967 – Transcript
Just Right Episode 967
Air Date: June 3, 2026
Host: Bob Metz
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.
Clip (Idiocracy, 2006):
As the 21st century began human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favoured the noblest traits of man now began to favour different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction — a dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators within the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone, it is Wednesday, June the 3rd, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right wing. It’s just right.
If there’s one thing that history teaches us in terms of ideas and culture, it is that shift happens. And that process of change from one culture to another is not always as understandable or direct as we might like to believe. From savagery to civilization and back again, the repeated patterns of collective behavior have yet to be discovered in terms of their causes or cures, which probably accounts for why the patterns continue to repeat and why civilization is constantly under threat. Like it or not, it’s pretty clear that stupidity is on the rise while intelligence is on the decline and common sense isn’t so common after all. In fact, we’re at a crisis point in this regard, and understanding this stupidity trend can go a long way toward our understanding the political and social crises caused by it. And to that end, between now and the closing of today’s broadcast, we plan to investigate the problem, the diagnosis, and the solution.
It all begins right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at justrightmedia.org where you can access all of our social media links、archived broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
Now this of course is not our first venture into the world of stupidity and human intelligence. And I’m pretty sure it won’t be our last, but it certainly promises to be a different one given what we’ll be discussing on the show today. From having your brain pruned of its ability to think to the art and science of what has been called brainwashing, I’m guessing that most of you have probably never seriously taken these processes into account when laughing out loud at some of the most outrageous and embarrassing displays of public stupidity.
I mean, you’ve got to admit, Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi called it right when she named one of her feature shows Lefties Losing It. And while it was tempting to fill our time with a steady array of these losers lefting it, the broader conversation seems itself to be shifting from a comedy spectacle to how to deal with a serious crisis.
So to take us through that progression of perspectives, kicking off the discussion by first identifying the stupidity problem and its symptoms, we have YouTuber Sydney Watson from her May 28 reactions to just how stupid Americans are increasingly becoming, particularly in light of plummeting literacy rates. And on the return side of the bumper, from his May 30th show, Glenn Beck offers his retarded analysis in response to the retarded word police. In fact, the whole issue is just too retarded for words.
Clip (Sydney Watson, May 28, 2026):
Sydney Watson: I am both upset and alarmed by the reality that we live in. Hi, my name is Sydney. Welcome back to hell. So in one of my last videos, I discussed the plummeting literacy rates across the United States, not just for kids, but for adults as well. Gen Z can’t read. But if we are being honest, the signs of society’s collective decline, not just cognitively, but in other ways as well, were there long before we learned that Gen Z is functionally literate. I mean, come on, there’s still people like this walking among us.
Stupid person: There are as many genders as stars in the sky.
Sydney Watson: And they just keep expanding that acronym:
Retard: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.
Sydney Watson: During my video about reading rates, I referenced the 2006 Idiocracy film several times, making jokes about how it was actually kind of prophetic. Other people have also made the same point over the years. I’m not claiming this is my own idea, but today I think that statement is truer than ever. If you haven’t seen Idiocracy, I do recommend giving it a watch not only for context, but also because it’s just a fun movie.
And we know we aren’t allowed those anymore. For the uninitiated, Idiocracy is a satirical sci-fi film that is originally set in the year 2005. The protagonist, Joe, an American soldier of aggressively average intelligence, is cryofrozen during a military experiment alongside a woman of the night called Rita. When the experiment’s leading man is arrested for his involvement in a schmosh-de-schmuschen ring, the project is disbanded, leaving Joe and Rita forgotten for the next 500 years. So when Joe and Rita wake up in the year 2505, they discover a completely different and exceptionally dumb world that is borderline collapsing in on itself. Instead of flying cars, there are enormous mountains of rubbish everywhere. Corporate greed has reached exponential levels with advertising everywhere and anywhere, including on clothes, in hospitals, even in the White House. The English language has completely deteriorated, much like we see today with people overusing the word “like.”
Idiocracy: “I don’t know what dress to get. My other dress like didn’t get here. Like, should I wear like, like the sparkly dress or should I get like, like…”
Sydney Watson: Water has been replaced with a sports drink of sorts called Brawndo. There are slot machines in the hospital to win medical care. Everything is sexualized into oblivion, including stores basically doing schmosh-de-schmuschen, like Starbucks and H&R Block.
Idiocracy: Man, I could really go for a Starbucks, you know?
Idiocracy: Yeah, well I really don’t think we have time for a handjob, Joe.
Intelligence tests are toddler puzzles, and the only forms of entertainment are ultra-violent, hypersexualized, and highly commercialized, with television channels called the Violence Channel and the Masturbation Network. Terrific. And all of this happened because the well-educated people had fewer and fewer children because they’re being considerate of the environment or their particular circumstances, while the undereducated and maybe even potentially not super smart at all people rapidly procreated because they don’t care. In short, the collective IQ of everybody has been lowered due to a lack of natural selection, or due to natural selection. I guess it depends on what your perspective is on that one.
