They’re Building the Prison Around Us: Josh Walkos on DarkHorse

Oct 11

Episode: The Inside Rail
Published: October 11, 2026
Host: Dr. Bret Weinstein
Guest: Josh Walkos
Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast / Inside Rail
Runtime: 1:28:18
Transcript source: SRTX transcript file, corrected

Video: Watch on YouTube
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Audio: Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Summary

Bret Weinstein speaks with Josh Walkos on the subject of Toka, a company that says it can alter surveillance video without a trace, and the wider network of surveillance and targeting tools being built with no public consent.

Walkos explains that the public alarm over Flock’s license plate camera network led him to Toka, a cyber company co-founded by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, and now headquartered in Maryland. Weinstein reads out what Toka says it can do: find internet-connected CCTV cameras, disable them, and alter their feeds in real time without leaving a trace. Both stress that they cannot verify the claims, but argue that if the capability is real it undermines video evidence itself. They consider how differently the J6 pipe bomber, Epstein’s death, the Butler assassination attempt and the Charlie Kirk assassination would read if such a tool had been available, and ask why Toka is so rarely discussed when it advertises these capabilities on its own website. Walkos describes Cognyte’s FalcoNet cell-site simulators sold to U.S. police departments, and Weinstein explains the Pentagon’s Maven Smart System and the OODA loop, arguing that a targeting system indifferent to the difference between a battlefield and a city is ripe for abuse.

The second half turns to consent. Walkos tells the story of PolyHeme, a blood substitute given to trauma patients under the FDA’s exception from informed consent, and Weinstein compares the public-hearing notice used in those trials to the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Weinstein argues that the real question is not whether some people would fake evidence if they could, but whether the technology and the protections allow it, and that convincing CCTV forgery is now a matter of price. The conversation closes on AI and job displacement, the five technological revolutions Weinstein has lived through, the case for removing the boomer generation from power, why Gen Z is in the bullseye, and Weinstein’s argument that these technologies can only be fought at the level of rights.

About the Guest

Josh Walkos is an independent researcher and writer who publishes on X and on his Substack, We The Free, where he says he posts long reads every few months on the research he is doing. In this episode he says his X thread on Toka is what first brought the company to Bret Weinstein’s attention.

Find Josh Walkos on X at @JoshWalkos and on Substack at wethefree.substack.com.

About the Host

Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and host of the DarkHorse Podcast, which examines science, institutions, politics, culture, and the challenges facing Western civilization. The Inside Rail is his long-form interview series.

Mentioned in This Episode

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Key Questions Answered in This Episode

What does Toka say its technology can do?

According to Bret Weinstein, Toka’s own website says its capability “includes the ability to find any and all CCTV cameras that are linked to the net to disable them, to alter their feeds in real time, all without leaving a trace that the owner of the camera would even know about” (00:05:14). Josh Walkos adds a caveat at 00:03:10: “see, we don’t have any verification.” Neither claims to know whether Toka actually does what it advertises. Weinstein notes at 00:07:19 that “Toka says that you have to be governmental to purchase its services.”

Why does Bret Weinstein say Toka calls video evidence into question?

Weinstein argues that if the capability is real, video can no longer be trusted as proof. At 00:05:38 he says, “So maybe that’s vaporware, but if it is not, it calls into question the very nature of video evidence.” At 00:07:51 he adds that with this technology, “it can exonerate the guilty, and it can incriminate the innocent.” He argues that courts are more likely to carry on as if the technology does not exist, because no one will have evidence it was used.

Why do Bret Weinstein and Josh Walkos connect Toka to the Charlie Kirk, Epstein, J6 and Butler cases?

They do not claim Toka was used in any of these cases. Walkos introduces the Charlie Kirk case at 00:10:29 as “not saying that this is the case, but let’s do a thought experiment here.” Weinstein’s point at 00:11:49 is that “all of these are cases that read very differently if the technology in question was available to somebody at the time of the crime.” At 00:20:28 he asks, “how on earth are we having the conversation about Tyler Robinson without having the conversation about Toka?”

Why does Bret Weinstein say this is worse than a panopticon?

At 00:26:37 Weinstein pushes back on Walkos’s description: “This is far worse than a panopticon.” He gives two reasons. Effectively everyone will always be surveilled, and at 00:27:02 he notes that “the panopticon didn’t falsify things you didn’t do,” while what Toka advertises can. Imagining how whoever controlled such a system would see everyone else, he says at 00:28:28: “The point is actually we own you all.”

What is the Maven Smart System, and why does Bret Weinstein think it is ripe for abuse?

Weinstein, who says he is new to the system, explains Maven in terms of the military OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. At 00:38:35 he says “the Maven system is allowing the integration of different kinds of data into a kind of dashboard” for military targeting. He says that is an advantage he wants the U.S. military to have in a legitimate fight, but at 00:39:19 he warns, “But the problem is the system is agnostic about what it’s being used on,” adding at 00:39:30, “There’s no distinction between a battlefield and an urban environment.”

What were the PolyHeme trials Josh Walkos describes?

In Walkos’s account, PolyHeme was “a blood substitute that the Pentagon was trying to develop” (00:45:34), tested in several U.S. cities under the FDA’s exception from informed consent after public hearings few people knew about. He says that paramedics treating car crash victims “would administer this PolyHeme to them without them knowing” (00:48:20), and stresses at 00:49:29: “This is something that was legally allowed to be done to these people with no repercussions whatsoever.” Bret Weinstein compares the public-hearing notice to the Vogons’ planning notice in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Is faking CCTV footage technologically possible, according to Bret Weinstein?

Weinstein reframes the question at 01:02:41: “the question isn’t, would they do it?” The question, he says at 01:02:51, is whether the protections “against them doing it prevent it and does the technology allow them to do it?” Using his iPhone’s ability to turn any photo into a 3D image as an example, he argues that convincing low-resolution CCTV forgery is not out of reach: “that’s a question of price point” (01:05:05). He says the only surprising part of Toka’s claim is doing it in real time without a signature.

How does Bret Weinstein say these surveillance technologies should be fought?

At 01:15:18 Weinstein says, “I think the way that this has to be fought is at the level of rights.” He argues the military can have battlefield technology, but it must be clear it cannot be used against citizens of the West, and that the public’s right to know video has been altered outweighs a government’s right to buy the ability to alter it. At 01:16:18: “You cannot go after this piecemeal because you cannot anticipate the technologies that will emerge.”

Episode Chapters

00:00:00 Who Controls the Camera?
00:01:28 From Flock to Toka
00:02:51 What Toka Says It Can Do
00:03:30 Sponsor: Sundays for Dogs
00:04:53 The End of Video Evidence?
00:07:12 Framing the Innocent
00:10:14 The Kirk Footage
00:11:15 J6, Epstein, Kirk, and Butler
00:12:48 The Cryptic Powers of an Emperor
00:14:29 Why the Silence on Toka?
00:17:28 Whitney Webb Was Already on It
00:20:57 Sponsor: Ethos
00:22:00 How Toka Plugs Into Flock
00:23:45 Fake Cell Towers and Spy SUVs
00:26:33 Worse Than a Panopticon
00:28:56 Ehud Barak, Epstein, and Toka
00:30:35 Where’s Your Evidence It Was Used?
00:34:05 An Open Invitation to Toka
00:36:48 Maven and the OODA Loop
00:41:19 Clean Hands, Distant Wars
00:44:59 PolyHeme Without Consent
00:49:47 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consent
00:54:16 If It Were Your Child
00:57:45 The Banality of Evil
01:01:36 What Do You Think Is Possible?
01:03:25 Faking CCTV Is a Question of Price
01:09:52 When AI Takes the Jobs
01:12:43 Billionaire Bunkers and Police Drones
01:15:18 Fight It at the Level of Rights
01:18:46 Five Revolutions, One Lifetime
01:22:07 Gen Z Is in the Bullseye
01:27:32 Where to Find Josh Walkos

