Let's Get This Party Started: The 350th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Published: November 3, 2026
Hosts: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast: The Evolutionary Lens
Episode: 350

Locals: https://darkhorse.locals.com/post/8301194/let-s-get-this-party-started-the-350th-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying
Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7htdrm-the-350th-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying.html
Youtube: https://youtube.com/live/tZS5yfGzNSM
X: https://x.com/BretWeinstein/status/2117702240702226465
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3zScHmEs6Cfmh9QyIOMz79?si=mh4H_R0gSGmnpkHynh4Pgw
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/lets-get-this-party-started-the-350th-evolutionary/id1471581521?i=1000799675751

Summary

In the 350th Evolutionary Lens, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying take on the wave of prepping talk that has spread across social media, and ask what the US government has actually told Americans to do. Heather finds that Newsweek's map of countries "urging people to stockpile food" overstates the American case: the ready.gov advice it cites is months old, September has been National Preparedness Month since 2004, and the only new federal document, Secretary Hegseth's September 30 memo establishing FORTRESS, concerns military installations and specifies no 30-, 60- or 90-day timeline. She then walks through a century of government advice, from Herbert Hoover's wheatless and meatless days in 1918, which named "the American woman" as the nation's one police force, to Grandma's Pantry in 1956, the 1968 civil defense handbook, Y2K, pandemicflu.gov in 2006, and FEMA's 2020 "Coronavirus Rumor Control," noting that the same behavior gets called stockpiling when the government wants it and hoarding when it does not. Bret argues that three days of supplies barely scratches the surface of a grid-down scenario, and that real robustness depends on things individuals cannot buy: spare transformers, dry cask storage for spent nuclear fuel, and an end to gain-of-function research. Heather pushes back on whether those failures belong in a critique of FORTRESS.

In the second half, Bret announces an effort he has been building out of public view: a friendly takeover of the Libertarian Party, in partnership with the Mises Caucus, to rebrand it as the American Liberty Party. He argues that a party that already has ballot access can become a viable second party rather than another failed third party, and outlines its basic principles, including policy that serves the American people, freedom, and equal protection under the law. He also speaks plainly about the personal risk he believes the effort carries, and asks viewers to sign up and circulate it. Heather closes by endorsing a common sense constitutional approach as what the country needs.

About the Hosts

Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and a former professor at Evergreen State College. He came to public attention during the 2017 Evergreen State College controversy and is considered one of the founding voices of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web. On DarkHorse, he typically leads the analytical and philosophical framing of the topics under discussion.

Dr. Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist and a former professor at Evergreen State College. She is the co-author, with Bret Weinstein, of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and brings a background in natural history and field biology to the show's discussions.

Sponsors

Ridge: Ridge’s biggest sale of the year is here! Head to http://Ridge.com/darkhorse to get up to 49% off, plus holiday extras like gift bags and classic cuff beanies on qualifying orders while supplies last! #Ridgepod

Redmond Salt: Jurassic-era salt from Utah, and amazing electrolytes (Re-Lyte) from the same sea bed. Go to http://redmond.life/darkhorse and use code DARKHORSE to get 15% off your first order.

CrowdHealth: Pay for healthcare with crowdfunding instead of insurance. It’s way better. Use code DarkHorse at http://JoinCrowdHealth.com to get 1st 3 months for $99/month.

Join Us

Join us 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

Heather’s newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.com

Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, including from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AGANGg (commission earned)

Mentioned

• Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-countries-urging-residents-to-stockpile-food-12629524

• Grandma’s Pantry on wheels (1956): https://civildefensearchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/grandmas-pantry-goes-on-wheels.pdf

• In Time of Emergency (1968): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15158

• Coronavirus Rumor Control (2020): https://www.kellykeislingtn.org/post/coronavirus-rumor-control

• National Preparedness Month: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2026/09/presidential-message-on-national-preparedness-month-6e71/

• Ready.gov: https://www.ready.gov/stand-ready

• FORTRESS: https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/30/2004009303/-1/-1/1/ESTABLISHMENT-OF-FORTRESS-AMERICA-AS-A-DEPARTMENT-OF-WAR-PROGRAM-FOR-THE-DEFENSE-OF-THE-AMERICAN-HOMELAND.PDF

Episode Chapters

00:00:00 Holding Screen
00:05:06 Number 350, If I Am Led to Believe
00:10:52 Sponsor: Ridge
00:13:26 Sponsor: Redmond Salt
00:16:25 Sponsor: CrowdHealth
00:19:00 Why All the Prepping Talk?
00:22:24 The Sun vs. the Grid
00:28:05 Three Days Is Dipping Your Toe In
00:33:16 Hoarding vs. Stockpiling
00:34:44 We Have But One Police Force
00:40:59 Grandma's Pantry Goes on Wheels
00:44:27 1968: Waiting for the All Clear
00:48:26 Was Y2K a False Alarm?
00:53:34 Your Gas Tank Is a Strategic Reserve
00:58:27 2006: Plan for a Pandemic
01:00:23 Quarantine the Sick, Not the Well
01:04:16 A Fact That Begins With Please
01:06:18 A Condition of Austerity
01:07:57 Preparedness Month vs. FORTRESS
01:12:02 Grid Down, Then Meltdown
01:15:50 Is That Hegseth's Job?
01:23:53 The Low-Hanging Fruit
01:28:14 So, Bret, What Do You Propose?
01:30:09 Not a Third Party, a Second Party
01:32:16 The American Liberty Party
01:40:34 The First Penguin in the Water
01:47:01 Why I Kept This From Heather
01:50:42 Recruit Massie
01:52:33 Common Sense Constitutionality

Key Questions Answered in This Episode

Is the US government telling Americans to stockpile food?
At [00:14:31], Heather reviews the Newsweek article and map claiming nations are urging citizens to stockpile, and at [00:15:34] says Newsweek "gets it wrong here." The ready.gov advice it cites was published months ago, and September is simply National Preparedness Month, observed every year since 2004. Her conclusion at [01:21:28]: when you go looking for what the government has said, "it's just not there."

What is FORTRESS, and does it tell civilians to prepare for 90 days?
At [01:04:58], Heather reads Secretary Hegseth's September 30 memo establishing FORTRESS America as a Department of War program. At [01:06:01] she notes that it requires action within 30 days of the memo but contains no 30-, 60- or 90-day readiness standard, and that it concerns military installations, not civilians.

Why is the electric grid more fragile than people assume?
At [00:17:18], Bret describes the threat from coronal mass ejections and other grid-down events, noting that a single large transformer "would be a year out" if ordered. At [00:21:00] he argues that efficiency carries the downside of fragility, and Heather adds that efficiency means lack of redundancy.

Is three days of supplies enough?
At [00:22:59], Bret says three days is "not even the shallow end of the pool. That's dipping your toe in." At [00:24:37] he argues the bigger problem in a widespread outage is that the systems that keep people safe from bad actors are built for the grid being up.

What is the difference between hoarding and stockpiling?
At [00:28:56], Heather observes that when the government doesn't want people putting up supplies, it calls it hoarding, and when it does, it calls it stockpiling: "It's the same activity."

What did the US government ask of citizens during World War I?
At [00:29:38], Heather reads from 1918 New York Times coverage of Herbert Hoover's Food Administration rules, including wheatless, meatless and porkless days. At [00:32:33] she reads Hoover's line, "We have but one police force, the American woman," which she found "totally stunning."

Is there a case for keeping supplies on hand during a bad flu season?
At [00:55:17], Bret argues there is: stores at home let you absent yourself from contact while a dangerous flu moves through your community. He is explicit at [00:55:53] that he opposes mandated lockdowns: "If you're going to quarantine, you quarantine the sick, not the well." At [00:57:54], Heather notes that the government's own messaging assumed the opposite.

Why does Bret raise spent nuclear fuel in a discussion of prepping?
At [01:06:56], Bret explains that reactors and their spent-fuel pools need an energy input to stay cool, and at [01:08:04] that the required two weeks of backup capability is "not nearly enough." He argues at [01:08:59] that fuel cool enough to leave the pools should be moved into dry cask storage, which needs no power. At [01:10:44], Heather questions whether that critique applies to FORTRESS, since the Department of Defense presumably has no purview over the fuel pools.

What is the American Liberty Party?
At [01:25:03], Bret announces an effort to create not a third party but a second party. At [01:27:10] he describes the plan: a friendly takeover of the Libertarian Party, which already has ballot access, in partnership with the Mises Caucus, and a rebrand as the American Liberty Party. He outlines its basic principles starting at [01:37:46].

Main Topics

• Prepping and grid-down preparedness

• Newsweek's stockpiling map and what it gets wrong

• National Preparedness Month and ready.gov

• FORTRESS America and Pete Hegseth's Department of War memo

• Coronal mass ejections and electromagnetic pulses

• Transformers and the fragility of the North American grid

• Efficiency versus robustness

• Hoarding versus stockpiling

• Herbert Hoover and the 1918 Food Administration

• Grandma's Pantry and 1950s civil defense

• In Time of Emergency (1968)

• Y2K

• Pandemic flu planning in 2006

• FEMA's 2020 Coronavirus Rumor Control

• Quarantining the sick, not the well

• Spent nuclear fuel pools and dry cask storage

• The duopoly and the Uniparty

• The American Liberty Party and the Libertarian Party

Search Keywords

Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, DarkHorse Podcast, Evolutionary Lens, prepping, preparedness, stockpiling, hoarding, food storage, grid down, electric grid, transformers, coronal mass ejection, CME, EMP, National Preparedness Month, ready.gov, FEMA, Newsweek, FORTRESS, Fortress America, Pete Hegseth, Department of War, Herbert Hoover, Food Administration, victory bread, civil defense, Grandma's Pantry, In Time of Emergency, Y2K, pandemic flu, COVID, herd immunity, bird flu, Ukraine, spent nuclear fuel, dry cask storage, gain of function, Uniparty, duopoly, second party, American Liberty Party, Libertarian Party, Mises Caucus, Ron Paul, Thomas Massie, election integrity, digital bill of rights

Transcript

[00:00:05] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Hey folks, yes you. Welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast livestream. It is number 350, if I am led to believe correct things about it. I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying. That will come as news to almost nobody in our audience. We are showing up here on a Tuesday, because of travel. We have various things to discuss. We are gonna be talking a little bit about the prepping in the air.

[00:00:40] Dr. Heather Heying: You need to fix your microphone.