Through a series of silliness and mishaps, Joe is found to be the smartest person alive and is eventually sent to meet the president, where he then is made a member of the president’s cabinet, and is charged with fixing the non-existent economy, the mountains of rubbish, and resolving the famine that is plaguing the country, one that is caused by feeding the plants Brawndo.
Unfortunately, Joe trying to explain to these people that you have to give water to plants to make them grow kind of feels a little bit like trying to explain to a progressive that men can’t be women.
Progressive Moron: It’s a spectrum, so like, a lot.
Interviewer: Can you name me a few?
Progressive Moron: Um, you can be man, female, you could be, ooh, there’s so many.
Sydney Watson: But a lot has changed in 20 years, and maybe our world is reflecting Idiocracy more and more as time wears on. And the thing is, if we don’t learn from this and course correct now, we’re in for a bad time.
Fat Idiot on Tik Tok: You know why being overweight is one of the smartest things you could do? Just imagine there’s a zombie apocalypse and there’s no food left. Overweight people keep all the food in their belly, therefore they would live longer than people who aren’t overweight.
Sydney Watson: Okay, it’s possible we’re already there. Government leaders in this movie are obviously so deeply unintelligent, but they’re also bought and paid for figures. Again, in real life, we have a member of the Supreme Court right now who couldn’t even define the word woman.
Senator Marsha Blackburn: Can you provide a definition for the word woman?
Ketanji Brown Jackson: Can I provide a definition? No.
Senator Marsha Blackburn: Yeah.
Ketanji Brown Jackson: I can’t.
Senator Marsha Blackburn: You can’t?
Ketanji Brown Jackson: Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.
Sydney Watson: And who could forget Kamala’s word salads, or Biden just wandering around confused for the majority of his presidency?
Kamala Harris: I just love them for so many reasons, maybe because I went to school on a school bus.
Usurper Biden: And you ain’t (sic) black.
Sydney Watson: It obviously doesn’t help when we have politicians like AOC trying to seem more relatable by using unnecessary slang that makes absolutely no sense. Like her recent declaration to pull up to the south or whatever.
AOC: What action can I take? It is time for the North to pull up to the south.
Someone: No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.
Sydney Watson: The interesting thing about Idiocracy is it opens with the idea that evolution doesn’t necessarily reward the most intelligent, but those who can reproduce the most, making intelligent people an endangered species.
Idiocracy successfully highlighted what wide-scale collective incompetence gets us, and in a lot of ways it’s just as alarming and dystopian as massive government overreach. I recently stumbled upon this clip of a university student who couldn’t spell the word business, didn’t know the sum of 45 and 55, and seemed to have the cognitive capabilities of a sim.
Interviewer: What do you study?
Future Governor of the Bank of England: I do business.
Interviewer: Business?
Future Governor of the Bank of England: Yeah.
Interviewer: Spell business.
Future Governor of the Bank of England: B-I. Wait. B-I. No. B-E-I-S-S-I-N-S. Business.
Sydney Watson: Obviously this is just one person in one clip, but it’s not hard to find so many others that are just like this. People are just incapable of doing anything that requires any level of intellectual thinking. And I know I keep saying this, but I come back to the fact that a lot of this is being spurred forward by the content and entertainment that we are consuming.
We’re at the point where even the entertainment that’s on television and in the box office and the movies and films and whatever that we watch are being dumbed down to accommodate people being functionally unable to concentrate.
Clip (Glenn Beck, May 30 2026):
Huffington Post is very angry right now because the word retard is making a comeback. It's making an unfortunate comeback. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. You notice you don't say that about imbecile or moron, but that's why the word retarded came in. Because retarded is a progressive clinical term. Because scientists said if you have severe intellectual disability, if you're severely retarded, is what we would have said, you're an idiot. That's what the medical term was. You're an idiot. If you're moderately retarded, you're an imbecile. If you have mild intellectual retardation, you're a moron. And everybody was ringing their hand clutch with their proletary, we can't use that word. So they replaced it. They replaced idiot, imbecile, and moron with retardation or retarded. Okay, because it was humane and scientific. Then the same thing happened. Because you didn't change people and you didn't change the meaning. They're people of special needs. And you know what? Guess what? Guess what? People of special needs is now not welcome in professional settings. It's an insult now. Wait, I thought that was to replace the insult of retarded. You can't just replace words. You know what it is? It's retardation. It shows retardation. And I am so tired of the word police, I decided I'm going to write an open letter to the word police. So here it is. Dear retarded language enforcers, professional offensetakers, and euphemism evangelists. Since clarity seems to be a retarded concept in your circle, words are not violence. They are syllables with baggage. And retarded has been carrying its suitcase through the English language for decades now, describing everything from developmental delays to your entire approach to public discourse. Now you've spent years trying to retire it. You have replaced it with increasingly retarded alternatives, intellectually disabled, differently abled, cognitively divergent. A person with lived experience of slower neural pathways. Good heavens, man. Each one of these is more retarded than the last one. It's honestly, it's like you're a thesaurus having a stroke. You wanted all of us walking on eggshells, retarded in our speech, self-censoring, like good little home monitors. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will literally kill me and require a safe space with an emotional support animal in it. How retarded is that? Extremely, clinically, textbook retarded. But as a perfect descriptor for your entire retarded worldview, climate policies that retard economic growth. It's retarded. Higher education that produces graduates who cannot define a woman. Peak retardation. Your retardation of humor, art and honest conversation has produced a culture so fragile that it makes Victorian ladies look like stand-up comedians. So, in conclusion, I leave you with this. The word retarded is not going anywhere. It's your word, your progressive word. You brought it into the culture, so deal with it. Or don't. I mean, honestly, your meltdowns are half the entertainment for me. Signed with zero regards and maximum linguistic freedom. A recovering compliance speaker who's done being retarded.
