand its implications it's terrifying. The Cartesian crisis I named it that after Descartes who became spooked when he realized that all the things that he thought were facts what you say you think it's physics but it's beliefs. He had not established himself and therefore was taking it on some kind of authority. The problem is that the systematically induced blindness that is being inflicted on the public is creating a scenario in which we really can't establish much of the anything and that does leave us vulnerable to being sold a narrative.
It just fills the vacuum of what you might actually believe in common. The obvious right thing for us to want is an agreement on basics that enlightenment is better than deciding what you're allowed to believe. For example that's pursue enlightenment. Let us agree to share facts we can differ over values we should talk about which value should govern how we are to live but we should not be differing over the basic facts and we should be and this is crucial using the one tool that actually allows us to establish those facts in a way that is utterly nonpartisan.
Science works because it is built to tell you what you do not believe it corrects for biases that we're not for this one value it wouldn't be worth doing it's too cumbersome and slow but because is the only system that allows you to see exactly the thing that you do not expect it has the capability of telling us what is true and to know that it is true on the basis that it predicts things better than some other idea. So that's the tool it belongs to no one where it belongs to us all equally and those who politicize it are putting us all in jeopardy. This is really this is why I'm trying to bring this tool to people in this way and show them that it applies to the things that they're battling over and that the only the only way out is through. We have to learn to wheel this tool to figure out where we even are in an era where all of the institutions that should be doing that job are failing at once.
We're going to have to build institutions that work. Some people think we can rescue the institutions we have. I'm less and less convinced of that but I know that we can build something that does the job and we have to stop bludgeoning each other over the product of scientific inquiry. The facts are what they are and then the values tell you what to think about them and if you divide things in that way so that we're not battling over the facts based on the idea that they are somehow themselves immoral then there's hope.
Can I try an idea out on you please? All right I think that the way the human animal is designed that there is no way for us to come to a consensus the only way to get us to operate in mutually beneficial ways is to tap into other base shit which I will just round to greed but I don't mean in a bad way. I think the only way out for something like Israel Hamas is to get people obsessed with the future of their children. If you believe that the brightest future for your kids could be getting killed being martyred going to heaven then that idea traps you.
Now violence is rad like that's a great way to ensure that your child has a wonderful future. If on the other hand you believe my child's future can be full of education and I guess I'll say terrestrial love here on this planet for at least this period of time and tomorrow is going to be better than today and that they're going to make progress and it's going to be wonderful and they're going to grow up and they're going to fall in love and they're going to have kids and you know this is going to go on forever. That feels like when I look backwards to identify how to move forwards I go yes you want progress, health and safety, love for ones kin to see them grow up etc. I think you're right on the question of Islam I will just simply point out that there are numerous examples in the Middle East in which Islamic states attempted to modernize.
We're embracing values that were not exactly western but were moving in that direction and I believe that unfortunately for reasons that in the end were profoundly economic we have disrupted this process. We in the west have disrupted this process and it has created a a conflagration that did not need to happen. How did we disrupt it? Well the Shah of Iran was installed to basically facilitate transfer of economic resources.
We've overrode a democratic impulse in Iran and it has resulted in a theocratic rebellion. So what would have happened if we had not meddled in Iran. We were on today B where it is or is that entirely the result of resentment against the west that has left a vacuum that has been filled by a well to connect it to an earlier part of the conversation. You have these two bases for cooperation.
You have reciprocity which I would argue is the way the modern world should be structured and there's lineage against lineage violence and I believe that our meddling in the Middle East has set the course to lineage against lineage violence which we now largely wrongly blame on the content of the religious doctrine. The religious doctrine does contain this violence but the question is exactly as is the case with Israel. The Old Testament contains some really toxic stuff but most Israelis want to be part of the modern world. The fact that there's this bad stuff in the founding documents is not fate.
So I'm not sure what to do with that and I've gotten detained trying to explain this connection but the right thing to do is to recognize that we are all better off. All of humanity is better off. If we do embrace you're calling it greed I wouldn't use that term but if we recognize that humanity is improved when human beings are enabled to compete in a way that ecologically we would call exploitation competition. There's two kinds of competition.
You've got exploitation and interference competition. If I bomb your factory so you can't make stuff I am arguably competing with you but it's a destructive kind of competition. If I try to make better stuff than you in order to outcompete you in the market and you try to make better stuff than me because you want to succeed then the point is what we get is an improvement in the quality of the things we have access to. So what you really want at the end of the day and I'm not telling you I know how to instantiate this.
What you really want at the end of the day is for people to profit when they bring things to the table that improve the quality, the length of human life. The way to do that to the extent that there is something we can describe is to internalize all of the costs of our activities and let the markets solve the problem. If you let the markets solve the problem and if somehow and I'm not claiming I know how to do it because it may just simply not be possible but if you did internalize all of the costs of every product and every process so that at the end of the day the only people who profited were people who made things that actually made us better off you don't need to do anything else. That solves the entire problem right there.
Then you get people spending their time trying to figure out how to improve the standing of humanity and when they succeed the quality of their personal life gets enhanced. That's what you want. That allows the market to do what it's good at without interfering with our values and it minimally facilitates or it prevents the outbreak of tyrannical impulses. The market simply tells us what things should be augmented and which things should be abandoned based on whether or not their impact on humanity was positive.
Why has it become a meme to say that America is collapsing like the Roman Empire? What are people trying to deal with when they say that? I think there is a palpable sensation that the system is coming apart. So I think it's not incorrect to think of collapse occurring.
I think of it as a slow motion collapse. I don't think of the Roman Empire very frequently other than just the simple fact that something that seemed as robust as it must have can also come apart. I also remember from childhood the surprise collapse of the Soviet Union but once you recognize that things that seem like they are forever still end it's not hard to recognize the signs in where we are now. I guess I'm glad we're finally having that discussion because the risk that the Republic was going to come apart was there and has been for decades and if we are going to get through this phase either by rescuing the Republic or figuring out how to walk away from a crash landing it's going to be because we understand what the implications are.
I've heard you say that the rational optimist position isn't wrong we can't get there but we're not going to get there by accident. So what is it that is being chipped away at now that's stopping us from naturally ending up on the optimistic path? I think we have antagonists to our ability to understand where we are and in fact I've grown tired of the idea of sense making that concept became hackney but there is some need to grapple with the evidence around you and to put it together into some kind of model and we have some force that is opposed to our ability to do that well. It is denying us basic information on readily answerable questions that would allow us to navigate the most basic issues of life well and so we keep injuring ourselves because something is is acting to keep us in the dark.
What are some of the things that it's stopping us from seeing? Well let's take an obvious question from the covid crisis. We were told that the mRNA shots were safe and effective. They have now been given to literally billions of people.
We have highly credible claims of certain patterns of pathology that have arisen downstream and we have a mind numbing set of denials over the connection between for example tumors various kinds of cardiac issues and anybody who has gone through the process of studying science knows that these are not difficult questions. There are difficult questions but the simple are people who took these shots more prone to X, Y, or Z condition than people who didn't take them. That is not a hard thing to ascertain and yet we are just simply going to battle over it till the end of time because it has somehow become important that we not be able to reach a scientifically robust conclusion about it. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress.
You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. We need vitamins, probiotics, greens.
We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it, when you travel, you skip it, when your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done.
You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you 87 dollars worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com slash impact to claim this offer.