[00:00:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, can y'all hear me? Apparently my microphone was not working for some reason. All right, so we are gonna be talking a little bit about the discussion of prepping that seems to be in the air. Lots of people talking about preparing for days, weeks or months with no grid. We're gonna talk about what--

[00:01:07] Dr. Heather Heying: I've got a little history of the American government's advice to its citizens on the topic.

[00:01:13] Dr. Bret Weinstein: No doubt perfectly consistent advice.

[00:01:19] Dr. Heather Heying: You know, it's not perfectly consistent, but I think it's just interesting to see back through history, because you wouldn't expect it to be perfectly consistent between an era, for instance, when nuclear war was a possibility and when it wasn't. So I don't think that we should demand consistency on a decade to decade or century to century scale, but yes, we would like to not be lied to.

[00:01:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes, we'd like to not be lied to. And I'm not arguing for consistency over long periods of time, obviously, if you were to say to people in the founders generation, jeez, you all better prepare for some days without services, they would have looked at you funny because what were the services and weren't they basically prepared by the very nature of

[00:02:15] Dr. Heather Heying: existence? I mean, part of what is remarkable about the modern moment is that there is any need for people at all that they should probably have some supplies laid in and have a bit of self-sufficiency to themselves. Yes. It is quite a statement about the state of modern, I mean, Americans, but really everyone across the world, that anyone would have to be told that they should not have zero preparedness.

[00:02:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It is a status report on our wellbeing. Yeah. It says interesting things. So we will discuss that first and then we are going to discuss what it is that we all should be doing in light of the utter failure of the duopoly and our failure to escape it thus far. We are gonna talk about political parties and whether we have a choice outside of the standard offerings.

[00:03:16] Dr. Heather Heying: And really it is, so it is election day, of course in the United States, but we are, other than the fact that this is gonna be a discussion about modern politics and specifically modern American politics, that's not going to be part of what we're discussing here. Election day is what it is. Given what has happened to elections in the United States in recent years and decades, most people who are gonna vote have already done so. So the fact of it being election day means a lot less than it used to. It has none of the same either urgency or frankly excitement as it used to.

[00:03:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes, and during election day itself, there's very little to say because it's the one day when the talking heads aren't talking about it because there's nothing to say. So anyway, yes, we're gonna be talking big picture how we Americans and those across the West should think about our current system and what might be done to save it. So anyway, stay tuned for that.

[00:04:10] Dr. Heather Heying: All right, so check us out on Locals. We don't have a Q and A today, but we've got all of our past ones there on Locals and there's a watch party going on right now. We are still, we still have some copies of our books for sale. You can go to darkhorsepodcast.org slash books to find all of the above. We've got Antipode, which is my first book from 2002, Seasons for the Extraordinary Wildlife and Culture of Madagascar. That is the one that we have lots of copies of because as I mentioned last time, I just found a whole, I just dropped it on the floor. I just found a whole box of them, a whole giant box of them that I didn't know I had. We have of course, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which came out in 2021. And then shortly thereafter, we have that book in translation, a few copies left of each of these Thai, the Thai version, the Brazilian Portuguese version, the Polish, Polish, French, there we go. And finally, Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, from the country of Spain, as opposed to the continent, other than Brazil, that they have spread their language into.

[00:05:26] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Cocker espanol version.

[00:05:29] Dr. Heather Heying: No. No. Really 100% not.

[00:05:31] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay.

[00:05:32] Dr. Heather Heying: No. Okay, we are going to start then with our ads, as we always do, three sponsors carefully chosen right at the top of the hour. And then we will launch into the rest of the show. All right, our first sponsor this week is Ridge. And you, Bret, have the props for Ridge. Ridge makes wallets, phone cases, power banks, ta-da, and more, all of which make fantastic gifts. Actually bring them over here so that we can see them while I'm just knocking things over all over the place today. Is there someone in your life who is impossible to buy for? Probably there is. Someone who never tells you what they want, for whom you can't seem to buy the right thing. This year, skip the gifts that get shelved or forgotten and check out Ridge instead. Consider Ridge's five-in-one travel power bank. It has built-in cables and lets you charge all your devices at the same time. It's got MagSafe, which attaches magnetically directly to the back of your phone, so you can charge without wires. It's powerful and fast and high capacity. 10,000 milliamp hours provide up to three full phone charges. There's an LED display that tells you your charge level is at a glance and an integrated kickstand at two. And it's available in some sweet colors. We just have the matte black here. Bret has the matte black, but it's available in several interesting colors. As with all Ridge products, you get free shipping, a lifetime warranty, and a 99-day risk-free trial. That means you can shop now, gift it in December, and your giftie still has it until February to decide if they like it. We gave our son a Ridge wallet months ago. This is Bret's Ridge wallet. I'm not gonna show your passport card. There's the wallet part of it. And he loves it just as you love yours. Zach said about his wallet, "It's elegant, pretty, and functional. "It holds exactly how much it needs to and expands "or shrinks so it's never the wrong size, "whether I have cash and lots of cards on a road trip, "or just a couple cards on my way to class. "It does exactly what it needs to do." Ridge wallets are slim, RFID blocking, and built to last. Like Ridge's power banks, they make fantastic gifts. For a limited time, Ridge is having their biggest sale of the year. Head to ridge.com/darkhorse to get up to 49% off. That's ridge.com/darkhorse for up to 49% off. Plus, qualifying orders can score holiday extras like gift bags and classic cuff beanies while supplies last. After you purchase, they will ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Tell them DarkHorse sent you.

[00:07:57] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And if you don't--

[00:07:58] Dr. Heather Heying: You can have your stuff back now.

[00:07:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: If you don't already use one of these MagSafe power banks, it can actually change the way you interact with your device by freeing you from a cable and allowing you to recharge, especially good when you're traveling.

[00:08:12] Dr. Heather Heying: Absolutely, and if you do use one and you have someone on your gift list who doesn't use one, what a great gift.

[00:08:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep.

[00:08:20] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay, our second sponsor this week is Redmond Salt. We've been using Redmond Salt for over a decade. We like it so much, I've said this before, we buy it by the bucket. There's one of our, actually, we have another bucket that's unopened. Speaking of crap. Right. Their salt is fantastic. It's mineral rich, non-iodized, mined from a Jurassic-era seabed in Utah, and very flavorful too. Redmond has been in the salt business since the Eisenhower administration, and they've now made the jump into electrolytes. The electrolytes are over in a corner, so I don't have the electrolytes on camera, but you'll have to infer them. There we go, it's on the screen. Electrolytes are salts and trace minerals that your body needs to function, and Redmond Salt Re-Lyte is an excellent product. If you're drinking plenty of water but still feel dehydrated, you may have an electrolyte deficiency. I didn't think much about electrolytes until we did the Camino de Santiago last year. We were through hiking in northern Spain where both Bret and I at different moments, no one calls it the Camino de Santiago. Why, I just dropped the deco, that's a weird way to appropriate it, isn't it?

[00:09:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: No, they call it, yeah.

[00:09:27] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay, okay.

[00:09:29] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which is two de's, which always strikes me as a little weird, but what? The Compostela.

[00:09:39] Dr. Heather Heying: Oh, two de's?

[00:09:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. A de. De, right, exactly.

[00:09:42] Dr. Heather Heying: Everyone goes for longer than two days.

[00:09:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh yeah, no, that's not a very long, you know. All right, we've done it.

[00:09:46] Dr. Heather Heying: We've lost the plot, but it's my fault. I apologize. I did not think much about electrolytes until we did the Camino de Santiago de Compostela last year. We were through hiking in northern Spain when both Bret and I at different moments at the end of a long day of hiking. Our walking companions, much smarter than us, insisted that we needed electrolytes, and they were right. Our favorites of the ones we got given by our friends were Redmond Salt Re-Lyte. When your body runs out of the minerals it needs to run, it starts to fritz out. When that happens, Re-Lyte gets you back on track. Re-Lyte is different and better than the myriad other brands of electrolytes available because of where the salt comes from. They start with unrefined mineral, unrefined Real Salt, like in this bucket here, that naturally contains sodium, chloride, and more than 60 trace minerals from geology, not from a lab. And the rest of the formula is just as clean. Zero sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, no chemical preservatives, no filler, no junk. It tastes great. I particularly like their grapefruit flavor. And when it tastes really good, that's your body telling you that you waited too long and you need electrolytes. Ready to give Re-Lyte a try? Go to redmond.life/darkhorse and use code DarkHorse to get 15% off your first order. That's redmond.life/darkhorse with code DarkHorse for 15% off your first order or click the link in the video description, scan the QR code on screen, or check the pinned comment. Excellent, yes.

[00:11:09] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay, really. And that is very delicate of you to have said disoriented. I felt way worse than disoriented for my rejuvenation with electrolytes.

[00:11:17] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah.

[00:11:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

[00:11:18] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, you did.

[00:11:19] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, now our final sponsor this week, Heather, is CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth, as you know, is not insurance. It's better. CrowdHealth is a community of people helping to decentralize healthcare costs from funding medical costs to helping negotiate your bills. No middlemen, no insurance, no nonsense. If you...

[00:11:40] Dr. Heather Heying: Mm-mm. Did I mess it up?

[00:11:43] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Kind of.

[00:11:44] Dr. Heather Heying: There's a decent chance I messed it up. Here's the thing. I was changing up all the scripts this week and then, you know, maybe language left me. I don't know.

[00:11:52] Dr. Bret Weinstein: See, my faith in you is so great that as I'm reading what is obviously an error, I'm assuming there must be some way it makes sense and I would have to get to the end of the sentence to know that, but I'm now going to edit the sentence on the fly. Okay. No one will be any the wiser.

[00:12:05] Dr. Heather Heying: No one will know.

[00:12:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: If you're your own boss or you've got your own business, paying for healthcare is likely an albatross around your neck.

[00:12:16] Dr. Heather Heying: You're not gonna let me assess if it's actually my error. No, sir. You know, I have it on my computer.

[00:12:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I know that you do. You can get away from the predatory health insurance model. We did and we're not going back. For several years now, instead of insurance, we've had CrowdHealth. The CrowdHealth community has repeatedly helped fund hospital bills with a simple, straightforward app that we have interacted with and we have interacted with people who are easy to reach and helpful. See, again, English, it just flows. With CrowdHealth, you get healthcare under $100 per month for your first three months, including access to a team of health bill negotiators, low cost prescription and lab testing tools, and a database of low cost, high quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth. You pay for little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy or an accident, you pay the first 500 and the crowd pays the rest. It's straightforward, affordable, and much better than health insurance. I'm hoping you'll stay stuck in their same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. Don't do it. Take charge of your health expenses and be part of a community. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 a month for your first three months using code DarkHorse at joincrowdhealth.com. That's joincrowdhealth.com, code DarkHorse. And remember, CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out, take your power back. This is how we win. Joincrowdhealth.com.