Bob Metz:
See? Shift happens. Glenn Beck is done being retarded. And you know what very important retarded word that he left out of his retarded hierarchy analysis? You know, idiot, imbecile, moron. In the hierarchy of intelligence, its most retarded word of all, right at the bottom, is the word stupid. Which apparently is far worse than being an intellectually disabled, cognitively divergent, differently-abled person with a lived experience of slower neural pathways.
Beck hit the nail on the head when he asserted that you can’t just replace words. Which is just another way of describing the process of changing definitions of previously established and understood concepts. I mean, how many times were the words vaccine and vaccinated changed during the COVID plandemic? That alone was all that was necessary to understand that those pushing the so-called vaccines were lying to us.
“Words are not violence,” correctly observes Beck. But the real threat of words comes not from any act of violence because as they say, the pen is mightier than the sword. And this holds as true today as in any period throughout history. In fact, if it wasn’t written and recorded, there would be no history to relate to.
But it’s not for no reason that politicians, governments and authorities are so consumed by wanting to center and control the expression of speech. Free speech is the singular thing that is capable of destroying them, despite all of their ability to resort to force. Or as Beck put it, “You wanted all of us walking on eggshells, retarded in our speech, self-censoring like good little hall monitors. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will literally kill me and require a safe space with an emotional support animal in it. Your entire retarded worldview, climate policies that retard economic growth, higher education that produces graduates who cannot define a woman,” etc. I mean, it’s just amazing.
Or worse, as we heard earlier from Sydney Watson, adult students who cannot spell simple words, like the university business students who could not spell business. I watched a whole slew of instances like this on one of her previous podcasts and it was among the most depressing videos I saw for a long time, even when dealing with reports of violence and war. I can’t think of anything more destructive to the human mind and its ability to think than to not be able to read.
When Sydney Watson cited her alarm at plummeting literacy rates in the US, I was instantly reminded of how that very issue became the first and most essential issue we tackled in the formation of the Freedom Party of Ontario. Both Robert Vaughan and I ran for the London Board of Education back during that period, Robert ultimately being elected twice, and we produced a door-to-door pamphlet entitled Schools Still Failing Our Children, in which we cited what was then called whole language as being the real culprit behind the high illiteracy rates in the state-run public schools. Our solution? Simple. Teach phonics, which of course, being the correct thing to do, was actively resisted by the education system and the teachers’ unions, as they continue to do to this day.
“Signs of cognitive decline were there long before we realized Gen Z is functionally illiterate,“noted Sydney Watson. “People are incapable of any intellectual thinking.“ Well, you know, she actually got me to re-watch Idiocracy, from which today’s Joe Opener was taken, and I have to say that she gave a pretty good synopsis of what the movie was about in her own narrative. The most frustrating thing about watching Idiocracy for me was that although the idiotic behavior was somewhat entertaining, it actually got me angry because all I could take away from it was the axiom that you cannot fix stupid.
And if you’ve ever wondered why there are so many stupid people in the world, that’s the very question being asked and potentially answered by Maria Karlova on her May 17 post entitled How Your Brain Was Pruned By The System.
So we have thus far defined and described the problem. Now we’re at the diagnosis stage, and there are a lot of abstract generalities used in Maria Karlova’s metaphor construction. She blames the quote-unquote system for much of how humans behave, but bear in mind that this isn’t about conspiracy or conspiracy theories, but about process.
The system is our cultural, intellectual, and moral environment, but yes, conspiratorial players can certainly use their understanding of the system towards their own aims, which of course is all the more reason to be able to see that system for what it is.
Clip (Maledicta, May 17, 2026, Maria Karlova):
Maria Karlova: Have you ever wondered why there are so many stupid people in the world? Why some people behave like NPCs running scripts instead of doing actual thinking? Why kids have more logic than most adults? Why common sense is not so common and where critical thinking vanished from this planet? How does social conditioning actually work? Why do most of us run the same programs from childhood — people pleasing, self-esteem, chronic shame?