Search Keywords

Bret Weinstein, Josh Walkos, DarkHorse Podcast, Inside Rail, We The Free, Toka, Toka group, Ehud Barak, Andreessen Horowitz, Flock, Flock Safety, license plate readers, Axon, Cognyte, FalcoNet, cell-site simulator, Palantir, Maven Smart System, OODA loop, AI targeting, autonomous weapons, surveillance, technocracy, panopticon, CCTV, altered video, video evidence, deepfakes, AI video, Fourth Amendment, Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk assassination, J6 pipe bomber, Jeffrey Epstein, Butler assassination attempt, Whitney Webb, Haaretz, Vault 7, WikiLeaks, CIA, MKUltra, PolyHeme, Northfield Laboratories, blood substitute, exception from informed consent, informed consent, FDA, Chuck Grassley, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Hannah Arendt, banality of evil, Tuskegee, Cartesian crisis, AI job displacement, universal basic income, humanoid robots, Flock drones, Minority Report, boomers, Gen Z, conscription, Iran war, Thomas Massie, Julian Dorey

Related DarkHorse Episodes

DarkHorse episode where Bret first raised Toka

Transcript

This transcript was prepared from the episode’s speaker-labeled SRTX caption file, corrected for names and spellings, and lightly consolidated into readable paragraphs. The source file begins at the episode’s true 00:00:00 timecode, so no timestamp offset has been applied.

[00:00:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting for a long overdue podcast with my friend Josh Walkos, who is an independent researcher and writer. You may know him from X or Substack. He is here to tell us about some of the new technologies that are showing up in the surveillance and technocracy landscape. Before we get into that, Josh, welcome to DarkHorse.

[00:00:29] Josh Walkos: Thanks for having me, Bret.

[00:00:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: What I was hoping that you would do is lead us through the technologies that you've been researching. These are things that are being deployed in either the intelligence sector or the military sector or the place where they intersect. And these are things that seem to far outstrip the concern or should outstrip the concern that we have surrounding simple technologies like Flock. And I think you, like I, have been scratching your head a little bit watching people freak out about Flock, but seemingly unaware of other things like Toka and the Maven Smart System and other technologies that seem to have far more potential for abuse. So how would you lead us into this so that people know what's being formulated and deployed?

[00:01:28] Josh Walkos: Yeah, and I really kind of got into it through the Flock conversation because it seemed like out of nowhere, Flock just kind of popped up on everybody's radar. And we woke up one day and we realized that there's thousands of these cameras that are connected to a network that can be searched retroactively across the nation. And that kind of piqued my interest. And I said, there are gonna be some more companies out there that are doing similar things. And just upon doing some research, I came across, I believe it was a TechCrunch article that put the Toka group on my radar. And that's what really kind of blew my mind. And that would prompt me to write the thread on X to kind of go over that and bring awareness to the type of technologies that have been out there for years now.

[00:02:13] Josh Walkos: The Toka group was actually founded in 2018 and they've been steadily growing and they've relocated here from Israel, originally located in Israel, co-founded by Ehud Barak and another individual who was actually in the IDF as well. So they're really relocated to Maryland. And this technology is something that seems like a science fiction. And I had to keep on rereading the documents to understand like, are they really saying what they're saying? Is this something that is actually, that they can do that is operational? So for those who aren't aware of Toka group, basically they state that they can, first of all, map out the internet of things, cameras specifically, but not just cameras. They can get into the networks. They can then, possibly, see, we don't have any verification.

[00:03:12] Josh Walkos: So you don't really know if this is what they're actually doing, but they can actually go in and alter video feeds and leave no forensic trace. And the implications of that are pretty stunning if you really think about that, given the world that we live in. So that's kind of what really prompted this.

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[00:04:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So I started digging into Toka, which I had never heard of until you pointed me to it. And what I found was shocking. Now, again, like you, I can't say that they're really doing what they claim to be doing, but I certainly know what it is that they say right on their website is within their capability, which if people didn't catch it, includes the ability to find any and all CCTV cameras that are linked to the net to disable them, to alter their feeds in real time, all without leaving a trace that the owner of the camera would even know about. So maybe that's vaporware, but if it is not, it calls into question the very nature of video evidence. And you-- Am I wrong about that?

[00:05:53] Josh Walkos: No, not wrong at all. You have to consider the investors to kind of understand the provenance of this capabilities. Like I don't think an Andreessen Horowitz, who was one of their major investors is gonna dump well, 12.5 million dollars into them initially back in 2018, if they didn't think that they actually did have the capabilities to do this. And we're sitting here in 2026 now, right? We've had all these events that have occurred over the last several years, that we rely on video feeds that are presented to us as evidence. So if they're able to do this, and also they don't tell you who they've actually contracted with, everything's under a veil of secrecy. So we don't even have the ability to really know or confirm any of this stuff. But they do state that it is agencies within the United States government.

[00:06:44] Josh Walkos: So I presume it's the alphabet agencies, Department of Homeland Security, that sort of thing. So if they're able to do this, like you said, it calls into question what we're being shown, and how we can even decipher the reality that's being presented to us. I mean, it really is a mind blowing thing if that is the capability they truly do have, the capabilities of doing.

[00:07:12] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it's almost impossible for me to understand how a society will continue to function. Now I should say that Toka says that you have to be governmental to purchase its services. It will sell to police and governments, but it won't sell to private citizens. Obviously, if the technology exists, the idea that private citizens will end up pointing it at things is not impossible. But even if it's governmental entities, I personally believe that our government is falling into the hands of some kind of mafia. With this technology, if Toka can do what it says it can do, it can exonerate the guilty, and it can incriminate the innocent. If you can literally have video placing somebody at the scene of a crime in whatever condition they need to be viewed in to look guilty, then people are going to take that as very powerful evidence.

[00:08:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And it's not even clear. Does this mean that everybody who faces a criminal conviction based on video evidence as the primary evidence against them actually has an easy out? Because who's to say what might have been altered and for what reason behind the scenes? Does this invalidate the possibility of convicting people because the court will properly understand that video evidence no longer means anything? Or more likely, the courts will continue to hum along as if the technology doesn't exist because you won't have evidence that it's been used. And so the evidence that you're presented that this camera saw that person engaged in this behavior at that moment seems to be straightforward evidence of a rather damning kind.

[00:09:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And that people, I mean, in other words, do you want to live in a world where something that controls governmental power can decide to put an individual in jail, deprive them of their liberty, by constructing evidence for a crime that they did not commit? I don't wanna live in that world because it's very obvious to me that it immediately becomes a dystopia.

[00:09:36] Josh Walkos: And the sad part is it seems that we perhaps do actually live in that world. You know what I mean? It's a sad state of things. I mean, we have not given any consent to any of this. We're not told. It's all, like you said, it's shrouded in secrecy. There's no way for a common individual to be able to decipher reality if we know that these types of things exist. And if you bring this to a court, and they bring it to, the courts don't even have the ability to understand who possesses this technology or to even reverse engineer it to understand if it was ever used. You said they could place somebody at a crime. They could also remove somebody from a crime by getting, based on what they tell us, they get in there and change your feed or system. The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the Charlie Kirk thing, right?

[00:10:26] Josh Walkos: Where they have all this video evidence, not saying that this is the case, but let's do a thought experiment here. Presenting all this video evidence, there's supposed to be lock stock and smoke and barrel. And this is what happened, Tyler Robinson did this. But if we know that this technology exists and that we have agencies within the government that already contracted to use this, we know, like you said, there's a mafia that's basically as powerful for us as you call it, which I'd like to flesh out a little bit more if you choose to do so. Because I think that's something that we really need to kind of wrestle with, that there is something that has the capability of sorts of things that's out there. We're already into dystopia is the way I look at it.

[00:11:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, so we have two recent, actually no, three recent cases that are of historical importance in which video evidence is playing a vital role. We have the J6 pipe bomber, we have the Epstein suicide in which the cameras were deactivated or were inactive, whether they were deactivated or not, we don't know. And we have the Charlie Kirk assassination. Now, all of these are cases that read very differently if the technology in question was available to somebody at the time of the crime. And I don't think we know, when does Toka say that it brought, can we go back and figure out how long Toka has claimed to have this as a product that's available?