[00:13:50] Dr. Heather Heying: Awesome.

[00:13:52] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right. Let us start discussing the question of prepping, which has been all over social media this week. Though, as you have found, it is difficult to trace back why in the US we are suddenly talking about this. Now there, go ahead.

[00:14:15] Dr. Heather Heying: We can show one of the, I think what must be one of the sources of all of this. It seems like panic. And really, I was completely unaware that other people were saying anything, but why don't you go ahead and show my screen here. This is a Newsweek article that came out a few days ago. Map shows nations urging people to stockpile food as France issues warning. That sounds big and current and important. And around the world, governments increasingly advising their citizens to have provisions in the case of an emergency, such as war, extreme weather and cybersecurity threats. And it's true that the UK has a newish campaign, Be Ready, and they're advising three days of provisions. France has also recently put something out. British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, was talking about how much he likes his beans. Also he's gonna have a lot of beans on hand, which, okay. And they go on, they're good, Sweden and Norway advising having supplies for about a week. Although in a lot of these cases, it turns out it's just that there is either a week in the year, like the 39th week in the year, or as in the case of the United States, September, which is a national preparedness month. And so there's actually nothing specific going on right now. And Newsweek gets it wrong here. They say some countries have less time specific guidelines. In the US, for example, advice published on ready.gov, a website of the Department of Homeland Security states, being prepared means having your own food, water and other supplies to last for several days. That's true, but that was published months ago. That's not new.

[00:15:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's not new.

[00:15:54] Dr. Heather Heying: It's not new. And so we go down to this, the map that is promised in the headline, this Newsweek article, countries with stockpile and emergency preparedness advice. Okay, that's different from governments that are advising emergency food stockpiles. And they got the US in red here, and the US is not in fact put out in anything new about suggesting stockpiling. There is a new program associated with the military and military preparedness, which also doesn't have a timeline associated with it, even though people are saying 90 days and three months as if it is, but that is A, for the military, not for civilians. And all the talking about particular timelines are either creative stay in air or from something else entirely and then conflated.

[00:16:41] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, there's something I think about what I think is actually a reasonable state of nervousness about the lack of influence we seem to have over our governments and the adventures that they seem to be on, which put us in jeopardy. So there is concern that what has been said about military readiness and the ability of bases to exist effectively off the grid for something like months is an indicator that we are in new territory. And longtime viewers will know that I wrote a piece not about a military threat at all, about a threat that is posed by the sun and the coronal mass ejections that are periodically thrown off the sun that impact the grid down here on earth. And what has happened since the last major interaction between the sun and the earth in 1859 is that the world has become a very electric and then electronic place. And because the danger of these coronal mass ejections is that they can disrupt the grid by inducing currents, blowing up transformers, that they could throw us into a darkness that most people would assume is a temporary matter of fixing whatever has been harmed and getting us back online. What people do not realize is that that can happen when it happens locally. It cannot happen when we are talking about a grid that actually links North America. There may be three or four separate grids that might go down independently of each other or they interact. But the point is the danger that we will be toppled into darkness that will not lift for months, if not years, is much greater than people understand by virtue of the fact that the transformers on which the grid runs, if you ordered one, it would be a year out. If you needed 40 of them, you've got a serious problem that the earth is not well positioned to solve. So in any case, the point is at the moment, what we seem to face is a threat from hostile actors. Yes, the sun is always out there and with the magnetic field of the earth decreasing a CME of a given size poses a greater and greater threat over time. But the idea of an electromagnetic pulse that a hostile force might use to disrupt our grid frankly hacking, which is on the minds of many people because apparently there's been some large scale hack of freezers in Europe, crazy as that sounds.

[00:19:40] Dr. Heather Heying: I'm sorry, when you said it to me last night, I said to you, what is the system of freezers that unites them? Like how is it that you can hack a continent's freezers?

[00:19:50] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, and the answer

[00:19:52] Dr. Heather Heying: is- Just because we don't know the answer to that and it sounds crazy doesn't mean it's not true. It doesn't mean it is true, but it doesn't mean it's not true.

[00:19:58] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Everything has subtly shifted from not using electricity to being electrical, to being electronic and programmed and very sensitive. These things are plugged into each other for a reason.

[00:20:11] Dr. Heather Heying: This is the dark side of the internet of things that we were hearing so much about 10 and 20 years ago.

[00:20:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, exactly, this is the downside of that. But in any case, what I want people to, you might go, we will post a link to the article I wrote about basically a scenario of how a CME could kick off an extinction level event by knocking out electric grids. And you can get an idea what happens downstream of an electric grid going down. But what I want people to get most from this is that there are features of this hazard that translate perfectly. It doesn't really matter if it's a CME or an EMP delivered by terrorists or by a hostile nation or something.

[00:20:55] Dr. Heather Heying: Or three other letters or ranges.

[00:20:57] (Both Laughing)

[00:20:58] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, what matters is that our civilization is highly efficient in many regards. And the problem is that efficiency has the downside of fragility. To the extent that it is efficient, it is not robust. And so most people don't

[00:21:19] Dr. Heather Heying: think-- Efficiency means lack of redundancy.

[00:21:21] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it means lack of redundancy, lack of robustness, all of this puts us in a kind of jeopardy that most people don't anticipate because when was the last time, if you were an American, that the food stopped showing up in the supermarket? We've had ebb and flow, but we have not had a situation where the supermarket is bare and people don't know what they're gonna do to eat. What's more--

[00:21:43] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, I mean, everyone did live through that to some degree. The shelves were bare for a bit in March and April of 2020.

[00:21:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I'm aware of it, but it's not the starvation level bare.

[00:21:59] Dr. Heather Heying: No, of course not, but it felt at the time like it wasn't organic. And we weren't publicly questioning what this was actually about at that point, but it felt in slight retrospect and certainly even more so now, greater retrospect, like it was a kind of test of what people would do as things became unavailable, things that they had become accustomed to and things that they had not only become accustomed to but actually needed in some cases.

[00:22:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep, it was a hint of what might come. It can get much, much worse. And the thing I wanna get people to focus on is that your supplies and your ability to persist without external inputs is not just dependent on whether or not you've shopped and purchased that stuff so it's under your control. There are dangers here that are far greater. And for all the people who've been talking about, prepare for three days. The only way in which three days actually requires is if that three days comes in the winter, you wanna make sure that you are in a position not to freeze. Probably that can be done with clothing. If you were in the summer and you're in a place that gets hot, you wanna make sure that you can remain cool. But three days is the, that's not even the shallow end of the pool. That's dipping your toe in.

[00:23:34] Dr. Heather Heying: Again, it suggests not just a fragility of systems but a fragility of individuals. That there are people who actually might not survive absent access to services or goods for three days.

[00:23:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep. And it is worth thinking about for sure. But the point is it's actually, there's nothing magic about a number of days, right? Can you go a day without food? That's a good experiment to run. Three days, a week, two weeks, a month, 90 days, right? These are targets. At some point, the target is so far away that the investment you would have to make, the way in which you would change your life is not gonna be worth it relative to the likelihood of it happening. But again, people need to understand that the biggest problem is not whether you've thought ahead three days. If the grid, the North American grids, all of them went down for three days, you have an entirely different problem, okay? Your entirely different problem is that the systems that keep us safe from bad actors, for example, are built for the grid being up. At the point the grid goes down, all sorts of people may have an interest in taking advantage of the fact that the cops, there aren't enough of them and they don't have good enough information to know where to be, and they may not be able to get there. People will take advantage of that. The very same logic that creates looting when chaos breaks out in a city where a city that can be managed with a certain number of cops cannot be managed if those cops suddenly have their attention called to a riot over here, and that means that stores over there get broken into, that same logic of the system when it functions efficiently needs this many resources of some kind, and then when things go haywire, it needs much, many more resources than it has at its disposal, right? So to the extent that we are being induced at all to think about prepping, what we really need to know is that the people who are in charge of keeping us safe give a damn about us and are not just simply telling us to take care of ourselves because we can't. We cannot keep civilization functioning. Further, I think we need to be concerned about the excuse, right? To the extent that there are people who seem to be in charge of governing us, who do not seem to care about our wellbeing. They pretend to when it gives them power, but they don't seem to care about our wellbeing. We have to be concerned that they actually might like the opportunity, you know? The grid goes down. It becomes very frightening and dangerous for a time. People are begging for law and order, and then what do you know? The rules of law and order are changed to the advantage of the powerful. So in any case, we need to keep our wits about us and discussion of prepping that is limited to whether or not you have food and water for a short period of time, that's really not the discussion we need to be having. We need to be having a discussion about a robustness to society and getting people in charge who actually do care about our wellbeing and our liberties.

[00:27:09] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, I mean, there are, I feel like you were going back and forth between two different levels of both analysis and action. The government is unlikely to be telling the people how the government is going to make its own systems more anti-fragile, more robust.

[00:27:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep.

[00:27:25] Dr. Heather Heying: We have no evidence that they're doing so really, although Hegseth's FORTRESS announcement from, I wanna say the end of September, although maybe it was more recent than that.

[00:27:37] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it was September 30th.

[00:27:38] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, so a little over a month ago was about exactly that. Whereas what we're seeing in Europe and actually really not seeing here now, but there's a history in the US of the government coming to people and saying, okay, you need to take action in order to protect yourself so that we have time to come in and help you if something happens. Those are, it's very different, right? Like individuals making themselves more self-reliant, more autonomous, more agentic, more capable is a different level analysis. And when I was starting to hear from you and others, oh, there's all this stuff on social media, and I go look and I'm like, "I don't see any evidence that this isn't fabricated." Honestly, I see no evidence that the US has put out anything from individuals about needing to put up supplies. But I'm also remembering what we were hearing six and a half years ago as awareness of COVID was starting to happen. And we were hearing more about like medical supplies and masks and such, but also I feel like I heard with regard to toilet paper, for instance, and food and grocery stores that Americans really should not be putting up supplies for themselves. And when the government doesn't want us to be doing it, they call it hoarding. And when they do want us to be doing it, they call it stockpiling. And it just got me thinking about like the use of language. It's the same activity. It's the same activity. And so I went, I looked back in time a little bit about what some of the other moments in American history where the government has decided to take a stand about what it should be telling Americans about whether or not they should be, they should definitely be putting up supplies and be prepared to take care of themselves until the government has an opportunity to step in if something happens or definitely not. So should we go through a little bit of that history?