Most people who try to escape the social conditioning fail because they’re working on the wrong layer. They’re trying to reason their way out of beliefs, repeat affirmations, meditate, go to therapy, trying to rewrite the narrative of their childhood.
None of this works for the thing they’re actually trying to fix, and the reason it doesn’t work has just been documented in a way that changes how this whole problem can be approached. The basic idea is that the system humans live in functions like a parasitic neural network that hijacks individual consciousness. Just like the fungus that takes over an ant’s body and makes it climb a stump to die, the social system rewrites human cognition to serve its reproduction, not you. This used to sound metaphorical. After a paper in Nature Communications published a few weeks ago, it starts sounding a bit less metaphorical, more like a literal description of what’s happening in your brain. Let’s take a look at what they found out, what it means, and why everything you’ve been told about how to change yourself has been pointed at the wrong layer.
Here’s what researchers found. They worked with mouse hippocampi at three developmental stages: newborn, adolescent, and adult. The hippocampus is the brain region responsible for forming memory and integrating sensory information, and it’s structurally similar across all mammals. The newborn brain is dense, like wildly dense. The hippocampal network in a newborn mouse has connections everywhere in what appears to be a random pattern. As the mouse develops, this dense random network gets pruned.
Not built up — the opposite. Connections die. By adulthood, what remains is a sparse, structured network where each connection has been selected by the environment. The brain doesn’t learn by adding, it learns by subtracting.
The researchers call this tabula plena — full slate — the opposite of tabula rasa. The infant doesn’t arrive empty and get filled. The infant arrives with everything and gets carved.
What you become is what survived the carving. Now, hold that for a second and think about what it means. You were born with a full range of human cognitive possibility.
All of it was there in the dense random network at the start. Then the work of selection began. Two forces drive it. Genetic programs provide a built-in trajectory. Certain pruning happens regardless of environment, because that’s how mammalian brains develop. And environmental signals shape which specific connections get reinforced and which die within that trajectory. In humans, the dominant environmental force shaping this process is the social system. The genetic program sets the stage.
The system writes most of the script. How do I know? Well, look at the people. If your environment is the system as it currently exists, the shape your brain is carved into is the shape that fits the system.
The biological mechanism of pruning is natural, but the system controls the environment that does the selecting. You weren’t given a program. You were subjected to an environment that starved every neural pathway that didn’t serve the system’s reproduction. The system doesn’t need logic and critical thinking. It actively weeds them out and that pretty much explains why some people are so stupid while we all have the same 86 billion neurons. This changes what we mean when we say someone has been conditioned.
The system simply hijacked a biological optimization process. The connections that would let them perceive the system as the system, recognize manipulation, doubt institutional narratives, or trust their own observations against social pressure — those potential pathways were never reinforced. What you experience as your default way of thinking is not your full cognitive potential. You’ve been operating on a fraction of what you came in with.
Most people don’t notice because everyone around them is operating on the same fraction. So, what does this system need them to be? It needs them to be obedient enough to function in hierarchies. It needs them to be productive enough to extract labor from.
It needs them to be small enough not to threaten power. It needs them to mistake their conditioning for their nature so they defend the system instead of seeing it. The neural pathways that support all of these — submission, conformity, internalized shame, hierarchical thinking, identification with the group, trust in authority — get massively reinforced from birth. School reinforces them. Family reinforces them. Media reinforces them. Religion reinforces them.
The pathways that would resist all this don’t get the same reinforcement. Instead, they are violently suppressed and most of them don’t survive past childhood. Children are ruthlessly logical. They constantly ask why, they immediately point out contradictions, and they do not naturally accept “because I said so.” That raw, piercing logic isn’t a higher-level skill adults have to develop. It is the default human baseline.
It’s part of the dense original network. But the system doesn’t reward why. It rewards compliance. It starves the demand for logical consistency and reinforces submission.
Clip (Maledicta, May 17, 2026, Maria Karlova):
Now there is a second piece of this puzzle that I want to pull in because by itself the pruning model doesn’t explain everything. Pruning happens in childhood. After the critical period the brain is supposed to be relatively fixed. But people don’t just have stable wiring as adults.
They have actively maintained wiring. Something has to be doing the maintenance work, otherwise the network would probably slowly drift back toward its denser earlier state, just from natural neural variability. That something is astrocytes. For decades, astrocytes were thought to be support cells, plumbing for neurons. Latest research has shown they’re nothing of the kind — they’re regulators. A paper in Nature published last year showed that astrocytes secrete a molecule called CCN1, which actively stabilizes specific neural circuits in the adult brain.
This is the second layer. Pruning establishes the form in childhood. Astrocytic regulation maintains it in adulthood. Your current cognitive architecture is being held in place by an active molecular process that resists reconfiguration. That is why you can’t reason with your mother. Now this matters for understanding why people who try to change themselves usually fail.
The standard methods all miss the mechanism. Most meditation traditions train conscious observation of mental processes. This is useful in some contexts, but it doesn’t reactivate dormant neural pathways. Therapy works on narrative. What story do you tell about what happened?
