Can Science Be Efficient? The 264th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 200, and I forgot already, is it 260? 264, of course. We are obviously not in our home studio. We are in Barcelona, Spain, where we have accomplished a great... deal of technical feats in order to uh broadcast to you from this lovely airbnb

We have not been drinking. We have not been drinking yet. It may come to that. We have held off, but I will admit that not having been able to do our planned live stream before we left has been something of a... Pain in the bottom. Yes, a pain in the rear end. So this is a replacement for the stream we couldn't do because our wonderful producer, Jen.

uh was out sick and uh there were a great many technical obstacles so anyway here we are with obviously a stripped down podcast at a technical level but hopefully everything is working yeah uh if yeah i don't even know what to say you might want to make sure that that's the case yeah so that's our

original producer saying, is it working or is it not? All good. Okay. Hey, if everything's good, then that's definitely a better timeline than we've been on. I'm just going to keep that sort of in view. I can't tell. Here we are. Number 264 from Barcelona. And we do have a locals watch party going, I think.

i don't actually know if that's true folks on locals know whether we have a locals watch party hopefully it is going on but so you can hopefully join us there we have uh we're going to just start with the ads get the business out of the way and then talk some today about some of the goings-on Bobby got confirmed and you've been observing some things about the health of the people that we are running into and our travels so far and we I wanted to talk a little bit about

science and grants and funding and indirect costs and not go into it as deeply as I was planning on when we were when we had all of our stuff with us but talk a little bit about that and why we need why we need science in an old original style that we don't have a lot of right now. Excellent.

uh without further ado we don't have we can do like a chime we don't have a green perimeter here yeah you may have to you can color your own a border around your own screen if you'd like so you know that uh the ads this is now going to be the sponsored content all right Our first sponsor this week is Peaks Nandaka, an adaptogenic coffee alternative. Uh-oh. Hello?

for both of us okay hi guys uh this is our original producer saying that we are supposed to turn up the mic decibels but the mic volume by five decibels and he will tell you how to do this I'm gonna put you on speaker this is all very I don't know it's not meta it's something here we go hopefully It is in OBS that I can turn up the decibels. Yes, it is in OBS. Go click the three dots by your microphone. Got it. Yep. 5.0 We are increasing the decibel level

Alright, hopefully that has increased the decibel level of our mics so that you can hear us. I'm going to assume that works. I'm going to go on mute and just hang up once I'm sure. Alright. Alright. As I was saying. Our first sponsor this week is Peaks Non-Ducca, an adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao, tea, and mushrooms. This is a fantastic product.

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you will actually be surprised to learn is fresh pressed olive oil club which seems totally apropos given that we are in spain one of the world's leading producers of olive oil and we have already had uh we've only been here for a day-ish we've already had some amazing olive oils and it reminds me of how many times you will get served olive oil in restaurants in the u.s and it just doesn't taste particularly amazing Yep.

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you won't regret it it's excellent stuff and being here actually makes me wonder we've of course heard and read that much of the olive oil on the market in the u.s isn't really olive oil and i'm beginning to think that actually olive oil has a flavor and a lot of the stuff that we get you can tell it isn't because it doesn't have that flavor at all anyway

fresh pressed olive oil club olive oils do have an excellent flavor and that's part of how you know they're real one of the things I think that we've been experiencing already in just you know a little over a day in Spain so far is the empirical lived experience if you will the difference in in flavor overall in ingredients in food that we've been talking for a while now about yes olive oil marketed as olive oil in america often isn't olive oil and

and if it is it's old it's stale and so it's got less flavor same is true for honey a lot of the honey on supermarket shelves isn't real honey but then also the produce isn't as flavorful as it used to be and this is in part because our soils are are impoverished and because we put so many things on these crops in order to get them to well in order to

have them be resistant to various pathogens but also we then grow crops that are hardy and able to travel and we pick them before they're ripe and just increasingly you buy something that should be the most luscious flavorful thing ever in the US a peach a raspberry a tomato and it tastes more like water than anything else and I feel like that's less so here yeah I feel like that's much less so in in Europe and you know it's it's there's so much we can't control for

um but one of the you know apropos this particular ad fresh pressed olive oil is the real deal it tastes amazing and you won't have the sense of oh i remember how olive oil used to taste this doesn't taste like that this is the real stuff

Okay, our final ad, and again, we don't have that fancy green perimeter today, but this is still in ad territory here. I can make the noise. Do it. That's not what it sounds like. Close. I don't think so. Okay, wow. Also, it shouldn't be in the middle because now you're confused. people right are we right or are we in we're in okay but we were already in yeah the noise should be in reverse on the way out

We should add that feature. I had that originally. Yeah. Is that not what's going on? I don't know. I'm usually doing the podcast, not watching it. It's supposed to be. Yeah. Our final sponsor this week is CrowdHealth, which is unlike any other service on the market. I know because before they were a sponsor, I went looking for exactly what they provide. I desperately wanted to get our family out of the health insurance rat race, and I did with CrowdHealth.