[00:29:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, let's do that.

[00:29:35] Dr. Heather Heying: At this point? Okay. Back in 1918, we have the New York Times with a headline front page, "Hoover decrees victory bread and cut rations. Calls for two wheatless and porkless days a week and one meatless." That's weird. I assume then by meat, they just mean beef. To us, moderns, pork is included in meat, but okay. "Sacrifices every day too. President calls on patriots to observe new regulations in effect tomorrow." So these new regulations were not mandates, but they were to be going into effect January 28th, 1918. I'm just gonna read a little bit from this. This is from the New York Times archive. "The insistent cry of the allied nations that more wheat must be supplied if the morale of the armies and civilian populations abroad is to be maintained and make possible a continuance of the war was met today by Herbert C. Hoover, United States food administrator, through the promulgation of further conservation regulations." So just a reminder, if you really have no idea what's going on, this is World War I, Wilson is president and the food administration, the United States food administration, I think that's what it was called, had recently been created, which is basically a way, and Hoover was established, not yet president, he was established as the head of it, to do things like literally fix prices, like that was one of his purviews. "Backed up by President Wilson, who issued simultaneously a proclamation calling upon the people of the nation to demonstrate their patriotism by full cooperation, Mr. Hoover ruled that after tomorrow, the war bread to be known as victory bread should be adopted and other sacrifices made." That in itself is just a silly, a silly sentence, like you're just calling it something else and then that's success, okay guys. "Hereafter, Mondays and Wednesdays will be observed as wheatless days, and there will also be one wheatless meal each day. There will be one meatless day Tuesday and one meatless meal each day, and in addition, two porkless days, Tuesdays and Saturdays."

[00:31:37] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That's wild.

[00:31:38] Dr. Heather Heying: That is wild, right? President Wilson and Mr. Hoover had many solemn words to say to the people in making the request that there should be no slackers in the big conservation campaign and indicated that the crisis faced was one which could be met only by general response. So these are just, these are excerpts from this article. Text of Hoover's statement. "In announcing the conservation rules, Mr. Hoover made this formal statement. The following is a summary of the rules have been formulated by the United States Food Administration with the approval of the president in order to effect the further conservation of foodstuffs necessary to support the allies and our own armed forces over the next four months. These rules are effective from the morning of Monday, January 28th. The effectiveness of these rules is dependent solely upon the goodwill of and the willingness to sacrifice by the American people. In the last analysis, the success or failure of any plan such as that here outlined rests with the people. We are dependent upon the cooperation of the trades. We have but one police force, the American woman, and we depend on her to organizing cooperation with our state and local food administrators to see that these rules are obeyed by that small minority who may fail." That I found totally stunning. They're calling on women to call out their neighbors, basically to call out their friends and neighbors and to thus work with the government to make sure that everyone comes into full compliance. I don't know if Hoover was insightful about what women were going to be likely to do, but that certainly feels to me like it has shades of the modern era in which women are more likely than men to call out their friends and neighbors and to hold other people's feet to the fire with regard to insane laws and regulations. And I'm not saying that these were insane. I mean, they seem a little silly as stated. They seem very circumscribed. On the other hand, there was a war effort going on and they needed the wheat for the soldiers overseas and meat. And so there was at least in this case, a very specific and inherently finite need for people to conserve now so that there could be enough food for the soldiers to fight. But calling upon, identifying American women as the police force who will be helping to organize in cooperation with our state and local food administrators to see that these rules are obeyed by that small minority who may fail.

[00:34:04] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Wow. Yeah, that does hint at a rather ugly future. And I agree with you. I think it makes sense to compare actually what is being said there with what we're living through now because there's actually- We're gonna get there. Okay.

[00:34:19] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, I mean, go for it, but like we got more history to go through.

[00:34:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I wanna compare it to what we are informally being told now.

[00:34:27] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay.

[00:34:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So you have President Trump telling us gas prices are elevated temporarily. It's a small price to pay for the advantage of what he claims that we are doing. And it is in effect him pleading with the public not to react to the fact that they are living with greater austerity. It costs more to drive your car, to buy all the things to which fossil fuels contribute. So rather than deliver a policy in which here is what we are sacrificing and here is why we are doing it, here we have a president who has initiated a war that's wildly unpopular with the public, pleading with the public to accept the degradation their lives for benefits that he claims that we get from it. So it's like a malformed version of the same idea and it reads very differently. And I obviously don't love the idea of women policing each other's families over rationing, but the idea of rationing because, you know, because we collectively are at war is a very different, has a very different vibe.

[00:35:52] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. Okay, so let's go ahead some decades to 1956. Here we have the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which at that point was newly formed. So let's just go back for a second. Here we have the New York Times reporting that Hoover and President Wilson were basically advising Americans not to hoard, do not stockpile. That's the opposite that you have to do. Do not stockpile and do not eat that much either. And, you know, basically live in times of austerity by choice so that we can bring our boys home. Sometime later after not just that world war, but the next world war was over, we have, we're now in the Cold War, right? So Grandma's Pantry reads this page two of this pamphlet. Grandma's pantry, its shelves loaded with canned goods and staples was ready for any emergency. And when grandpa announced pack up, we're moving west, grandma put a portion of her pantry on the wagon and was ready. Civil Defense figures grandma had the right idea at home and on the westward trail. That's why Grandma's Pantry, which is now the name of the project in the mid fifties, Grandma's Pantry already adopted as a must in home defense preparations is going on wheels. So this is actually a later version of Grandma's Pantry of which I could not find the original version. This is Grandma's Pantry hits the road. 20th century grandmas may be moving and moving fast, evacuating their homes in a civil defense emergency. Many of them will be traveling in a family car and they should have the car, their home on wheels ready for any emergencies. And it goes on. The suggested main items for the car trunk kit are a three day supply, that again, of food and water, first aid items, flashlight, blankets, and a portable battery radio if there is no car radio. And they have PS, don't forget the can opener. Here we have, it's only a four page pamphlet. So the cover here, the newsletter by Ford about women in civil defense, again, introducing Grandma's Pantry Goes on Wheels and some of their suggestions for what should go into the survival kit include foods purchased bulk or loosely packaged, including strangely hard candy and gum and cigarettes and tobacco. I mean, if you really need it, you really need it, I guess. Water, good, they have that there. And then some other survival supplies. Cigarettes. That's wild. Yep. And, you know, including their items for bread, the parenthetical after bread is canned, date, nut or brown. No, actually it's canned date, canned date bread, nut bread or brown bread. Those are the options that they want. They want the wheels to be taking on the road for survival in the mid fifties.

[00:38:46] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I think that makes sense in a way because those three, I don't know any of them well, but those three can be stabilized. Like regular bread goes bad, but those guys.

[00:38:57] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, brown bread is, so nut bread is not a yeast bread. It's probably gonna last a little bit longer. Brown bread is just, you know, it doesn't go stale quite as fast, I would say, as a white bread. I love that. I like that. But okay, so that's mid fifties.

[00:39:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Mid fifties.

[00:39:17] Dr. Heather Heying: Our government, the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Then we go up 10 years, 12 years rather, where the Department of Defense, the Office of Civil Defense, has put out a book called "In Time of Emergency, A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack and Natural Disasters." And so this, of course, has a different tenor. It is not, you're not gonna be hitting the road with Grandma's Pantry. You are gonna be trying to get out of the way of the particles to use their language. And it's a long book, and I'll put a link to the Gutenberg Project's version of this book in the show notes. But just a few things, this, from page 17, the last paragraph on this page, "Food and water would be available and usable," they say. This is, again, in the event of nuclear war, basically, "From many studies, the federal government has determined that enough food and water would be available after an attack to sustain our surviving citizens. However, temporary food shortages might occur in some areas until food was shipped there from other areas." That seems like it couldn't possibly be true. Like nothing about that paragraph seems right to me, but they're assuring people that it's gonna be fine, but it just might take a few days. And so given that it's gonna take a few days, we jump forward some days, here's what you're gonna want if you were smart enough to build a home shelter. They also have instructions for what to take to a shelter that was built by your local county, for instance. But there are a few things you must have, the absolute necessities. They are water, food, sanitation supplies, and any special medicines or foods needed by family members such as insulin, heart tablets, dietetic food, and baby food,

[00:40:56] Dr. Bret Weinstein: baby food. Baby food. Baby food.

[00:40:59] Dr. Heather Heying: And then they have a list of suggested foods. And so this really is more of like a history of how Americans have eaten. And the numbers on the right of this list, and it continues on the next page, are how long the Department of Defense expects these foods to last. So if you're building a home shelter and you're putting up supplies, you wanna be eating through these and resupplying. Every six months, if you've got evaporated milk, or 18 months, your canned meat, poultry, and fish should be lasting. Cereal products, they say 18 months, it seems like a long time. Canned berries and sour cherries, only six months they give it. That doesn't seem like enough time, frankly. I feel like well-canned, highly acidic fruits can last well more than that. Let's see, dried fruit and metal container, only six months. Again, I think they should last longer than that. Tomatoes and sauerkraut canned, six months. Those numbers seem quite low to me. But they also, pretty much all that food seems like, yeah, that's useful, that's good, that's real food. I'd like to have that on hand if I was living in an underground shelter, waiting for the, I don't even know what, waiting to be able to come agr-

[00:42:11] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The all clear.

[00:42:12] Dr. Heather Heying: Yes, waiting to be able to come above ground again and see what awaited me. But here's some more of the stuff in there. Here's what to put in your home shelter. They've got ready-to-eat cereals, hydrogenated or antioxidant-treated fats and vegetable oils. Those are gonna last 12 months, they say. Nothing else about any other fats, as far as I remember on here. So just the hydrogenated and antioxidant-treated fats and vegetable oils. Sugar, they say, will keep indefinitely. Well, that's good, I suppose. Again, with the hard candy and gum. You've got on this list instant puddings, dry cream product, instant bouillon products. Bouillon products are actually useful. Okay, flavored beverage powders. Okay, and then flavoring extracts like pepper. Actually, flavoring extracts will last forever. It'll just lose its potency. So this is what the American government, in this case coming from the Department of Defense, was advising in 1968, clearly concerned about nuclear war. Move forward, I think I skipped several decades here. There are of course various injunctions all along the way to 1999. And the original government sites are all down, but this is what the Red Cross posted was very much like what I'm seeing the government was also posting. So for those who are younger than, we'll remember exactly what Y2K was about. This was the moment that the clocks went from 1999 to 2000 and there was concern that the computers had been built without an understanding that actually we would hit 2000 and that something or some things dire might happen and send a lot of systems offline for an extended period.