What story do you tell about who you are? Real things happen on this layer. People do reorganize their stories, but the anchor isn’t on the narrative layer. It’s underneath it, in the patterns calibrated by your earliest social environment, held in place by ongoing astrocytic regulation. Talking changes the layer above the anchor.
The anchor stays where it is. Okay then, how does change actually happen? Here’s what I can tell you from my own experience and from watching it happen in others. It doesn’t come gradually through accumulated practice.
It comes as a phase shift. You can spend the years collecting fragments, analyzing pieces of yourself, working on this issue and that issue, getting nowhere fundamental, because you’re still looking for common sense inside the system’s logic. The shift happens when you stop assuming that what the system tells you should actually make any sense. When you stop trying to find a reasonable explanation for arrangements that were never designed to be reasonable, the architecture becomes visible the moment you stop expecting it to be sane.
That’s like using a different lens. Once the architecture is visible, it loses its grip because its power was its invisibility. You don’t reason your way to see in the system — you see it and then everything snaps into alignment around the seeing. The seeing is the event. Most people never see it because they’re trapped in piece-by-piece analysis. The system encourages this. The fragmented approach is the system protecting itself by keeping you focused on fragments.
Now here’s what actually happens when people break out. The pruning process destroyed the original connections, but it didn’t destroy adult neuroplasticity. The brain can build new synaptic connections at any age. The phase shift when it happens isn’t gradual relearning. It’s a sudden structural collapse of the system-installed architecture. When a strong enough signal finally breaches the astrocytic regulation, when you actually see the system, the old wiring can no longer explain reality. Your brain is forced into a rapid, high-energy reconfiguration. It builds a new conceptual network that bypasses the system’s intended pathways. This is why it feels like a revelation. You aren’t waking up dormant pathways. You are violently forging new ones that the system tried to make impossible. You are finally using your neuroplasticity for yourself instead of letting the environment use it against you. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. After the shift, the system continues to operate around you the same way it always did, but your nervous system processes it differently because the pattern is now seen rather than inhabited.
That is the difference. When the shift happens, you’ll know. It feels like you’re finally back from a lifelong coma.
It feels like remembering who you are because for the first time since childhood, your cognitive network actually belongs to you. This is why the people most able to see the system are often people who suffered the most as children. What the system calls a pathology is actually its own failure to make them docile. This also explains exactly what happens with people, social groups under the autism spectrum or ADHD. Neurobiology shows that these brains undergo significantly less synaptic pruning.
They remain physically denser. The system frames this as a deficit, but look at what else survives when the pruning fails. An absolute uncompromising demand for logical consistency. They don’t just feel everything. They often analyze everything. The system pathologizes them because their hardware physically rejected the software of blind compliance. What gets diagnosed as a disorder is often just a brain where the system’s attempt to cut out logic completely failed.
Bob Metz:
You are listening to Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. So how does change actually happen? It doesn’t come gradually through accumulated practice. It comes as a phase shift. Now I have to confess that’s pretty much how I personally quote-unquote saw the light, as they say. This phase shift is experienced like an epiphany, or as I’ve often expressed it, suddenly the dominoes all fell into place. And something that didn’t make sense before now becomes clear as day.
There’s a lot about what Maria Karlova said that reminded me about the way Professor Gad Saad discusses his parasitic mind virus metaphor as idea pathogens. When she said that “the system that humans live in functions like a parasitic neural network just like a fungus that takes over an ant’s body,” that sounded a lot like Gad Saad talking.
Now of course she’s not discussing this process necessarily as an evil one, but one that we should be aware of because it can be used for evil purposes and of course is being used so. As Karlova put it, “the shift happens when you stop assuming that what the system tells you should actually make any sense. When you stop trying to find a reason for arrangements that were never designed to be reasonable, the architecture becomes visible the moment you stop expecting it to be sane.” Wow, and isn’t that exactly the process that people have been going through when trying to understand the government’s motives and actions regarding all of those retarded political campaigns that Glenn Beck was talking about.
From climate change to COVID to multiculturalism, none of these ideas are sane, and once you know that, then the people pushing the insanity no longer command the authority they previously may have had, and this is exactly what they fear the most.
Now there’s been a lot of talk about this new way of understanding how the brain works thanks to a study that apparently appeared in Nature Communications. In the following article published by Psypost on May 22nd under the heading “Neuroscientists Discover the Brain’s Memory Center Starts Full and Prunes Itself Down to Optimize Learning,” writer Eric W. Dolan reports, and I quote: “A newly discovered developmental process reveals that the brain’s primary memory center starts out with an excess of tangled, random connections that get pruned away to form a highly structured efficient network as an animal grows. These physical and functional changes optimize the brain’s capacity to store and retrieve memories over a lifetime. The study detailing this transformation was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria wanted to understand how this vital memory network develops. Two competing philosophical and biological models framed their approach. The first model is the tabula rasa, or blank slate theory. This concept suggests that the brain starts with very few connections and slowly builds them up as the animal experiences the world. The opposing model is the tabula plena, or full slate theory. In this scenario, the brain begins with an overabundance of connections that are gradually trimmed away leaving only the most necessary pathways.”