[00:12:12] Josh Walkos: I think they were discussing these capabilities back in July of 2018, whenever they got the seed funding initially, that's what kind of brought on the funding to them, which allowed them to expand, and had been expanding when they were in Israel. And then they've kind of sort of focused everything on the United States and relocated their headquarters here in Maryland now. So, we're looking at almost a decade, and you missed one other event there, the Butler assassination attempt as well.

[00:12:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Of course, Butler. So imagine for a second, let's say that everything is actually perfectly straightforward at the moment. Let's say all of these crimes were properly investigated, the people implicated are actually the correct people. At the moment that our governmental structures fall into the hands of somebody that does not respect the values that undergird the West, it's all over. This technology gives them a kind of near absolute power. If you can literally convict anybody of a crime or exonerate anyone from some crime they've actually committed, then you are above the law, obviously. And you have the cryptic powers of an emperor. So, our system must not depend on the fact that we only elect high quality people. Obviously, we will elect some bad people.

[00:13:56] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The system has to be built in such a way that bad people do not have unlimited power. And this is a kind of unthinkable power that would clearly fall into their hands. So, you pointed out they move from Israel to Maryland. So, that's a conspicuous move, right? That's right in the heart of intelligence and military control for the US.

[00:14:25] Josh Walkos: They're basically telling us without telling us there, yeah.

[00:14:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, they're telling us without telling us. And I would like everybody to notice how many conversations have you seen about Flock cameras and the potential for abuse of a license plate reader that can be used to do more than that? We've seen hundreds of them. How much discussion have you seen of this company, Toka? For many, it will be the first time they've heard that name. For some, they will have heard it from me having heard it from you. Why is this not on everybody's mind already? Why is this hard to look away from for a tiny number of people and the rest of the media and even the podcast space is not paying attention to it as if it's not even right there on the web?

[00:15:18] Josh Walkos: That's the great question. I think there's sort of like this willful amnesia that seems to be occurring in our society with a lot of people. I mean, people don't want to believe it. I think that is the thing. We could tell them, we could put them to the article in Haaretz, it's now basically scrubbed. We had to go through the archive to find it. You can point this out and say, hey, look at this. They're telling us in their own words that this is the capabilities. But people want to put on their ideological blinders. They don't want to accept it. It creates a sort of cognitive dissonance in their mind. And they just don't want to believe that this is actually something that they have to grapple with when it comes to the trust of their government.

[00:16:05] Josh Walkos: I mean, we have this sort of like, it's like an abused spouse or something, a relationship with our government. They keep on abusing us, but we keep on saying, oh, but the next time they're going to be fine. They keep on lying to us, but the next thing comes and we say, no, but they would never lie about this. And this goes back for decades and decades. Look at the MKUltra thing that was uncovered. Like, oh, but they would never do those things today. That was in the sixties. They were just experimenting and MKUltra's over with. Those type of programs were shut down. They had the commission that exposed all that. But over and over again, we keep finding out that these sorts of things are continually happening.

[00:16:51] Josh Walkos: The government, like people just don't want to believe that the people that empower in our government, as you call it again, I like this powerful force, this thing, we can't say for sure. We can't point to individuals and say, they're the powerful force, but just based upon historical evidence and looking back in hindsight and understanding these events and things that happened, there's clearly something out there that is above the law that is able to do and pull off things that the normal public can scarcely imagine and they refuse to imagine.

[00:17:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep. I do want to say when you alerted me to this and I started talking about it, Whitney Webb pointed out that she had been talking about it for several years at least. And I must say I have concerns about Whitney Webb. I have found her uncareful in certain regards. I think she is prone to connect dots that don't inherently connect. But it is interesting that Whitney Webb was talking about this years ago and it seemingly disappeared without a major discussion. Right? So you then went to bring it back to public attention. I've done that. It still remains obscure for some reason. And obviously something being funded by Andreessen Horowitz is a big deal as you point out.

[00:18:22] Josh Walkos: Let me ask you this, right?

[00:18:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

[00:18:24] Josh Walkos: What do you think it is? Why do you think this type of thing remains obscure even though with the platform that you have, and I appreciate you putting a spotlight on it and bringing me on and actually mentioning it on your DarkHorse podcast with Heather and everything. And you could tell like the views that I had on that thread were like something like 5,000 views whenever you brought it to light. And then it kind of took off a little bit. But yeah, even the algorithm seemingly was suppressing it at the time until you and your larger platform was able to kind of bring it to the forefront. So what is it that you think is keeping people from taking this thing seriously and the implications that follow through with it?

[00:19:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I have no idea. There are a couple of contributors I suspect, which is people do not pay attention to really important things until they start paying attention at which point they become obsessive. And it may be that it just hasn't crossed the threshold of awareness. But the level at which people are unaware, I brought it up on Julian Dorey's podcast a couple of weeks back and he had not heard of it. They looked it up in real time. And of course he was shocked as anybody would be discovering that this is out there. So this is somebody who pays attention to concerns about the abuse of technology, technocracy and all of that. And still to catch him off guard says it's really not circulating. So on the one hand, they have a webpage. I mean, they could easily not have a webpage, right?

[00:20:02] Dr. Bret Weinstein: They don't have to put the claims of what their technology can do right there for anybody to see it. But given that they do and it is therefore, it's not the case where somebody has uncovered something and other people don't believe it's real. It's like, well, the people who sell it tell you what it does. So maybe it does more than that, but at the very least we can talk about the claims of this product that's being sold to governments right now. And I mean, how on earth are we having the conversation about Tyler Robinson without having the conversation about Toka? I don't understand that at all. It doesn't make me--

[00:20:41] Josh Walkos: Well, that would make you a conspiracy theorist, Bret. That would make you a conspiracy theorist.

[00:20:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That would make me a conspiracy theorist. That ship may have already sailed, as I like to say, when I find out that someone is a conspiracy theorist, my only question is, are they any good at it?

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[00:22:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Something is very odd. To have the conversation anywhere and everywhere about Flock and not be having a simultaneous conversation about the way, frankly, Toka plugs into Flock, which is a connection you've drawn. So you wanna paint the picture more broadly. What is the technology in question and how might the various technologies in question be combined into something even more dangerous?

[00:22:28] Josh Walkos: The technology, a high level way to think about it is it's a privatized panopticon that is being built around us. Now, this is not something that's new. The private part is something that I find extremely disturbing because if you recall, there was the Vault 7 leaks that happened years ago there with WikiLeaks that exposed the cyber weapons and cyber tools that the CIA were able to use to employ worldwide with their various activities that they do. One in particular was to create false attribution to them. So let's say they want to frame Russia to say that they are trying to get into the DNC's computers, you know what I mean? Something along those lines, but that is the government. That is the government that created those tools.

[00:23:21] Josh Walkos: Right now what we're seeing is the government taking this tact similar to what they did in a weird way with COVID where they're pointing to private institutions to do things that they know that they are not allowed to do legally. And just because they're purchasing these things and contracting with them, that somehow erases our Fourth Amendment rights and it's okay to do and makes it part of the capitalist system, right? So Flock, Toka, there's another company just so happens to be from Israel as well. They're called Cognyte. They're kind of looked at as the Palantir of Israel. They are able to do basically a fake cell phone towers. They create backpacks. Somebody could walk into a convention and be able to tap into everybody's cell phone and basically do anything that they want to.

[00:24:14] Josh Walkos: They also are selling what's something called FalcoNet to all these police departments all over the country, which are literally SUVs or outfitted as surveillance vehicles, which can do the same thing and create basically, I'm not very good at the techno aspect of it, but it's basically a fake cell phone tower where they can go to an area and then be able to access all the connected devices in a certain radius. You have all these different types of companies that are creating and also, there's gonna be able to do cross capabilities.

[00:24:50] Josh Walkos: So they're able to, like through, they Flock, they don't explicitly state it, but you've gotta believe that they're able to kind of coordinate together and have a database or cross functionality that can get into each other's databases if these are being sold to police departments, government agencies, that sort of thing. So we're seeing basically the Fourth Amendment being liquidated through a privatized panopticon that's being forced upon us with no one has voted on this at all.