[00:44:02] Dr. Bret Weinstein: There was fear that planes would fall out of the sky and grids would go down and all of these things, which did not happen. I will just say, we do not know because there was so much effort put into correcting the Y2K problem, we don't know whether it was a false alarm to begin with or whether the vigilance of people went around looking for places where a system would have failed because of it, purged enough of those things and nothing bad happened.

[00:44:30] Dr. Heather Heying: Now, do I remember correctly? I feel like it was a question of at the point that many of the much of the code that computing systems in 1999 were still based on was from the original in like 1950s and 60s when storage was at such a premium, that instead of using a four digit year, they had used a two digit year. And so the concern was that rolling over from 99 to 00 would cause systems to not understand that time had continued to move forward in some way. I'm sure I've butchered some of that, but I think it was actually like, just say like, we didn't include enough digits in the year question.

[00:45:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I don't remember that. It doesn't mean it's not right. There was a lot of efficiency stuff that went into computing at that time that would seem absurd to us now because, things like storage have gotten so simple. The example that some in our audience will know is that the computer language C, which is still used, obviously it's evolved C++, et cetera. But the computer language C lasted as long as it did because it was very efficient. And the reason that it was so efficient was that it had initially been coded to reduce the number of characters because there were not screens. And so everything had to be printed out, which was wasteful and annoying. Loud. It was very loud, right. So the language was made very eloquent and because of its eloquence, it actually.

[00:46:14] Dr. Heather Heying: Eloquent. I don't think eloquent is the right word. I think, concise, which I think you already said, but I don't, concise and eloquent are very often not the same at all.

[00:46:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, obviously eloquent is a weird term for computer language to begin with, but let's just say whatever your terminology for it was, the byproduct was that once we moved into the era of screens, it was still a very good language because it had been thought through from the point of view of how do we say what needs to be said very tightly.

[00:46:45] Dr. Heather Heying: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So anyway, suffice it to say, I believe it's highly likely that there were two digit years and that that would have compounded the problem. Maybe even the whole basis for it.

[00:47:00] Dr. Heather Heying: So here the Red Cross, but similar to what the federal government was telling Americans at the time, stock disaster supplies for several days to a week for yourself and those who live with you. This includes having non-perishable foods, stored water and an ample supply of prescription and non-prescription medications that you regularly use. And they go on, actually I cut it off because we don't have time to go through everything today, but as you would to prepare for a winter storm, keep your car's gas tank more than half full. And so just a number of very reasonable, what should be self-apparent suggestions that many people may actually not think of. And I think more likely if you live in the Northeast than if you live in the Southwest, if a storm is coming, you should have a full tank of gas in your car. But really you should just be keeping, there's a level of awareness about your environment that scales out from your immediate environment. Like be aware, be situationally aware out to the entire world that is worth being reminded of, that we have sunk into this complacency that assumes that other people are taking care of our problems for us. And really the evidence is ever greater that really they're not, they're not taking care of our problems for us.

[00:48:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I would just point out, if you think by analogy to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a stockpile of petroleum that we keep so that if there's a disruption, we have a buffer, there's a bunch of stuff that we already own that can be processed and distributed. And effectively these injunctions to prepare are like creating a decentralized reserve, right? That's not changing the amount of toilet paper produced or bread or meat, right? You're obviously not affecting that except very indirectly and slowly by sending a signal into the market that actually there's a bit more demand. What you are basically doing is taking the stuff under your control. And with gas is the easiest place to see why this might be so important, right? How long does it take to increase the amount of gas produced? Like you need many, many, many months of lead time to adjust the amount of gas produced. But if the grid goes down, the fact that there's lots of gas so-called in the pipeline doesn't matter. If you can't pump it because there's no electricity, the point is your ability to utilize it disappears. Whereas if it's in your gas tank, then you can burn it. So the idea of like, hey, why don't we, why don't I take some of that gas under my control and have it in my vehicle that is a safeguard against that gas being in a tank below ground that you have no ability to access because there's no electricity.

[00:50:09] Dr. Heather Heying: Right. Yeah, it just like the stuff exists in the world is not sufficient. You have to incorporate your understanding of the supply chain and how much of it you will need to end up with it yourself. And obviously if you're already sitting on it, the supply chain becomes a non-issue.

[00:50:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep. I will also point out that, you know, obviously we are evolved creatures and we are built to figure out what the hazards to us are based on close calls and other things. We have a very incorrect understanding of how vulnerable we are based on how reliable these supply chains are under normal circumstances. The idea that the supermarket shelves are always full. So it seems like there's infinite abundance. The point is what has to happen for those shelves not to be full? And the answer is very little and they will empty within hours to days. And at the point they empty and there's no incoming, if you live in a place where there are, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are suddenly facing the same dawning realization that they don't know how long this is gonna last. They don't know where their food is gonna come from. There's nothing. The point is you can go from any other Tuesday to absolute chaos in a matter of a few days as people realize that they have not prepared and they go looking for those who have. I would also point out this interacts with the Second Amendment too because the thing that is liable to make some sort of order maintainable is that those who go looking for those who prepped run a risk that they are gonna encounter people who are not only prepped with respect to their cupboards but also prepared with respect to the ability to defend what they have. So I'm spooked about a lot of stuff that goes over on the political left but the desire to do away with personal firearms is so foolish in a world as fragile as the one we are in. And this among many other reasons is a good one to recognize that yes, there's a price to be paid for liberal gun laws but as a price, you will not understand why that price is so worth paying until it's too late, until a grid does go down and doesn't come back up, something like that.

[00:52:46] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay, let's just do a couple more moments in our recent history with regard to how the government has advised us to either stockpile or hoard, stockpile or not hoard depending. Oh, and I will say with regard to Y2K, just like back in World War I, there was contradictory, there were contradictory suggestions from the government. There was like be careful, be prepared, but also don't hoard. And those are hard to mesh with one another. Go to 2006 and we have at pandemicflu.gov. I did not go back and figure out if we were being specifically scared into thinking about the pandemic influenza at that point but I find this site, now this actually, the site itself is not still up but a local politician in one of the states has left it up on his page and so that's where I got this from. The government wrote in 2006 says, "You and your family plan for an influenza pandemic." That's just a different language right away, right? Like it's not telling you that you are already aware that there are issues and here's what you'll do. Like as you are planning for a pandemic, an influenza pandemic, that's one of the things I'm not planning for. I'm not doing that. So they're already sort of priming the pump to get you scared with this language. Think about the challenges you might face, particularly if a pandemic is severe. They say essential services you depend on may be disrupted. These could include services provided by hospitals and other healthcare facilities, banks, restaurants, government offices, telephone and cellular phone companies and post offices. Stores may close or have limited supplies. This all reminds me very much of what would come 14 years later. That feels like they're telling us what then happened in 14 years later. And so just from the same site before you comment on this, food and water supplies may be interrupted and limited. Temporary shortages could occur. So the government was advising with regard to pandemic influenza to store two weeks of non-perishable food, select foods that do not require refrigeration, preparation or cooking, and ensure that formulas for infants and any child or older person's special nutritional needs are a part of your planning. And store two weeks of water with one gallon of water per person per day. They're suggesting two quarts for drinking, two quarts for food preparation and sanitation.

[00:55:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, I'm going to go a little heterodox here. First of all, I will say, during the COVID pandemic, I was persuaded based on the R-naught of COVID that there was an argument for a short-term cessation of interaction. I don't like the term lockdown. I think that was imposed on us. I will never, given what we saw, support any sort of requirement that we not interact. If you're going to quarantine, you quarantine the sick, not the well. I don't think there's an argument for any disease in which it makes sense to do anything else. So don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. In light of that though, the idea that you might store resources for a bad flu season or something actually makes a kind of sense. And it does in the following way. First of all, for reasons that we've

[00:56:25] Dr. Heather Heying: talked- You don't have to go out to the store and interact with other people and be a vector.

[00:56:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. If a really bad flu, the kind that kills old and infirm people is tearing through your town.

[00:56:40] Dr. Heather Heying: And the young, unlike COVID. Like bad flu gets both the very young and the very old.

[00:56:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The very, it gets the vulnerable. If such a thing were tearing through your town, the ability to say, well, I can actually absent myself from contact and wait this out until herd immunity has set in in my community, at which point I go back to work. That is perfectly rational from the point of view, not of slowing the spread of this disease, you're not going to, right? That was one of the terrible lies about COVID was, and of course they understood that we would spot it as a lie if they said, we're gonna block the spread of this thing. What they told us was two weeks to flatten the curve. And you'll remember that that was an argument that hospitals were going to be overwhelmed, which of course they absolutely never were. But from the point of view of protecting your own family by not interacting during a particularly bad moment, a bad flu season, for example, that's a reasonable thing to do. And it is something where the supplies you have on hand dictate whether or not you're in a position to do it.

[00:57:47] Dr. Heather Heying: I agree with you. That of course is not the language that they've used.

[00:57:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right.

[00:57:54] Dr. Heather Heying: The messaging here is plan for the possibility that usual services may be disrupted, stores may close or have limited supplies. They are basically assuming that if you can get stuff, you will get stuff, which goes exactly counter to your point. And you're arguing, the reason to be prepared in this case is such that if there are a lot of people sick with a very nasty disease in your community, being able to effectively self-quarantine until the worst is over has a chance of protecting you.

[00:58:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, and the point is it's not like some situation where it's eventually gonna tear through everybody. If it's tearing through your town, at the point that your town has had enough people recover from the thing that it has herd immunity, you may not be exposed to it again. So anyway, yeah, I'm not defending what they put out. I think what they put out is the same tactic where powerful people are spooking us for their own purposes and the advice they've given is coarse at best. But just from the point of view of whether or not there is an argument to be made for having stores on hand so you don't have to interact with potentially sick people, that's something you could choose to do for yourself and it would be reasonable.