So this explains an inconsistency I’ve been running across over the years when it comes to the meaning of tabula rasa. This article suggests that there are two competing philosophical and biological models in conflict here. But it doesn’t address the philosophical side of the debate. All I see here are two differing biological models, not philosophical ones. And I have to confess, I’ve never understood the term tabula rasa as a theory suggesting that the brain starts with very few physical connections and slowly builds them up. That’s never been my understanding of that term.
As Ayn Rand defined it, man is born with an emotional mechanism just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism. And this is an acknowledgement of the mechanism to which the scientific community is referring. But in philosophy, the term tabula rasa refers to knowledge, not to mechanism. As Rand explained, “at birth a child’s mind is tabula rasa. He has the potential of awareness, the mechanism of human consciousness, but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive unexposed film, his conscious mind, an an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed, his subconscious. Both are blank. He faces an immense chaos which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism which he must learn to operate.”
So to draw a conclusion from this, there is no fundamental contradiction between the biological concept of tabula plena — a full slate — and the philosophical concept of tabula rasa — a blank slate. In fact, they complement each other when kept in their proper contexts.
And this brings us now to the solution stage of today’s discussion. From this May 28th YouTube presentation, British host Chris Williamson interviewed psyop expert Chase Hughes, and their discussion was remarkably similar to what we heard from Maria Karlova, especially given Hughes’ experience in, as he put it, how the brain works and how to shift human behavior.
Clip (Chris Williamson, May 28, 2026, with Chase Hughes):
Chris Williamson: Who are you? How do you describe what you do for work?
Chase Hughes: It’s so hard. But if I’m talking to somebody that’s boring, I’ll just tell them I teach psychology stuff. But if I want to get into it, I’ll say, you know, I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation, apply it on yourself and other people. And most of what I do is train sales teams nowadays. So sales has gotten really addicted to this stuff. But I’ve studied neuroscience for a long time. And I spent my life trying to figure out how the brain works and how to shift human behavior, not just like to get someone to confess to something in an interrogation, but how do we modify our own behavior? And what are the mechanics that make that possible?
Chris Williamson: Do you think we’re living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history?
Chase Hughes: Yes. Hands down. But I mean, you go to ancient Rome, some shit would happen and they would say, hey, do the lion fighting thing with the guy. Let’s distract everybody. So I don’t think it’s new. I think it’s a lot more pervasive though.
Chris Williamson: What’s the motivation for that?
Chase Hughes: If you think about what is the number one fear of human beings, like every psychology class talks about it, it’s public speaking. But it’s never public speaking. It’s I don’t want to be judged. I don’t want to be ostracized because in our brain that’s 200,000 years old, getting kicked out of a tribe means I’m dead. I’m not going to have sex. I won’t have babies and I’m going to die.
It’s a mortal fear of dying. And in this world today, with how performative and artificial everybody has become, is that I’ve got to show my best self. I’ve got to hide shame. I’ve got to conceal all this guilt and stuff that people carry around. The reason that somebody can feel lonely in a room full of people — and I’m not just talking on Facebook, I’m saying like in a real room full of people — is because no matter how many times your friends come over and pat you on the back and say, “Oh Chris, you did a great job. We love you. You’re a great guy.” Your spouse might say, “Oh we love you and you’re a great person.” In the back of your mind, you know you’re faking it and you know that none of them really like the real you.
At the end of the day, you’re lonely in a room of 150, 200 people because you know that none of them know you and you haven’t ever really been seen by anybody. This is my opinion, but I think that’s the root of the pandemic that we’re in right now of loneliness. Like we’re more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can’t really connect.
Our brains are wired for a 120, 130 person tribe. And we start getting over that and we have massive issues. We need to be kind of shaken awake and somebody grabs our little camera and changes our camera angle to look at a situation differently. I want to be woken up like that in every possible way. And I think that’s what we all need.
Chris Williamson: Is brainwashing real? What’s true and false about that?
Chase Hughes: Brainwashing is absolutely real. There’s a four-step process and it spells out the word FEAR. It’s focus, emotion, agitation and repetition.
So if we start with focus, this is me routinely breaking what you are predicting to be what’s going to happen next over and over and over in a massive amount. One or two times this is what triggers a mammal brain — our mammal brain and a dog. You’re walking down a pathway in the woods and a stick breaks behind a tree. You’re like, what was that? You’re not worried about anything else. So the fastest way to generate human focus or mammal focus is novelty. Some genuine thing happens that you didn’t expect. So that’s the first. That’s what we generate a massive amount of focus.