[00:25:20] Josh Walkos: We have no consent to this and this idea of consent is something that I've been kind of really drilling down on because this is the common theme we've seen for years and years, not just with the technology aspect, but also I guess with like COVID and what we've been seeing going back years and years with the government, they will do things under this false facade that we have this democracy that we can vote and to have any say in what they're doing. But when it really comes down to it, they're gonna do it whether we want to or not. They don't really care about it. They will experiment on citizens to their own ends to whatever that may be, whatever their agenda may be.

[00:25:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I must say I'm heartened as much as there's obviously a discussion to be had about when you can break the law because there's a higher principle at stake. When can you patriotically break the law, let's say. I'm heartened to see how many people are having the proper reaction to the Flock network being installed around them. That tells me that there is hope for those of us who do not consent to this and are not gonna put our fingers in our ears. But I did wanna push back on one thing. You say panopticon. This is far worse than a panopticon. The panopticon simply was capable of watching you everywhere so you never knew when you were gonna be surveilled. In this case, it's worse in two ways. One, you're effectively always going to be surveilled. It's gonna be very hard to escape this network of cameras.

[00:27:02] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And the second thing is the panopticon didn't falsify things you didn't do, but what Toka is advertising is perfectly capable of that. And so just think, I would invite listeners to just put yourself, imagine that there's a diabolical version of you. Put yourself in that person's head with this kind of power at their disposal. It's not even the case that you have to go through the exercise of creating evidence that somebody committed a notorious crime to lock them up despite the fact that they're innocent. Suppose you collect everything and you are capable of telling any story from you are perfectly innocent to you are entirely guilty for any crime. And then the question is, well, what's your freedom worth to you? Here, we'll give you a little preview of what the jury is gonna see. Maybe you'd rather they didn't see anything.

[00:28:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I mean, so the point is if you imagine our worst fears about what the Epstein thing was, right? Imagine some version of compromise on powerful people that becomes a cryptic mechanism for shepherding them. Okay, well now imagine that the people in question even have to do anything. The point is actually we own you all. We control all of your fates. And if you'd like to do our bidding, we're happy to play ball. If you don't wanna do our bidding, that's fine. That's what prisons are for. You know, I mean, that's basically it. A totalitarian regime, the worst kind of totalitarian regime is one that simply locks up people that disagrees with it and everybody else falls in line because they'd rather have some liberty than none at all. That's where we're headed.

[00:28:56] Josh Walkos: Certainly isn't. And you mentioned Epstein. There is a connection to Epstein and Toka as well. You know, the Barak, is it Ehud? Is that how you pronounce it?

[00:29:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Ehud Barak, yeah.

[00:29:09] Josh Walkos: Ehud Barak, yeah. So, you know, he was very close with Jeffrey Epstein. And I believe there is an article which actually mentions that he was proposing Toka or running it by Epstein as far as seeking either investment or just kind of get his ideas about it. And that opens up a whole other can of worms. And you're talking about Epstein and what he's been accused of. And, you know, let's just say like, there's a couple minutes missing in that prison, right? Whenever he was in a jail cell. Those are, I mean, who's to say any of it, like this is the perfect technology to either blackmail somebody, just frame somebody without anybody knowing it could be done according to them without even the authorities who are tasked with investigating them to know.

[00:30:03] Josh Walkos: So these, so just as a thought experiment, these individuals in Utah who are presenting this, these feeds from the campus, they could be presenting this in good faith. And according to the Toka documents, this could be already taken care of on that back end and just, and they're presented with this feed. And then it goes to court. No one knows anything about it. And then you're putting somebody in jail for the rest of their life. I mean, it really is.

[00:30:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Nobody knows anything about it. Or if you're, I can easily imagine, and I'm not an expert in the law, but I can easily imagine that you're, let's say you have a great defense team and the defense team looks at what the evidence exists against you and realizes that absent the video evidence, there's no argument that they've proved anything beyond a reasonable doubt. And they approach the court and they say, we'd like to introduce into evidence this website from Toka that claims that they have the ability to create the exact evidence against my client. And the judge says, where's your evidence that it was used? And the lawyer says, well, I don't have any, but, well, no, it's not admissible.

[00:31:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So then the point is, okay, now the court is functioning like an executioner for a cryptic power structure that can decide when to apply this and when not to. And I will tell you one thing for sure. People who are funding this thing and building this thing are never gonna face it, right? This is for the little people. And it can't help but create a two tier society. The people who have access to this technology to cover their own crimes and to convict their enemies and the people who don't have access to it who will simply be victim of the whims of whoever does.

[00:32:00] Josh Walkos: And the fact that we are not privy to any information on this, even if the court wanted to find something about it, how are they gonna go about it? You know what I mean? They're just gonna say, this is your speculation. There's no, are they gonna FOIA that, you know, Toka? How are you going to, are we able to go to the government agencies to say, give us all the documents you have on Toka? They don't even tell you that they've contracted with them. So it's so rooted in mystery and purposefully, obviously, because of the nature of this technology that, I mean, we are stuck in a really rock and a hard place here because people are gonna look at this and say, look at these lunatics we're talking about.

[00:32:41] Josh Walkos: The ability to get into a video feed and change it in real time or place something in there where it's not forensically traceable, and then prosecute somebody based upon false evidence. The common person is watching this, maybe not your audience, but they're gonna run across this clip and say, these guys are out of their mind. Like, there's no way that this exists. And that's why it's so frustrating about this is that it can be framed that way because there's, we have no recourse or any way to prove that this has been implemented or used. We're just going by what, like you said, the company is telling us and that's all we have. But no one wants to talk about it.

[00:33:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, this is above our pay grade. And the only thing at stake is our liberty, right? That discussion is happening. It's obviously going to be a secret discussion and the consequences of it, the whole design of it is for the consequences to be invisible. So utterly maddening that this is happening and that we are forced, it's out in the open. They've got a website. We have to be able to talk about whether or not this is consistent with the values of the West or not. And it's hard enough to even just get people to be aware that it exists.

[00:34:05] Josh Walkos: Yeah, and I implore, have a representative from Toka come on the DarkHorse podcast and discuss this. You know what I mean? This is something that as Americans, we deserve to know about. If you want to lay our fears about what's going on here, be a man, come on the podcast or some public forum and discuss what you're doing because we have a right to know that this technology isn't being used against us, you know, or know the manner in which it is being used because these agencies aren't buying this just to sit on it. They're obviously using it for operational purposes.

[00:34:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: What are the protections that make it impossible that it would be used against us in this way? If it fell in, if we elected the wrong people and it got into their hands, what is it that protects us against us being used against us as enemies of the regime or whatever we might be considered? There are no protections. So are you aware? Go ahead, yeah. Well, that's the thing. That's what I want them to answer for. You're building something. Is the answer, whoever you are who are building this, is the answer that you do not respect the values of the West, in which case, what the fuck are you doing in Maryland? Right?

[00:35:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I mean, if the point is the values of the West are quaint from your perspective and they don't need to be respected because they're already gone or they were not sustainable or whatever it is that you're telling yourself, then I don't want you here. I want us to limit who is here interacting with our governmental structures to those people who respect the values of the West. And obviously this is just sort of being, I want to say it's being snuck in, but again, the most jarring thing about it is seeing their website proclaim these capabilities.

[00:36:08] Josh Walkos: Well, the Defense Authorization Act had that, the recent story about combining, they say it's combining capabilities with Israel and United States recently, right? This further goes to that as well. You know what I mean? But more secretive manner, but they're codifying it is what I'm saying. They're basically codifying this into law, snuck into these bills in order to, I don't know, like it's all, it just subverts all of our rights in a way that is grotesque. Is there any way I can really put it bluntly?

[00:36:42] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, grotesque and somehow under the radar. Have you, are you aware of Maven, the Maven system or the Maven systems?