[00:59:10] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay, let's go forward 14 years. Just remind ourselves of what happened during COVID. This is actually the site that has been taken down. This is at FEMA's site, but it's still up at a local politician site. Coronavirus rumor control. Now that sounds like modern languaging, doesn't it? Rumors can easily circulate within communities during a crisis in order to help the public distinguish between rumors and facts regarding the response to the coronavirus pandemic. FEMA has provided the following information for you to stay informed. Myth, I need to stockpile as many groceries and supplies as I can. Fact, please only buy what your family needs for a week. It is important to remember that many families may be unable to buy a supply of food and water for weeks in advance, asterisk that. Consumer demand has recently been exceptionally high, especially for grocery, household cleaning and some healthcare products. Freight flows are not disrupted, but stores need time to restock. This, it is important to remember that many families may be unable to buy a supply of food and water for weeks in advance. It's a sort of just a classic tragedy of the commons style argument where, you know, that you want to have enough stores on hand for your family and you are being advised that because other people can't, you shouldn't. But of course some people will, which means by sacrificing your family, that is all that you are doing. You are only sacrificing your own ability to keep your family safe and fed and whatever else it is that you need to buy. You are not actually going to solve the problem that the government is asking you to solve in a way that it is unsolvable.

[01:00:42] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it's crazy. For one thing, you know, since when does a fact begin with please? That is not the form of a fact, right?

[01:00:51] Dr. Heather Heying: I mean, this is, you know, this is March 2020. This is, you know, Trump's first administration. This reminds me of Biden era language, but it's, I mean, it's all the same thing. I mean, I think, you know, the people writing, the people in charge at these sites mostly didn't change between Trump and then Biden and then Trump again.

[01:01:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. And I would just point out actually relevant to the second segment in today's podcast, that there is the ominous impression, if you look at the policy that has been deployed administration after administration, you will increasingly see that for some reason, a condition of austerity is being created. Yes. Right? The Biden administration sent our spare transformers to Ukraine, a war that still doesn't make sense.

[01:01:39] Dr. Heather Heying: Yep.

[01:01:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And those transformers are what we are depending on should our grid go down, right? In other words, chaos in America is being made more likely in order to fund a inexplicable military catastrophe half a world away. Yep. At the same time, you know, flocks of chickens are being killed because there has been some bird flu and allowing the chickens to become immune to flu which is what they will do through herd immunity. We are killing off chickens so that we guarantee that the chickens will be naive and they become vulnerable every time bird flu shows up. So we see across the board, all kinds of things that actually make us more robust, being whittled away for reasons that make no sense. Some of it may be an accident, but there's an awful lot of it. So the very same people who are telling you, you know, don't hoard, those people are creating a world in which you are dependent for reasons that presumably serve them and don't serve you.

[01:02:49] Dr. Heather Heying: Yep. Okay, so let's just go to what has come out of the federal government for individuals recently, which again is not what the panic on social media would make it sound like. September, 2026, the beginning of September, there was a presidential message on national preparedness month. Apparently every September since 2004 has been national preparedness month. So there was a lot of messaging, but so was there in past Septembers apparently. It reads, "America has always been a nation of strong, capable and determined people who understand that strength must be built before crisis. Preparedness builds that strength and readiness is the result. This national preparedness month, I call on every American citizen to ready themselves and their families, homes, businesses and communities for natural and manmade threats." So they, he, the president recommends, "Americans can take practical steps before crisis to protect their homes and property, purchase affordable insurance against the risks they face." That's a weird one in there. "Know evacuation routes, maintain an emergency kit with essential supplies and stay informed to trusted local news and real-time alerts." Okay, so there's that. There's also the FEMA site, this is Homeland Security, announcing national preparedness month. This was from one of the first days of September. Today, FEMA's Ready campaign launched national preparedness month since 2004. FEMA has observed September as national preparedness month to encourage Americans to plan for emergencies. This year's theme, American Stand Ready, I don't know how that's a theme, that just seems like saying the same thing over again, but this year's theme celebrates the self-reliant spirit of the American people. When Americans take steps to prepare for disasters and keep their families safe, every neighborhood and community is more resilient. And they have at the Ready.gov site a basic disaster supplies kit, which includes things like water and food, several day supply, but that hasn't been updated since the beginning of July. So that's not new. And the only thing really that is new is this, which comes out in the last day of September from the Secretary of War, from Hegseth, establishing FORTRESS America as a Department of War program for the defense of the American homeland. He says, "Effective immediately, I established FORTRESS America as a program of the Department of War. It will serve as the nation's insurance policy, a comprehensive Future Years Defense Program-aligned program that reinforces the United States military's unmatched ability to fight and win under any conditions by securing sustained access to the critical capabilities, infrastructures, and resources on which it depends. The program aligns basing and infrastructure projects to ensure they are collectively advancing toward greater independence. It puts America first and it does what should have been done long ago." And the entire document, which is here just in a web browser, is short and it makes no mention of any particular time. It requires 30 days after this memorandum goes out for this project to be acted on, but there's no 30-day readiness, 60-day readiness, 90-day readiness that's not in here. Also, this isn't about civilians. This is about military installation.

[01:06:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I find something about it troubling. FORTRESS, the program. Yeah, I mean, we live in a country, it has military bases. It would be good if they were capable of enduring what might come. However, I know enough about this puzzle to be concerned that the focus on the ability of these bases to function is alighting the real issue. Several of them, in fact. So one thing is we have a vulnerability that the bases being viable in a catastrophe does not address and the vulnerability looks like this. There are something like 400 civilian reactors in the world. We have quite a number of them in the US. We have not been building out our nuclear capability, but they exist. Every single one of those reactors that is running, and for years after they are decommissioned, they require an energy input to keep from melting down if they have an active reactor or the fuel pools that are getting rid of the residual heat have to be kept cool or they will literally catch fire. The water will boil off, they will catch fire, and the radioactive material will be distributed in the atmosphere. When the grid goes down, the power to keep the reactors and those fuel pools cool disappears. There is a regulation that says that those sites have to have two weeks of capability to keep their fuel pools and reactors cool in the absence of external power. That's not nearly enough. So all well and good that the military bases can keep themselves viable. The question is how good is their plan for making sure at the very least that diesel fuel is making it to each of those reactors in sufficient quantities that we never have a hiccup where something that starts as a grid down turns into a meltdown, right? That is all too likely. Second thing is where is the federal government, the federal government should be insisting that all fuel that has become cool enough to be removed from the active cooling pools is put into what's called dry cask storage. Dry cask storage does not require an energy input. These are basically concrete chambers in which spent fuel after something like five years after it's been removed from a reactor can go into and it doesn't require vigilance.

[01:09:15] Dr. Heather Heying: So five years isn't that long actually.

[01:09:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's not that long. And so we are living in a stupid reality where--

[01:09:22] Dr. Heather Heying: So what's happening to it if it's not, if after at the point that it's ready to not be actively cooled all the time and could be going into dry cask storage, what is actually happening?

[01:09:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's sitting in these damn fuel pools.

[01:09:36] Dr. Heather Heying: Still being cooled when it doesn't need to be actively cooled.

[01:09:39] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, which means that the catastrophe--

[01:09:42] Dr. Heather Heying: It needs to be one or the other. It can't just, like if the fuel, if the water evaporates, then it becomes a risk, even though it's been more than five years. If it had been dry cask, it would be safe-ish.

[01:09:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The most recent five years of fuel has to be sitting in active cooling. To have the rest of it sitting there makes it all the worse. If the worst happens, the fuel pool cracks, it empties, or it boils off, suddenly all of that stuff is going to be sent into the atmosphere. So the point is, look, I don't know what these people are doing. If you actually cared about the wellbeing of the American public in a grid-down scenario, A, two weeks is not enough from the point of view of the diesel fuel. Second, let us limit the amount of damage that will be done. You limit the amount of damage by spending the money, and frankly, it's money that the industry doesn't want to spend, which is why it hasn't been spent, but the federal government can require the industry to spend it, or the federal government can allocate it, and it would make us vastly safer.

[01:10:44] Dr. Heather Heying: So, I mean, I guess, I don't know anything actually about the various departments and who controls what and how Byzantine it is, but I have unfortunately been familiar with some bureaucracies. And it strikes me that this is a critique that's not relevant to the FORTRESS program, that the Department of Defense, which I insist on thinking of it as, presumably has no purview over the fuel pools and the spent fuel from nuclear reactors. And so, Hegseth doing this is entirely within his domain, and he would be unable to do what you're talking about. I don't know whose domain that is, but I guess I'm not sure why that's responsive to FORTRESS.

[01:11:33] Dr. Bret Weinstein: First of all, I think it would probably be the Department of Energy, but it doesn't matter. What matters is you've got the theater of, we've got to be able to get through a something, and there are obvious vulnerabilities that are readily solved that we're not addressing. And so the point is, if you're gonna beat your chest and say, we need to have these bases be able to withstand, are the bases involved in keeping the diesel fuel flowing to these nuclear reactors? I think they should be, because nothing else is gonna be functional, right? The point is, if the idea is we have military bases, their functioning is essential to the wellbeing of America in a grid down scenario, then the answer is one of the things that they need to be doing is getting diesel fuel to these reactors so they don't melt down, which my guess would be probably there is that plan. But to the extent that the vulnerability that we are running each and every day is greater than it needs to be, there's just a total failure of governance. An obvious, easily solved, well, easily reduced problem. And the fact that year after year, it doesn't happen, says nobody's minding the ship, and people are all, they enjoy talking about the stuff that's familiar, like, oh, will there be enough food? But they do not enjoy talking about the stuff that actually really matters, like in the worst case scenario at one of these reactors, how much material is gonna be liberated into the atmosphere? Obviously matters, it's maybe not gonna make sense to your average voter, but it's not a reason not to focus on it. So anyway, I'm not faulting Hegseth for wanting military bases to be prepared.

[01:13:12] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, I think it's non-responsive to FORTRESS and to the Department of Defense. I think the fact that the Department of Defense, for instance, has been renamed the Department of War, tells us something about what this administration is doing. It's about signaling, it's about getting people interested in the drumbeats of war and aggression. And I do read this as potentially a kind of a chest thumping, like, look how ready we are, don't mess with us, but perhaps appropriately. And in this case, I'm not using chest thumping in a derogatory way, but what you're talking about speaks to the less understood, the less charismatic, the less headline grabbing, but ultimately potentially more important because of the catastrophic things that could happen after failures, issues that we aren't hearing about. Like, I actually don't even know. Like when I said I don't know who it would be, yes, I thought Department of Energy, but I don't know who that is. That's why I said I don't. Like, I should know who the Secretary of Energy is, just like we all know Hegseth's name, and it doesn't grab our attention the same way.