And then it’s emotion. And with emotion, there’s an old hypnosis technique that became popular in the 50s. This guy named Dr. Milton Erickson popularized this thing called fractionation. So they figured out like if I pull somebody down in hypnosis and then take them gently out of it, when I put them right back down in, so this is in quick succession. I take you out of hypnosis and then I put you back into hypnosis again. You’ll go deeper every time.
And there’s no such thing as depth in hypnosis. What they essentially mean is you’ll have more GABA. GABA is a neurotransmitter in your system, the safety chemical. And you’ll also have a higher degree of theta wave brain state.
And it follows the thing of getting your focus, showing you an authority figure, telling you something threatening, making you fearful of judgment of a tribe, and then making you emotional, and then bringing you back out and then back down in that cycle. So it’s focus, authority, tribe and emotion.
But that’s the core of brainwashing is focus, emotion. That’s that fractionation part of up and down, then agitation. So this is doing something to where the mammalian brain recognizes this is a different environment than I was expecting, not a thing that’s happening. So now the landscape is changing, the oil prices are going up. This big thing is happening. There’s a shortage of some critical resource.
And then repetition. So focus, emotion, then agitation. Something is extremely disrupting to your ability to predict the future. That’s agitation and then repetition. The cycle begins again.
And you can kind of do whatever you want. That process creates a blank slate in people. And that’s like the baseline formula of how brainwashing works.
Clip (Chris Williamson, May 28, 2026, with Chase Hughes):
Chris Williamson: Why can’t people relax? What’s the truth about emotional debt? I’ve heard you talk about this.
Chase Hughes: Dude, this is a big one. I think this goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning — people carrying around shame. And everybody thinks that they’re the only one.
If we’re really, really honest with ourselves, we walk around every day, we conceal shame, because there are a lot of institutions that are around today that have made shame into an institution, like social enforcement and shame. And everyone thinks it’s just me. I’m the only one hiding the shit from everybody else. If I start becoming real, everyone’s going to leave me. I’m going to be abandoned by my friends. I’m going to get outcast and judged. I have to keep hiding this. And everyone thinks it’s just them.
The cool thing is that it’s literally 100% of people. It’s every single human being out there carrying the exact same shit as you. And they all think it’s just them. It’s saddening, but I think it’s beautiful at the same time. And we all, we really do share a lot more in common, especially with the things that we hide from each other than a lot of us would be willing to admit.
So when we encounter emotional debt, this is typically when I’m a little kid, what are the patterns I had to develop to earn friends and keep friends, to feel safe, or to attain some kind of social reward, like appreciation or love or something like that. So if something in my childhood made one of those three things happen — friends, safety, and rewards — then that, the brain says, oh, this worked. I’m going to make an app out of this shit. So your brain makes an app and says, I know exactly how to produce this thing. So I’m going to make an app and I’m going to run that app all the time.
So for the first couple of years, it’s an app that you’re consciously clicking on in social situations. By the time you’re like probably 12 or 13, that’s solidified in your behavior. And then fast forward, you’ve got a 34-year-old woman working in an office who had to kiss some bully’s ass in middle school. And that’s all she does as an adult. So we carry all these little childhood things without knowing it, like a loaded childhood backpack.
Chris Williamson: It’s gone from being an app to being source code.
Chase Hughes: Yeah, beautifully said. Yes. And we carried it into adulthood without knowing.
And then you say, oh, you came to me for help with this XYZ thing. Look at your eight-year-old self. Let’s go back in time and take a look at them. And then you’re like, oh, wow, that’s it. I mean, that’s all I was trying to do. And that is emotional debt. And every time we’re not dealing with a lot of that stuff directly, every time we hide it from someone else, we’re withdrawing from the account and we’re kind of overdrafting everything in our life.
So concealment is one of the most exhausting, cognitively exhausting things that there is when it comes to human behavior. Concealment is more mentally taxing than doing calculus.
Chris Williamson: How do you advise people to process emotions so that it doesn’t get deposited into the bank account or used to withdraw from the bank account?
Chase Hughes: Dr. David Bercelli discovered this thing called trauma release exercise. Or it’s been known that we go into these things called neurogenic tremors all the time. And Robert Sapolsky wrote a book about a lot of this stuff, about how nature knows what to do. It doesn’t suppress healing mechanisms. It’s called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. But they figured out that humans suppress this tremor mechanism.
Chris Williamson: Why do you think that is? To avoid being seen as strange by the people around us? This is an indication of weakness that I was bothered.
Chase Hughes: Yeah, I think you hit the nail perfectly on the head there. But he basically, he’s not teaching you a technique. He’s just helping you to find the switch in your body that you’ve been suppressing your entire life.
And we had to do it after a deployment that I was, I did 20 years in the military. So I did a bunch of deployments. But one of these deployments, we came back, it was rough. But we had to go through this trauma releasing exercise, a different one under a different brand name than this, Dr. Bercelli. But it was maybe the most profound emotional transformation I’ve ever made in my life, other than psychedelics. It’s unbelievable. And it’s your body knows how to do it. Every life changing. And it’s free. It’s totally free. You go on YouTube and learn how to do it. And it’s unbelievable. And it’s every mammal does it. And during this lady’s presentation to us, when we got back from the deployment, she says, raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a depressed squirrel or a zebra.