[00:36:57] Josh Walkos: Yeah, that's the one that DOD is using currently to execute, well, I think it's working in Ukraine and they're working with Palantir as well, right? It's a huge AI system that is basically, it's used to basically operations through the DOD, right?

[00:37:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, it's kind of a brainteaser. I'm new to it, but what I understand it to be is a, it's, I think it's Palantir based. It is an AI integration system of various streams of information. If I'm reading it correctly, you know what OODA loops are? There's a famous military doctrine, I've forgotten, at one point I knew, but I've forgotten the author of it. But the idea is that there is a cycle that goes by the acronym OODA, which is observe, orient, decide, act. And if you take two fighter pilots, the one with a tighter OODA loop that can iterate that cycle faster as a strong likelihood of beating the one that is a little bit slower in that because basically they have a finer resolution ability to act in space. And so in a military context, you want those OODA loops as tight as possible.

[00:38:35] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And the Maven system is allowing the integration of different kinds of data into a kind of dashboard that allows you to point at a vehicle and the identity of its owner and the history of its travel and various other things are immediately available. And the whole purpose is for military targeting. I believe that's effectively the final stage of what Maven does. Now in a military environment, if the United States is involved in a battle with people who need to be fought, this is an advantage I want them to have. But the problem is the system is agnostic about what it's being used on. So again, the ripeness for abuse is staring us in the face, right? There's no distinction between a battlefield and an urban environment because of course there are urban battles.

[00:39:37] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And so what is protecting us from this dashboard being used against, you know, I mean, I've been accused of all manner of things in the last nine years. Who knows what they're gonna decide is terrorism that justifies their using this system to go after us. You know, it's madness.

[00:40:00] Josh Walkos: It's crazy. And the use of AI is an interesting aspect because it's another way to kind of not be able to be morally responsible for these types of acts, right? It's a way to say, oh, it was the, I actually recently written something about AI and how I think that it can be eventually used as a way to just basically wash their hands of moral responsibility, point at it, say, it did that. We don't know how it did it. You know, these agents got out, they started the cyber pandemic and it causes a cascade of events that eventually, as always happens, is it reduces our rights as citizens because they have to protect us for our security, of course. So, you know, as you said on a battlefield, how do you define a battlefield? You know what I mean?

[00:40:49] Josh Walkos: You know, you have battlefields in Ukraine, battlefields in Gaza, but there's also urban environments, like you said, or they target you, say, well, you're acting much like a domestic terrorist, you know, look at J6, they blanketed everybody and did like the biggest manhunt in the history of the United States, where people just even being standing on the premises there were able to locate them. So it's pretty dystopian when you really think about it.

[00:41:19] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, two points. One, I exactly agree with you that AI, especially when it comes to autonomous targeting, relieves people of responsibility, where, you know, the sobering fact of deciding that somebody needs to be hit with a munition is suddenly not done by a person. That makes the person who set the thing that did the targeting in motion, you know, feel like, well, I picked the best system available and that system decided the person was deserving of death and, you know, I'm sorry that didn't turn out to be true, but it's not like I targeted an innocent person. And of course, the responsibility has to fall somewhere. And I would argue that this is the extension.

[00:42:08] Dr. Bret Weinstein: If you went back, I don't know, several hundred years before the invention of gunpowder, I'm not sure exactly where to present that, or so, you know, pre-revolutionary war kind of stuff. A battle involved very close combat. That close combat makes your reluctance to get into a battle, it elevates it. The more remote you can be, you know, firing at somebody at a distance makes it a more impersonal act. Firing at them from a great distance increases that. Using a drone and a VR headset increases it yet further. You know, robotic soldiers or robot dogs removes the responsibility one step further than that. And AI autonomous targeting is like the final step in this where you can, you know, sip your wine and feel like your hands are clean when in fact people are bleeding out, you know, thousands of miles away.

[00:43:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So anything that, you know, basically what I'm arguing is that as terrible as it is to have your people coming back from the front in caskets or body bags or whatever, that creates the necessary break to engaging in these actions so that there has to be a really good reason for you to want to do it because, you know, who wants to confront grieving mothers? But the technologies that break that cycle so that this is, it's like playing a game of risk now, right, yes, the people on the other side are gonna be faced with the body bags and the burials and all of that, but, you know, we're just moving, you know, pawns in the Situation Room or something like that.

[00:44:12] Dr. Bret Weinstein: This is a very bad way for conflict to evolve and ultimately citizens need to understand that the difference between somebody who does not trigger empathy amongst the powerful because they speak a different language and they're thousands of miles away, that's not different than the way the very powerful people themselves of these technologies view us little people, right, we also don't count in their calculus. And now is the time to fight it because the thing hasn't been thoroughly deployed, presumably it's still in the process of being refined and deployed.

[00:44:57] Josh Walkos: I mean, the government has been doing this sort of thing on various levels for decades and decades against its own citizens, you know what I mean? This isn't just thousands of miles away, somebody's dying. They've done things to our own citizens. And have you heard, just as an example, this is a story that I came across and was completely shocked by that happened just in the late 90s and early 2000s. Are you familiar with PolyHeme, what PolyHeme is? That does not right now. Might be of interest to you as a biologist, but PolyHeme is, a blood substitute that the Pentagon was trying to develop in the early, late 80s, early 90s, then they went operational with it in the late 90s and early 2000s. The way they went operational with this is to a company called Northfield Laboratories, okay?

[00:46:00] Josh Walkos: And this goes back to the consent thing that we've been talking about, the lack of consent. Are you familiar with a law of exception, an exemption from informed consent that is actually on the books through the FDA?

[00:46:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: There are several loopholes in the informed consent rubric. I'm not sure which one you're thinking of. I mean, one thing-

[00:46:23] Josh Walkos: This one is exception for informed consent for experiments. So that's what this is-

[00:46:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Is military-

[00:46:31] Josh Walkos: This can be used through the military as it was for the Northfield Laboratories, but this is actually not solely through the military. So this is something that most people aren't even aware of, that they can get an exception from informed consent, which basically allows them to experiment on people without them knowing. The Northfield Laboratories was the vessel for this PolyHeme product. It went through some trials, it had some issues with adverse effects, of course. This has never come to market, but this is kind of like a holy grail that the DOD has always wanted to be able to use this operationally on the battlefield, right? If you don't need somebody's blood, you can do a blood substitute to save people's lives.

[00:47:13] Josh Walkos: You know, it doesn't make sense, but it just has never really panned out because it's something that's very difficult to do. I digress. So what they did is several cities all over the country, in the late 90s, they applied this exception from informed consent rule. The way that they do it is they are required to have a public hearing wherever they're gonna be doing this, okay? So they have people come to a public hearing, which no one ever hears of it, so they don't, there's very few people who actually participate in this. And as long as they say that they held these public hearings, they're allowed to move forward with these experiments that they do on the public without them knowing.

[00:47:54] Josh Walkos: They'll even give you a little wristband if you want to be exempted from this, if something happens, say you get in the car wreck, then you, if you have this wristband, then the paramedics need to know that they're not to administer this PolyHeme on you, right? So this is literally what they did. They, that they went through this exception from informed consent rule. Several cities all over the country, people would get into car wrecks. They would administer this PolyHeme to them without them knowing because they're in a state of, they can't beat consent to it because their life's on the line. They wouldn't only administer this PolyHeme to them while they're in the ambulance. They would continue to administer to them while they're at the hospital where they could have received proper care. A bunch of people died.

[00:48:43] Josh Walkos: Chuck Grassley actually found about this, but this is something no one really knows about or ever has heard about, just because it's, you know, it's one of those things that happened and it's buried. But our government literally wrote into law, exception from informed consent, experimented on people who are in their most vulnerable position. They get in a car wreck. They need life-saving care. And instead of giving them actual plasma or blood, I'm not, you know, I'm not a medic, whatever would be required because they have blood loss, they gave them the PolyHeme product, which of course they found later, put people into cardiac arrest, did not assist them in any way. A lot of people died, but they legally did this. This is the key to this.