[01:14:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay, here's what I'm reacting to. And I'm glad for the pushback. I'm reacting to being gaslit over whether or not these people care about us. Okay, I believe the evidence is 100% clear that they don't care about us at all. And so every noise they make about the safety and wellbeing of Americans is pure, unadulterated bullshit. If they did care about us, they would deal with the low hanging fruit, right? Deal with the dry cask storage of all of the material that can be put into dry cask storage. It would simply be done because it's an obvious thing to do that will, you know, in a bad scenario, make things radically better than they would have been. Right? So I don't wanna hear about it if, I don't wanna hear about, you know, what we can do to make ourselves safer if they are leaving us very unsafe and if they are effectively setting themselves up to use our radical unsafety as an excuse to crack down on us. Right? That's what I think all of these noises are about is you're very vulnerable. Yes, we are very vulnerable. We became much more vulnerable when our spare transformers were sent to Ukraine without anybody even noticing that it happened. Right? Somebody made us more vulnerable, right? That is them setting us up for a catastrophe that is totally predictable.

[01:15:48] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. I guess most of these, most of these historical examples I've pulled up and most of what we've been talking about, I feel like I can find in all of them something that is true and something that can be taken from them that is valuable. And then there may more often than not, perhaps every single time, be some hidden agenda or not so hidden agenda. But for instance, you know, you found the one that I found the most ridiculous, you took the most seriously.

[01:16:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

[01:16:15] Dr. Heather Heying: Because you wanted to talk about what actually having stores in your house might do in the case of, in their case, their example was influenza pandemic. And my feeling was in 2006, what the hell were they doing trying to terrify people into imagining that there was going to be a pandemic of influenza that was gonna require stockpiles for weeks in your home. That is fear mongering. Now you found in what they were recommending some value in terms of thinking about what disease is, what vectors are, how pathogens move and thus took some value from it.

[01:16:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I think they were cynical.

[01:16:54] Dr. Heather Heying: But I think- Of course. And as I already pointed out, their particular examples pivot on, at the point that you cannot rely on the stores, then you have to rely on your own personal stores. And that goes exactly against your suggestion that you shouldn't be going out into the stores where everyone's sick or if you're sick, because then you just create vector madness in terms of the pathogen. But I guess, I mean, I think you specify and you're tired of being gaslit and you don't take these people at their word. And frankly, it's obvious now that they're not interested in us, even though we have either elected them or we've elected the people who appointed them. And it's about time that we ended up with a system that worked I think is a good segue to what you want to introduce here to the next segment can be true at the same moment that, the Department of Defense can't be held accountable for not taking care of the non-casked fuel. And there's just a lot of, yes, we want people to be actually watching out for us when we have elected them into positions where they could and should and must be doing so. But that doesn't mean that every single act must be understood in the most generally negative way because the other thing that needed to be done wasn't done even though it's not their purview.

[01:18:26] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Sorta, kinda. I mean, we have military bases, we pay a ton for them. Presumably the point of making them robust is that they can help keep everything else functional. The point is, is the idea that these things should be robust because they should be unto themselves or is the idea that they are playing an important role which is of course why we built them in the first place. So anyway, my point is this. There is low hanging fruit to the extent that anybody cared about our wellbeing. Dry cask storage, dry cask storage for spent nuclear fuel as soon as it can be done is worth the price. Transformers, we need to have a ready supply of them and they need to be tolerant of the faults that are caused by EMP and coronal mass ejections.

[01:19:17] Dr. Heather Heying: You haven't specified, I know what you're talking about, but you haven't said what these transformers are for. You've only said that they were sent to Ukraine.

[01:19:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: They are essential to keep the grid functioning and they are built vulnerable so that a massive induced current causes them to fry in a way that can't be fixed. So we had some spares, we sent them off. We can fix the design so they are more robust. We can have a plan in which yes, we are all inconvenienced more often. Grids may be taken offline in order to protect them during a particularly intense storm, but the point is that all needs to be thought about if we're to be rendered safer. Herd immunity for animals with respect to bird flu. Stop making us vulnerable by killing animals that have been anywhere near bird flu. That's not how the biology works and stop pretending that you think it is because you're dumb, but you're smarter than that. And then last off the top of my head list is, hey, this is a gain of function research that your mad scientists are doing because they're really interested in biological warfare. Cut it the fuck out, right? The leaks from the labs are all over the place. It's not an uncommon event to the extent that you're enhancing pathogens so they infect people. You are putting us in danger. So my point is I don't wanna hear about our safety in the public if you are making us vulnerable at every turn. You have low hanging fruit you can deal with. You have policies that you could institute that would make us safer with respect to things like gain of function research and you're not doing it. So the point is until you do the obvious stuff that would make us at least somewhat safer, you're full of shit when you tell us what we need to do to make ourselves safer. You're just manipulating us.

[01:21:09] Dr. Heather Heying: So I think I agree with all that. But I will also say that a lot of people, yourself included, were very focused on how much was coming out of the government about this stuff and it turns out there's nothing. Like there's literally nothing, like it was a fabrication. I like Newsweek is participating in it and lots of other media outlets are participating in it. But when you go and try to find what the government is, it's just not there.

[01:21:33] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. Dan Bongino is the closest we've got and he's not in the government.

[01:21:37] Dr. Heather Heying: Right, right. So yes, he recommended 30 days this, and that's not to say that there isn't maybe something going on and we haven't been told.

[01:21:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: No, but I'm talking about the Hegseth. I do think military bases should be able to survive in really bad scenarios. But I also think that to the extent that the Department of War is interested in bases surviving and those of us out here in the public seem to be vulnerable in ways that we can't address, which is really in some ways the overall point here, is the public preparing itself, that's the last line of defense when the system that is supposed to render us safer has failed.

[01:22:21] Dr. Heather Heying: And I'm not arguing. But again, the public hasn't been advised that it needs to be taking

[01:22:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: active steps. No, we have apparently an annual celebration a month in which we celebrate our preparedness. So, you know.

[01:22:34] Dr. Heather Heying: That's not new.

[01:22:35] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I'm not saying it's new, but I'm saying there are obvious things that need to be done. I mean, really, I'm just making the same point over and over again. The evidence that they don't give a shit about us is everywhere, okay? And until we have a government, I mean, the government is us. The fact that the government doesn't care about us is that somebody else has taken it over. So that is the problem, and it is making us very much more vulnerable, and it has to be addressed. And so every time our safety comes up in any form, I think that's the point.

[01:23:08] Dr. Heather Heying: So, Bret, what do you propose? Well, all right. Keep trying. I know. Keep on getting to the segue. You got this.

[01:23:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay, so. We have a problem. The problem is the duopoly, otherwise known as the Uniparty. Now, some of us thought that we might drain the swamp by voting for a renegade, somebody who clearly was detested by the Uniparty. That does not seem to have worked. It is shocking the level at which it has not worked. I'm not saying we haven't gotten anything. There are some things about the Trump administration that are truly positive. We had a huge influx of illegal immigrants. The influx appears to be halted for the moment. The massive number of immigrants that came across the border illegally does not appear to have been addressed for some reason. We have had progress on the madness associated with so-called gender-affirming care. There are positive things about this administration, but overwhelmingly, it has fallen short on many of its promises to us in the process of getting elected for reasons that I truly believe we don't know. Could be that it was all a con all along. I don't think that that's likely, but it doesn't really matter. What we've learned from this experience is that we will not be voting our way out of our crisis through the duopoly. Even a renegade who has taken over one of the parties does not appear to be able to do it through the duopoly. The hope is that it could be done outside of the duopoly or the so-called Uniparty. And so what I am announcing today is something that I have hinted at in many places, which is that there is an effort to not create a third party, because that's not going to work, but to create a second party. And that's really what we're talking about. We have two parties. If you think about the question of what vote would you have had to have cast in 2024 in order to avoid war in Iran, I think we would be at war in Iran no matter what. I think we did not have the option to vote against this war, that this war was going to happen because the powers involved in the Uniparty wanted this war to happen for reasons that are not properly explained. And we could do similar analyses with Ukraine or any one of a number of topics. So, now I will say at one point I thought I was very clever for arguing that this was a second party, not a third party. It turns out that Ron Paul made that point much earlier than I had made it. So kudos to Ron Paul for pointing out that this would be a second party. So, the dynamics are the following thing. Our system is built to frustrate the production of a viable third party. It becomes very, very difficult for reasons that the average person in public can't see and won't be aware of and won't be interested in. The fact is though, the Libertarian Party for all of its defects has managed to gain ballot access in all 50 states at one point or another. It stands always ready to vote in all 50 states to put somebody on the ballot. That said, the Libertarian Party has historically had difficulty finding a candidate worth voting for. And so the point is it has accomplished something that is structurally impressive and important and bypasses the control lever that the Uniparty inflicts on us. But somehow it never plays an important role in terms of wielding power. So the idea is a friendly takeover of the Libertarian Party. I'm partnering with the Mises Caucus, the sort of hard-headed folks who have libertarian values but are also frustrated by the way the party functions. And the idea is to take over the Libertarian Party and to rebrand it the American Liberty Party. So you wanna put up the American Liberty Party site so people can see what we're talking about. Now you will see that the slogan here, it says the new home for the America First movement. And I wanna point out that America First is a fraught term. What we mean here is America First in the sort of most obvious sense of the term. American policy should always be in the interests of the American people. There's no excuse for the American government making policy that isn't in the interests of the public. Now, lots of things can be in the interest of the public. Can foreign aid ever be in the interests of the American public? Of course it can. Of course, yes. Immigration, of course. But we have to have a discussion in which the American people's interests are absolutely overriding and we don't have that. At the moment what we have is governmental policy, which is at best indifferent to the wellbeing of the American public. So we are very interested in anybody, any patriotic American who is in line with the values expressed in our constitution, founding ethos of the country. If you want the country to function of those values, then this is the party for you. If you want to use America as a weapon, if you want it to be some kind of ethnostate for certain people, no, that is not what this movement is at all. This is about, frankly, a division that comes down to us and them. I hate to talk in us and them terms, but the us is everybody who wants a system that is fair, that provides equal protection under the law, that provides access to the market for everyone.

[01:29:38] Dr. Heather Heying: The us could be nearly everyone.