Like a zebra doesn’t get bit by a crocodile and go back to his tribe. And we’re like, “guys, I had a day. And I need to curl up under that tree for like nine days. And people need to bring me food.” That doesn’t happen. Like, they’re somehow over stuff a lot quicker than we get over stuff, even though we make more meaning about the situation than the zebras do.
Chris Williamson: How do you come to think about the role of shame in people’s lives?
Chase Hughes: I think shame has been institutionalized on purpose, by many different places. And we learn as we’re little kids, like if I feel shame about something, I need to conceal it. And I’ve learned a new part of me that I can wall off and I don’t need to show anybody.
So if I’m ashamed about anything, it doesn’t make shame doesn’t make you a good person. And I think a lot of people think that if I feel ashamed about something that makes me moral, that makes me good as a human being, it doesn’t just ruin your life, it doesn’t make you a good person.
Chris Williamson: Has what we’ve spoken about to do with shame and childhood patterns related to the trauma triangle, is that all wrapped up inside of that?
Chase Hughes: I think it might be. I don’t know. I don’t think we know shit about consciousness. And there’s so many people who have so much certainty that I would be embarrassed showing that level of certainty about “Oh, this is exactly how the brain works.” I’ve studied neuroscience for nine years, we have zero clue how the brain works, we don’t know where memories are stored, we don’t even know what they’re made of.
And I mean, it’s like somebody studying DMT and saying, Oh, yeah, it activates a receptor on your five HT2A serotonin receptor. Like, yeah, that’s what’s made our ancestors see the exact same thing for 4500 years. And that’s what creates the entities, you know, it’s silly to think that we can really comprehend everything. We can’t even define or understand consciousness.
And we’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s a receptor activator, it’s a receptor agonist.” And I just think that there’s way too much certainty about this stuff. We need more scientists just finishing a few sentences with “as far as we know.”
Bob Metz:
Because of course, the science is never settled. That we do have a working definition of consciousness, but not in the technical scientific context being attempted at the physical and biological level. It seems to me that consciousness is more useful as a philosophical concept rather than as a technical one. That may be why Chase Hughes said that we can’t even define or understand consciousness when one is speaking in terms of receptor activations, etc. Consciousness is the faculty of awareness, the faculty of perceiving that which exists. And if nothing exists, there can be nothing to be conscious of.
And of course, one can always test a definition by entertaining its opposite. In this case, unconsciousness. Is there a similar process that applies to unconsciousness that we can also apply to consciousness? I mean, it’s very possible that some people who are seemingly wide awake may be unconscious of something. But if they were simply totally unconscious, they would be in a coma or dead. So it seems to me that the concept of consciousness has as much to do with the object of which one is conscious as it does with the individual experiencing that awareness. So if someone ever comes up to you and asks, “Are you conscious?” the first response should be “Of what?”
When Chase Hughes suggested that we all need to be shaken awake — “I want to be woken up like that. It’s what we all need.” — he appears to be calling for this sudden phase shift discussed earlier as when he referred to that researcher who was not teaching a technique but helping you find the switch. But very significantly, when Hughes connected a general fear of public speaking to really being a fear of being judged, this goes a long way towards explaining why those not wanting to be judged are constantly advocating censorship and speech controls. Whether they realize it or not, it’s an admission that they know they are on the wrong or losing side of a given debate or conflict.
But given both the idea of tabula rasa and tabula plena, it seems clear that the phenomenon of stupidity is not going anywhere soon. Wide public support for various irrational actions has been referred to as the result of an emotional plague by Wilhelm Reich or as mass formation by Matthias Desmet or as suicidal empathy and the mind virus by Gad Saad while the growing wave of stupidity dominating today’s zeitgeist continues to draw the attention of a similarly growing number of analysts.
The idea of having an informed electorate in today’s zeitgeist seems to be an impossibility. Thus the challenge facing western culture is how intelligent and rational people should deal with entrenched stupidity and how understanding this whole shift phenomenon can be employed to shift most political thought from the left to the right is a problem yet to be resolved.
And that’s a problem that we’ll continue to work on when you join us again next week as we continue our journey in the right direction and until then be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right and be right back here. We’ll see you then.
Clip (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, 1970s, Lily Tomlin):
I mean, first of all, when you work in an office, the thing is, I don’t even, it’s so, when I think it was so, it was such a hard, it was just the most draining, it was just the most hard. I mean, when you have every day you just feel like your face is just all, your whole mind, you just feel like your brain is just twisting, you don’t know what’s happening, just so, and then the next thing you have to go in there and then you reach and you run around, you don’t know what’s, then you’re getting the Christmas for everybody, you don’t know, it’s just the most hard, it’s the most, it’s just the most, it’s, I don’t even, I can’t even talk about it.