[00:49:29] Josh Walkos: This is something that was legally allowed to be done to these people with no repercussions whatsoever. It just went out, you know, it's still going on today. There's certain things like that with this exception from informed consent is still being used on the public that without their knowledge.

[00:49:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That is completely amazing. It reminds me of several things. One, there's a, the beginning of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Have you read the book?

[00:50:02] Josh Walkos: I haven't.

[00:50:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Okay. There are two parallel stories unfolding that are shockingly alike. One is that the anti-hero of the book is having his house torn down because there's a highway being put through and his notice of this was obscured in a similar way as your informed consent for PolyHeme. At the same time that the earth is being destroyed to put through a hyperspace bypass, the Vogons are doing the work and the someone puts a message into the, you know, people are told that their planet is about to be destroyed and somebody complains that they didn't have any notice and the Vogons, I think, tell them you had plenty of notice that there was a, you know, a proposal on file on some faraway planet, you know, and if you wanted to complain, the time was long ago.

[00:51:04] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So anyway, the idea of, oh, I know how we're gonna get around informed consent, we're gonna create something that technically allows us to say that you were informed and that your failure to do anything about it is your consent, aha. And it's like, obviously, it's so, we hung seven doctors after World War II for violating informed consent and now we're coming up with, you know, sophistry to justify our violating your informed consent and apparently nobody's worried about being hung. That's interesting. But the other thing that this reminds me of is you always wonder how the diabolical perpetrators know that they are not going to be victim of their schemes.

[00:51:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And in this case, let's say you create some hearing if you wanna hear about PolyHeme, show up at the, you know, the public high school and, you know, hear our presentation and if you'd like a wristband, you can have one, that's how, well, no, you're not consenting. But this also means that were you to be a powerful person passing through a place where PolyHeme was gonna be administered to people who volunteered for it by getting into a car wreck, that you could wear a wristband and, you know, that's your out. So.

[00:52:27] Josh Walkos: I just want the viewers to put theirself in the shoes, say it's your family member, you know, your child. You've grown this child from day one, loved it. You know, did everything you can to protect this child. Just because the government wants to create a substitute for blood for the DOD, your child can be experimented on legally and if it dies because of this experiment, you have no recourse. They might give you a couple hundred thousand dollars, say, shut up, you know what I mean? Something along those lines, if you're lucky. But we lack the empathy on that end just to think about these are real people, you know what I mean? This isn't just some story I'm telling you. Just like with the COVID vaccines and all these things.

[00:53:15] Josh Walkos: As a society, I think that we lack our ability to actually view these casualties and things of that nature as actually living, breathing human beings that are basically taken off the face of the earth for a government that will experiment on you and does not care about you. I mean, we can go back decades. The radiation experiments, look at those back years and years ago, the things, the horrors that they did there. This is something that happens over and over again. The most recent, like COVID again is one of the most glaring examples of the lack of consent of the governed, what they did. You know this more than anybody of what occurred during that time. It just, it boggles the mind that we're sitting here right now discussing this and there's legal mechanisms that are put in the place to subvert the things we cherish most.

[00:54:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I mean, there's no shortage of these examples. What happened during COVID was shocking because of the scale at the very least. Tuskegee obviously was utterly shocking. The experiments that were done on people, unwitting people with LSD. It's mind boggling how ready people are to violate informed consent. In the hypothetical you present, if my child, now I wanna come at this a different way, we are not stupid. We understand I have a right to kill. If somebody comes after my child or my wife or me with deadly force, I have a right to kill them. We don't worry about the rights of the person who's doing this thing at the point that they're threatening my child's life.

[00:55:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: What do we make of the bureaucrat who decided that it would be okay to run the risk of triggering a cardiac arrest where my child to have the misfortune of being t-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver? Oh, hey, we can experiment on him. Oh, it might kill him. The point is that my same right to protect my child should apply, morally speaking, it's not different. But of course, I'm not advocating violence, committing crimes that do not trigger our natural understanding of our right to self defense because they are cryptic only, not because the violation of our loved one's physiology and bodily autonomy is being violated by a stranger who is uncaring.

[00:56:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So I guess my point is I'm struggling for words at how, because this is so obvious, it's so obvious, any, anybody, you don't even need average IQ to understand why the government is not entitled to experiment on you without making their experiment explicit in a context where you with full information have every ability to say absolutely not, right? You can't hold a fricking hearing or informational session and decide that anybody who didn't go and didn't speak up is therefore consenting. You're a diabolical person if that's what you think. And you're taking advantage of the fact that the public can't track a thousand things. But in a different context, the harm that you're doing to my kid would justify me shooting you and a court would free me because we would all understand I had that right to protect my kid. So where the hell are we?

[00:57:20] Josh Walkos: In the context of unfortunate system we live in, you would not even get to the point where you can get to the court to try and prosecute the faceless, nameless person who injected your child with this product, you know what I mean? This private product, this novel product, similar to COVID, going back to the COVID vaccines and that sort of thing. That's what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. The word for it is evil when you really drill down on it. Yeah. And we're living in, we're in it. I mean, again, it sounds like I'm a raving madman to some, but these experiments and these things never ended. It's not like just because the government was caught that they said, "Oh, we're gonna be good now." "We're never gonna do this sort of thing again." It is ongoing. They're still doing these things.

[00:58:17] Josh Walkos: People need to be aware that the government is not your friend. They're not your buddy. They know they, this is an apparatus that is exploiting us on multiple levels at all times. You know, it sounds like doomerism here, but we are up against it when you really step back and look at it about what's being bombarded. I mean, look at our food, look at our education system, look at our healthcare system. When you call it the Cartesian crisis, I think it's something that you, I mean, we are in the process of collapse, okay? Slow motion, you know, but every trusted institution that we've had, and that's even, you know, I would argue we probably should never trust them in the first place, but that's probably the reason we've got to this point, is in free fall. You know, academia is a joke.

[00:59:09] Josh Walkos: You would know this more than anybody, especially what you've experienced. Your experience opened so many people's eyes to what this woke mind virus is, you know what I mean? Because that's kind of what got you started on this. And it was one of the things that really opened my eyes to the level of the brainwashing and the uncaring that these individuals had for you as a person. They didn't even look at you as a person. And I mean, it was mob mentality. And we've seen this repeated over and over again with the BLM riots. COVID was the biggest like, psy-op we've ever seen in our life.

[00:59:46] Josh Walkos: I can't believe that we went back to normal life and people still aren't trying to dissect what happened there because the downstream effects were still feeling we don't even know, really, what has occurred to our children, the loss of education, things like that. It's really, it's disheartening and it boggles the mind that there's only so many people who are actually taking this stuff so seriously because we think that actually my kids, your kids' future depend upon it. This needs to be discussed and brought to the forefront. But people are willing to just put their blinders on, go back to work. I get on a train every day to go to work. I see people staring down. No one's looking at each other. All across the city, down. Everybody's stuck in their brainwashing themselves. Short form video, just not caring about any of this stuff.

[01:00:48] Josh Walkos: It hasn't even entered their consciousness. And it's so frustrating to me that we are pointed at and say, these guys, they're conspiracy theorists. They're crazy. What are you talking about? Why are you bringing up the fact that we don't believe the Charlie or the Tyler Robinson story? Why don't you accept it? It was a crazy leftist trans person who just became trans out of nowhere. It decided to do the most high profile political assassination in history since JFK. But why you're the crazy person for not believing the government whenever all the evidence points not on that particular sound, all the evidence of history is why should we believe them?

[01:01:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, in listening to you, I wanna come at this a different way because as is often the case, I feel like we're talking ourselves blue in the face and that's probably an indicator that we're making a point that probably doesn't need to be made and that there's another approach. So here's what I'm thinking. I think you'd have to be pretty damn naive to think there was any limit to what some people will do given the power to get away with it. We know, just look at history, that there are people out there who will behave in an absolutely monstrous fashion towards people over whom they have power. It's not uncommon, right? It's a feature of humans. I'm not saying everybody is capable of it. I wouldn't do it if I had the power. I'm sure you wouldn't, but there are many, many people who would.