[01:29:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It should be everyone. It's everybody worth talking to. And the them is anybody who decides that they want something else, that they want special advantages for their people or whatever, or they want to use America as a weapon in some fight that is not our fight. So we're talking about effectively a second party, we're talking about an American effort, but one that is resolutely in favor of either rescuing the West or reinventing it. And the reason that that is so important is that the West uniquely views all people as having equal status. And that is the only alternative we have to the sort of prior state of man, which is lineage against lineage violence. So if you don't like what's going on in the Middle East and you don't want it to spread to the rest of the world, then the answer is lineage against lineage violence is the thing that we have to oppose. The West is the alternative to it. We need to get the West back on track one way or the other. So this is of course a cardinal sin. The idea of escaping the various traps that are supposed to keep us battling red against blue is a cardinal sin. In other words, the way our system is managed so that it can be perfectly indifferent to our wellbeing and it can tax us at the same time and spend those resources on whatever it wants. The way it does that is by making sure you never have a viable alternative. And this comes in a couple of different flavors. If you try to run a viable candidate, somebody who's actually popular with the public outside of the parties, you will be accused of electing whatever the more horrible of the two mainstream offerings is. So you will effectively be put in the position of taking the blame for whatever harm comes. And the second thing is that frankly, all of the interesting stuff has always gotten rid of in the primaries. And so by the time you get to the general election, they've already won, right? They've already got somebody who's gonna do their bidding and not yours. So we have to escape that paradigm in one way or another. The right way to escape that paradigm is to recognize two things. One, Goliath is gonna trip sometimes. Goliath makes mistakes, he stumbles. If you wait until Goliath stumbles in order to build an alternative, then you won't be in a position to capitalize on his stumbling. If you build it and then you wait for him to trip, then you're ready to go. So one thing that is true is if we hope to elect somebody, hopefully to the top office who is capable and interested in draining the swamp, for example, then we would need to build the structure that would allow them to get to that position. Now, it is very difficult to go from not having a viable presidential candidate to winning such an election. That would require a lot of luck, frankly. But in the meantime, a party that is popular with the public because it actually represents their interests, which is frankly all you have to do in order to be popular, right? The way that these two awful, terribly corrupt parties manage to persist is that you don't have a non-corrupt alternative, right? So you're forced to hold your nose. But the only thing that a party would have to do to be truly popular is to represent the interests of the public. And if such a party were not to be able to get to the drain the swamp position in one go, which is very likely, it can make the people who support it powerful get their interests represented by strategically interfering in the battle between the two corrupt parties. So in other words, the idea is if one can take 5, 10, 15% of the vote away from one of these parties, then that party has to listen and cater to the interests of the people who support it in order to put itself back on the map. So there's an obvious strategic mechanism. Even if our loftiest goals are not attainable term, there is a way in which to wield power. Now, I've said that creating a viable party is likely impossible if you create a third party. Creating a second party out of a party that has already succeeded in organizationally getting ballot access is much more viable. It's also extremely dangerous. I don't relish saying any of what I'm saying here because I know that the folks who have corrupted our system understand what such an effort is. Either it will be impossible to accomplish it, and if it's not impossible, then they have extraordinary mechanisms at their disposal. And so I don't like being the first penguin in the water here, but I'm gonna be the first penguin in the water. I will say we have talked to many important people, people who are honorable across the political spectrum, from pretty far left to pretty far right. The enthusiasm for this plan is huge. Why am I emerging here to put this on the table with all of that support is that the risk to people's standing is significant enough that this has to be made viable in order for the large number of people who have agreed that this is absolutely necessary and the right plan to come forward. So what I'm telling the folks who are watching this podcast is you hear that this is necessary. You know it if you've been watching American politics, if you watched the most recent election, if you watched the Biden administration pretend that we had a president when in fact we had a demented old man who was barely aware of what was going on. If you've been watching recent American history, you know how important this is. You know that no third party has emerged out of nowhere, but you also know that the Libertarian Party does exist and has functioned in order to get ballot access. So if you want this strategy to be deployed and to work, then sign up, go to the website, sign up, let us know who you are and show your support. Circulate this because if it catches on, then those people are going to join. And as they come out in public in the aftermath of the midterms here, this movement can grow very, very quickly. It needs to have momentum and the momentum is going to come from the public.

[01:37:31] Dr. Heather Heying: What's the website?

[01:37:33] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It is theamericanlibertyparty.com. Is it americanlibertyparty.com or theamericanlibertyparty.com? It's americanlibertyparty.com. It lists very few principles. You want to click on our principles here. So there's a lot to be said about what this party should do. In general, in terms of what this party stands for, it stands for making American policy serve the interests of the American people. It stands for freedom. I have argued that a policy can be judged on whether or not its impact is net liberating. Even regulations can net liberate. Regulations that make air travel safe allow you to travel around the world easily so you accept a restriction in order to be freer. But I'm going to argue that the validity of a policy can be judged based on whether or not it is net liberating. And then justice, equal protection under the law. The law has to function in the interests of the public. There has to be special categories of people, whatever the powerful force is that seems to act with impunity in our country. It has to be counteracted. So those are the basic principles we're outlining. Now there are lots of things that I think we should be interested in doing with this party. It's not mine to say this is going to be an actual party in which you all will be able to participate. But I would say in addition to the constitutional basics, we should be very interested in restoring election integrity. The madness that we have in our elections is intolerable because it gives power to those who wish to cheat. I believe we need a digital bill of rights. So, you know, there's a lot to be said for what conservatives have brought to the table. But one thing that is true is that the structures that we've inherited from the founders, as brilliant as they were, are not up to modern challenges. So the fact that we have rights, if those rights don't apply to us online with respect to things like propaganda and surveillance, then they're insufficient. So we need a digital bill of rights that spells out what the rights of citizens are. I believe we need a plan for what to do with vast numbers of people who are going to be out of work as a result of an AI revolution that has been unleashed on us without such a plan. So in any case, there's lots that we should do, but the basics are basically common sense constitutionality. And a couple of things that are worth saying, this is not an ideological movement beyond what I've just said. And what that means in this moment is that actually there is room for a vast coalition of people who, at the end of the day, agree on basic values, but disagree over issues of policy. And the counterintuitive fact is this. We are so far off track with respect to good governance and the wellbeing of the population that there's almost nothing to disagree over until we get back to a place where our government is again, under our control, consent of the governed, until we get back to that point, then there is no reason for disagreement, right? Which is why we've gotten buy-in from people from the far left to the far right, right? As long as you're a patriot, you understand we're off track and you understand that it is necessary that we regain control over these structures. And frankly, that we face the powerful forces that don't want us to do this because frankly, they're profiting from that corruption. So I sort of hesitate to say this next part, but it's important to do it. I will say to you, Heather, I have kept this away from you as we've been building it. And I've kept it away from you because it is dangerous. And I love you and I don't want anything to happen to you. I don't want anything to happen to me either. I have an awful lot to live for. And as I've said elsewhere, I'm very healthy. I take good care of my vehicle. And if something happens, that's gonna tell you something. So, you know, there are lots of things that happen sort of with plausible deniability, right? People commit suicide. I'm not gonna do that, okay? I have everything to live for. People have unfortunate accidents. People crash their cars into trees under anomalous circumstances. None of these things are likely for me. Now, we are dealing with unscrupulous people, people who really have no moral compunction about wielding violence in their own interest. And so do I believe that my saying this actually protects me? It depends. I don't think in general that it does because in general, it actually serves two purposes, right? The violence sends a message to other people who might say the same things. And so to the extent that many in the public would be aware that the violence is suspicious, it can serve the interests of the corrupt people as much as it can oppose them. But not if you in the public understand that if somebody wields violence cryptically or otherwise in an effort to derail an effort to recapture the American government for the American people, that the right response to their doing that is for you to double down, right? There is no escape from this that does not involve us recapturing our own government and retooling it in our interests. We have to do that. If you shy away from the responsibility to do that, then yes, you may be able to protect yourself in the short run, but in the long run, your wellbeing is going to be liquidated by whatever this force is. So we really don't have a choice. It's a question of fight it now or suffer from the consequences of not having fought it later. And in many ways, it's pretty late in this process. So in any case, that is why I'm taking the risk of doing this. That is why I hope that you all will step up. It is not a good idea for you to say, well, let's just see how this goes. No, if you want this to work, then circulating it so that people know that this is a real effort is exactly the right idea. And it is also the most protective thing for those of us who have initiated this. I will say they're on our website. Can you put the website back up? You will notice at the top, there is a, we don't use the term draft Massie here. It says recruit Massie here. So Massie is obviously somebody who has paid a very high price for his integrity in the public sphere. He's lost the primary with the president and a large amount of money deployed against him. And anyway, I'm not suggesting that he has signed on to do this. What I am suggesting is that he's aware of it and is supportive of what we are doing. He has every reason not to want to participate. But if you want him and other people, Joe Kent, the other people with integrity who have shown up in our system, you want them to participate. The way to get them to participate is to make it clear that there are a lot of us and that we know that we have to make this happen. So there's a form on the website where you can join the movement. You can give us a small amount of information about who you are. And the most important thing you can do is talk about it, circulate it, make it clear that you're supportive and make it clear that you want these patriots to join forces because frankly, this has to happen. This has to happen for America, it has to happen for the West and frankly, it has to happen for humanity because we are deeply off track and lineage against lineage violence is gonna get us all killed.

[01:47:26] Dr. Heather Heying: Amen.

[01:47:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, any questions?

[01:47:32] Dr. Heather Heying: That's a fair way to end your soliloquy. We need it and clearly what we've got isn't working. And as you began your discussion there with a renegade within one of the existing parties clearly won't work. So.

[01:47:51] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep.

[01:47:52] Dr. Heather Heying: So we need something entirely different and it is rare and unexpected to have something that has the administrative structure already built but is potentially open to the content that we need, true patriots who are actually interested and what did you say? Common sense constitutional thinking.

[01:48:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep.

[01:48:19] Dr. Heather Heying: A common sense constitutional approach to being an American and to living life in America is exactly what we need. And there's nothing else out there.

[01:48:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep, there's nothing else out there and at some level we just have to confront our fears and to the extent that bad things happen that is out of our hands but the way to make it not go that direction is to make sure that if bad things happen it makes you more determined, not less determined. So please keep that in mind as you think about whether or not to join us.

[01:48:59] Dr. Heather Heying: All right. We will be back next week again on Tuesday. Check out our sponsors this week, Ridge, Redmond, and CrowdHealth. Thank you for joining us here today and until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside.

[01:49:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Be well everyone.