[01:02:36] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So in light of that fact on which I believe all reasonable people should agree, the question isn't, would they do it? The question is always, are the protections against them doing it prevent it and does the technology allow them to do it? If the technology allows them to do it and the protections are insufficient, there are those who will do it and those people are very likely to find themselves in positions of power. So I really think the only question is what do you think is possible? I'm speaking to the average person. What do you think is possible technologically? On my phone, I happen to have an iPhone. At some point, some update introduced the ability to take any photograph in my entire library and almost instantly turn it into a 3D image.

[01:03:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So when I move the phone, the things in the foreground move against the things in the background, right? In order for that to work, the algorithm inside my phone has to be able to approximate what the things that are hidden by the person standing there would look like if they were revealed by a change in my perspective, right? It has to be able to fill in the tree behind the person in the photo enough to allow them to appear to move in the frame. Okay, that's a small computer. We all have one. It can do it with very little energy and apparently very little computing power because my phone is doing 20 other things at the same time. What do I think is possible if the feed is lower quality? It's a CCTV camera and the computing power is immense and the importance of the imagery is high.

[01:04:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: In other words, how many pixels does one actually have to place in order to make it appear that this person was running from that location wearing these clothes at this rate, was this height? The answer is that's a question of price point. We now with AI, I mean, look at the videos that are coming out as of this week that we know are quickly made by virtue of the fact that they're on topics that have only just emerged and we see these photo realistic things that depict particular people that we know simulate their voices well, right?

[01:05:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I'm not saying those things are done instantly, they're not but what needs to be done in order to pretend that you've committed a crime is actually a lot less impressive and the computing power, if it's important to some governmental entity that person X be removed from the street on the basis that they will appear to have committed a crime, does anybody think that the technology to formulate CCTV footage is really out of range? The only question, the only thing that's really surprising is that it can be done in real time without a signature but if that's not possible today, it will be soon.

[01:06:16] Josh Walkos: We've, if not verging on it, have already passed the uncanny valley, as far as these AI videos go. It's very hard, I'd laugh because the boomers on Facebook their posts and stuff, they swear that is real, and it's AI. I almost got fooled the other day, I was looking at Instagram and there was this video of this posted Chinese temple that was put in a side of the mountain and I was completely blown, I was like, this is amazing. But then I was like, oh, this is AI because they had to label it. But somebody who doesn't have an eye out for this stuff, like older people who haven't familiarized herself with this technology, just imagine what governments could do to fool people on a mass scale. And you know it's gotta be common, it's gotta be common because the technology is just as bad as it's ever gonna be right now and it's pretty damn good.

[01:07:21] Josh Walkos: And you could crash a market, I mean, there's actually an instance of this, it happened a couple of years ago whenever this new AI videos were just coming out where somebody, you might have remembered this, somebody posted a video as if there was a bomb that went off near the Pentagon, but it was an AI generated video. And for a moment there, markets reacted to it because it was posted on X, you know what I mean? And people were kind of panicking about it, but there's no doubt that these types of technologies are going to be used to fool people and further agendas if they aren't already operational in doing it right now. And the implications of it, it's a brave new world, as Huxley said, we're going into something that our chimp brains can't scarcely comprehend the type of reality that's being foisted upon us.

[01:08:13] Josh Walkos: And again, this goes back to the consent issue. We never asked for any of this stuff. You know, we never said, hey, let's, well, you know, it'd be a good idea, let's just pump trillions of dollars into these private companies. Let's create all these data centers that are going to be put up against all these private communities that are gonna be using unbelievable amounts of resources so that somebody can put an AI slop video on Facebook or to create this surveillance, I guess I won't call it panopticon anymore since you kind of told me that it's even worse than that, but put the surveillance infrastructure in place. Like I said, these aren't going up everywhere just because of that.

[01:08:53] Josh Walkos: Like these data centers are going up worldwide, trillions of dollars into these companies that are private companies that are now being integrated with the government and private industry or something that we never asked. They're warning us that it's going to displace all these jobs, displace people in society as a whole, but they're moving forward with it because it's going to, it's gonna be a cool utopia, tech utopia, because we have three or four billion and trillionaires who want to live forever and have this technocracy. Supposed utopia is gonna be a foist upon us and we're gonna live happily ever after. We're gonna get our credits every month from the government and it's gonna be a beautiful kumbaya world that we're living in based upon this AI beautiful technology that we're all being in given.

[01:09:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I'll tell you, my impression is that there's a discussion that we aren't really having. We know that AI is going to massively disrupt the job market. I think we can extrapolate that the people who say, well, there's always been disruptions and new jobs that you can't even describe now will fill the gap left by the jobs that have been destroyed. I don't think that's true in this case because those jobs would have to be something that a human is better at than a machine and humanoid robots plus superhuman intelligence, it's game over. What that means is that the people who at the moment have a leg up, the people who have billions know that they are about to have a population on their hands with nothing to do, that's dangerous enough. And that those people are sure to become unruly as they discover that there's no plan for them.

[01:11:04] Dr. Bret Weinstein: So they give us these low quality fantasies about universal basic income or something. It wouldn't work even if they tried it, but I don't really see our lives are not gonna become better because AI has taken the drudge work out of life. What's going to happen is we are going to be forced to accept a lower quality existence. And I think it's going to keep getting lower. And the natural thing would be for people to mutiny as that happens. And so the technocracy that we're watching erected around us is planning for the near term as people discover that actually their wellbeing is not a priority in any of the powerful people's minds. So I guess I'm hoping that people will think about that question. Maybe I've missed something and hopefully they'll tell me about it.

[01:12:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But if I haven't missed something, if we're really all gonna be left with nothing to do and no way to earn and the people who have tremendous resources actually in that circumstance are not going to feel generous towards us. They're gonna feel resentful that we are now a burden to them. That controlling us would be a priority. And that all of the things, all of the shocking kinds of control that your articles and threads point to sound like a response to that crisis that anticipates it happening.

[01:12:38] Josh Walkos: Yeah, I mean these--

[01:12:38] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And if that's so, the time to fight is now.

[01:12:42] Josh Walkos: Agreed. You know, these billionaires aren't buying bunkers in underground bunkers in New Zealand just because it's something cool to do. They can see the writing on the wall problem before anybody can because they're the ones erecting this system that's displacing the current system that we have. And it's happening right in front of all of our eyes. You know, it's something that, it's hard to wrap your head around because like you said, we're living in it right now and it's happening.

[01:13:11] Josh Walkos: During all this money that's being invested, just think about how that could have been invested in other ways to, you know, the betterment of actual people instead of displacing people, creating these robots, as you say, that are gonna be humanoid robots that are painting a picture that we're gonna be living with the humanoid robots, have super intelligence installed into them that are, Flock is not only doing the license plate readers now, they're going to drones that can now be deployed by, you know, police departments. They're going to where they're going with this as well. So they have these crime, almost Minority Report-like, the report centers that are being erected all over the country with these drones that can be deployed immediately. It's only a matter of time before they put weapons on these drones, you know what I mean?

[01:14:00] Josh Walkos: And justify a reason to do it. It's not like they're just going to be all your friendly drone just taking photos of you or the scene of a crime. It's only gonna get worse. And if we don't, our only weapon in this is us discussing it the way we're discussing it now and getting it out to millions of people, hopefully, that will, there's gonna be a lot of people that agree with us, you know what I mean? Probably most of your audience is gonna agree with us. The people that I'm trying to reach when I post these threads or write these articles is the people who are on the fence, they can be persuaded to not go along with it and to speak out about it with the people that are closest with them and their broader community. Because that is actually how you can start to change things. But we are definitely up against it, as you said.

[01:14:48] Josh Walkos: And hopefully people's eyes are open to the technological prowess like Toka group and Flock and Axon, we didn't even get an Axon. There's just a replacement for Flock. I mean, they just keep coming out with more and more things. Once one thing's exposed, they just have a replacement. They come into it. And they're intent on putting up this sort of surveillance network all around us, regardless whether we want it or not.

[01:15:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I'll tell you, I think the way that this has to be fought is at the level of rights. It needs to become immediately clear what our rights are and that these things are a violation of them. I don't think we can prevent the military from having technology that allows it to fight on a battlefield. But it has to be very clear that this cannot be used against Americans, citizens of the West, that our right to know that surveillance video has been altered supersedes the right of a government to buy the ability to alter it. Our right of informed consent should still be backed up by the threat of hanging. The rights are where this has to be clarified because nothing else will work. You cannot go after this piecemeal because you cannot anticipate the technologies that will emerge.

[01:16:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And if the only thing that has to happen is your awareness of it has to lag the deployment in order for you to lose your rights, we can't live that way. That's, you know, it's not only gonna be dystopia, but it's almost like every dystopia at once. You know, it's a little bit Minority Report. It's a little bit RoboCop. It's a little bit, you know, Skynet. It's all of these things. And it only needs to be one dystopia to be completely intolerable. What's coming is just, we need to understand who we are and what we are entitled to so that none of these things can be put on the table while we're asleep.

[01:17:06] Josh Walkos: That is the fight that we have to try and get through to people, that we need some type of mass breakthrough or consciousness to get to that point because right now we're sleepwalking into it as far as where I see it. And it's, you know, it's just crazy to me that we're in this position. I myself have two small children, you know, so that's the entire point of me even coming on here to talk to you about this because there is a serious question about the world that they're going to be growing up into. It's not the world that I grew up in, that's for sure. Things are changing so fast. And I get to go back to this monkey brain, like we are not, you're an evolutionary biologist. You know this, we are not equipped just by our biology at the speed at which this technology and the changes that are occurring right now in our societies.

[01:18:02] Josh Walkos: We can't, somehow we are not able to process this stuff because we're still, it's hard to explain. I think you've discussed this before. It's outstripping our evolution, I guess I would put it that way. It's something that we are incapable of handling just because we are still smart apes basically, you know what I mean, when it comes down to it. This technology is something that's more powerful than most people can conceive when it boils down to it.

[01:18:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I would say a human being by its evolutionary design is capable of enduring one revolution during its lifetime. Your ancestors can arrive on a kayak and try to move inland and change everything about how they live. But you're not supposed to face multiple revolutions. The world that you grow up in is supposed to look like the world in which you're expected to be an adult. And I have already seen four full fledged revolutions. I saw the computer entering the home. I saw the internet. I saw the smartphone and I saw social media. And now I'm watching a fifth AI. Five revolutions in a lifetime is way faster than evolution allows us to keep up. And it also points to one of the reasons that boomer power is so unfortunate. As you point out, the boomers are not able to figure out what world they're living in.

[01:19:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Even just simply suspecting that a video that looks perfectly realistic may well be AI. Thomas Massie lost his seat in part because boomers were convinced he had a threesome with Ilhan Omar and AOC based on AI video. The boomers have to be taken away from the helm. They cannot steer the ship anymore. Even, you know, I'm angry at them for the way they've steered the ship. But at this point, they're incompetent to just deal with the technological realities of the world we are building. And so younger people have to take them out of power.

[01:20:44] Josh Walkos: I mean, look at the age of our senators and the people who actually hold power. You know what I mean? It's that, how do we do that? It's the question. You say through voting, we can get people in. Okay, we could do that. How's that working so far? You know what I mean? They're gonna hold on to power as long as they possibly can. We have a half dead senator right now who's being wheeled around like Weekend at Bernie's. You know what I mean? People wield tremendous power and they're gaslighting us on this the same way they did with Biden, who could barely string a sentence together, but he's the smartest man they've ever discussed or talked to, you know, according to the media. And they'll tell us that, I mean, that scandal in itself is a gigantic scandal that they gaslight us.

[01:21:31] Josh Walkos: The most powerful person in the world was not cognitively capable of making decisions. And they told us otherwise. And his team was basically running the government. You know, we had no, again, no consent or say to it. So I agree that we need some youth, I guess, in power, but, you know, how we get there is I wanna question. I'm not sure how that happens. And I'm not a, I mean, voting is the obvious thing, but I'm a little bit more black-pilled on that issue, I guess.

[01:22:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, well, I think all of us are after Trump's second administration has unfolded counter to every promise he made on the campaign trail. But I think the answer is voting may not work, but we have to try that mechanism. It's not necessarily the limit of what we have to do, but we have to try that. And the key, I think, is for Gen Z to realize they're in the bullseye, that they are, all you have to do is look at men being dragged to the front in Ukraine. You have to look at the quiet alterations of our own conscription structure. The integration, as you point out, of the Israeli and American military structure, the inability of the American public to vote against war in Iran. All of these things are pointing to something. And what they're pointing to is that something has power. It has objectives that we don't get to say no to.

[01:23:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And those objectives seem increasingly to point towards Americans on the front line of a battle they didn't choose. So I keep putting into these terms, I don't know that people can hear it, but the threat that Gen Z is going to find their men dying in the mountains of Iran is far too great to tune out of the electoral structure because you think it's broken. It is broken, but it's the first and the cheapest route to go to prevent that outcome, and we have to do it.

[01:24:14] Josh Walkos: Yeah, so you're saying the political solution is really the only solution that we have that is in front of us?

[01:24:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: No, I'm not saying that, but all of the other solutions are terrible. So you and I would agree that even though the boomers are pretty ancient at this point, and you would have expected a normal civilization, power would have turned over, that in large measure, boomer power, partially by virtue of how large the boomer generation is, and partially by virtue of the fact that they're not relinquishing that power, that boomer power is steering us into danger. Gen Z has the power to end boomer hegemony, and I don't know how intact our electoral system is, but the boomers have to be taken out of power. Gen Z has to wake up in order to do that. Gen X and the millennials can't do it, obviously.

[01:25:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And the threat that if Gen Z doesn't pay attention that they are gonna end up living in a world even more horrible than the one that they've already come to understand they are headed for needs to loom large in their minds.

[01:25:36] Josh Walkos: Yeah, and to an extent, Gen Z to an extent is awakening to some of this stuff. They don't have the benefit of hindsight. That's where we come in and we can tell them. These individuals who are in Gen Z don't even have a memory of 9/11, what unfolded after that. So it's important to individuals like yourself and myself to give them a historical context at which they're operating so that they can move forward. And hopefully, like you said, people with their head on straight can get in the power and start moving the ship in a direction that is beneficial for everybody and away from war, which is seemingly where we're always heading at this point. The disappointment with the Trump administration, it's so bad with the Iran war and everything. And now they're gonna pivot to China too. It's always the looming China.

[01:26:38] Josh Walkos: The whole AI race is couched in this Cold War rhetoric that we had with Russia or the Soviet Union that we have to do all these things because they're doing it. So we have to do it because we gotta be the first to do it. Even if it means we do some things, some evil, we gotta crack some eggs if we wanna make the omelet that we want in the future. And that's kind of the whole psychology that we're always working against here. But I hope, I appreciate the angle at which you're coming to because it is the generation below us. It is gonna have to be the people who actually do something about it. And all we can be is kind of like the Paul Reveres who are telling them, hey, you have to do something about this because they're building a system which you're not gonna wanna grow up in and your kids aren't gonna wanna grow up in.

[01:27:29] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep, we can partner with them. All right, Josh, where can people find you on X and where's your Substack?

[01:27:39] Josh Walkos: Just at Josh Walkos, so J-O-S-H-W-A-L-K-O-S. I post a lot of stuff there. And then I have a Substack called We The Free. So wethefree.substack.com. I try to post long reads every few months on there as I do research. And they all had the common thread of what kind of what we're discussing here.

[01:27:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I recommend people sign up for both of these things. I have certainly been educated by you and had my attention brought to things that I'm shocked I wasn't paying attention to already once I see them. So anyway, it's a good bet. So Josh, thanks for joining me and everybody at home. Thanks for watching.

Credits

Music: “Marble Machine” by Wintergatan. This track can be downloaded for free at wintergatan.net. A free license to use this track in your video can be downloaded at wintergatan.net.

Jennifer Donogh