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I don't know how the noise sounds in reverse. Do you want to give me your ad? Yeah, sure. Or you want to write on it. I'll write on this. You're going to write on that nice paper bag that you've got? I've repurposed this paper bag if I need to write now, so I'll do it there. That fine... uh spanish paper bag which uh in which with which we purchased iberico ham fine fine jamon yeah such good food

Good stuff. All right. You wanted to start, I believe. I wanted to start with an interesting observation. And I will just give you a little bit of history here. So I used to have very sensitive lungs. I discovered...

far too late that the reason that my lungs were so sensitive was because I was very allergic to wheat, which I was eating not knowing that I was allergic to it. And so I used to live in a kind of fear of winter and the pathogens that circulate because... um i would tend to get them and i would get them worse than a lot of people would upon not eating wheat anymore most of my lung issues have cleared up but i'm still

partially of the mindset of paying attention to these things at an unusual level. And I've noticed something this year that I haven't known what to make of it and I haven't known how widespread it is. But as I've been traveling around and I'm in places like... airports, airplanes, big spaces full of people, I have noticed that there's something very different going on this winter. There's something that you don't hear that was absolutely ubiquitous before.

people coughing. And as we were leaving for this trip, we were in a couple of different airports and I pointed this out to you. What don't you hear? Nobody's coughing. That was not my first response. Right. What I said I didn't hear was mice. Which I still don't hear them. Right. But, you know, mice can be subtle. But in any case. No, you're absolutely right. Once you tune into this and you say. Wouldn't February sound very different in an airport in, you know, 2015?

You would have people coughing everywhere. You'd be noticing it, and you'd be thinking how many of these people are still actively sick with something, how many of them are getting over something, and this is a lingering cough that can't infect you. So before you say what you're going to say, one of the things, one of the parameters that is different is that one of the ways that COVID was used to scare people.

uh was uh it made an enemy of anyone who had a cough and so uh there may be some lingering sense and probably one of the few one of the few positive things to come out of that madness is actually if you're sick you shouldn't be out there exposing other people to your illness and so there are there may be some people making behavioral choices of course around staying home

when they have a cough but as you point out this is not likely to be the case in an airport where if you're sick sick you may put off a trip but most people do not put off a trip because they have a cough i think there may be many contributing factors here one of them can be that the social cost of having a cough has gone up and so people are suppressing coughs more staying home when they have them whatever they might be doing i think the fact of travel airport

travel falsifies that as the driver in this case because the nature of such travel, it's hard and expensive to cancel. So the point is even if somebody would not go to a party that they would once have gone to with a cough, they are still likely to get on an airplane that they had booked a flight for.

and airplanes in winter used to be full of coughing people full of coughing people and airports i mean you could just literally just stand there and listen to the coughs around you and i've been almost counting them since we left our island in the pacific northwest you know every time we pass through a space whether it's indoors outdoors i'm listening for it and you know i've heard a little bit of coughing you know last night there were coughs two children right

So, A, I'm sure that the pattern is real. B, I'm now pretty sure the pattern is global, or at least intercontinental. We see this on the west coast of the U.S. We've seen it on the east coast of the U.S. We're now seeing it in Europe. Something huge has happened to this pattern. And I would say, as far as my personal model goes...

I feel that it has to be downstream of COVID and all of the madness that surrounded it. And the problem is this goes in a direction that I wouldn't expect. I think people are less healthy. because of the shots that most of them took right and those shots have compromised immune systems and a lot of people are getting sick more regularly more severely there's still covet circulating so people are getting an additional pathogen

So my expectation would be that people would sound less healthy. So there's a paradox here in the sense that I think there really is something to the fact that people's health has been degraded. And yet the observation goes in the opposite direction. So what the heck? You're right. Could be some behavioral modifications. There's an absolutely terrifying possibility.

which is that the pull forward effect, which we've discussed in a number of different places. I discussed it with Ed Dowd. The pull forward effect is where some... uh misfortune befalls a population and it takes a lot of people who are hovering at some distance from death and pulls them over the line leaving a population on the other side of that event that is less

prone to, is less vulnerable. So it could be that there was a pull forward effect, but it's hard to imagine because most of the people who were coughing under prior circumstances weren't, you know, near death. they were mostly just people who had a winter cold or whatever and it was causing the symptoms so anyway i think we have a genuine mystery on our hands and it could also be that something about the massive disruptions which i think we're

negative, right? The lockdowns and what they did to businesses. You had a massive transfer of wealth from poorer people to richer people. You had massive disruption of everything from learning amongst children who were held to remote schooling, which didn't do the job that schools are supposed to do.

So there was a massive disruption. It's possible that that disruption had an impact on the circulation of pathogens and that there's something about the ecology of the pathogens that has now been disrupted enough that... what we're seeing is causing less of the symptoms. And largely, I just wanted to put the observation on the table and say, something is going on. I think that our audience...

Now that they've been alerted to it and are going to be consciously thinking about it, it's February. Go any public place. Listen and ask yourself if the level of coughing that you hear is what it would have been. five or ten years ago. And maybe something about the way I've been traveling through the world and the way we're traveling through the world is anomalous, but it's hard for me to imagine what it would be.

right to have this observation in you know in spain in heathrow airport which we passed through in seattle it seems to be everywhere and i've been noticing this now for a month and a half or two months right as winter descends i'm used to hearing you know when we were in the classroom it was absolutely ubiquitous on campus yeah right yeah every room was full of coughs and so something has changed and i think it's important for us to figure out what it might be.

whether it's a weird positive externality of something that happened in the massive debacle of COVID, whether it's negative, a pull-forward effect where lots of vulnerable people have been removed, and maybe those vulnerable people were playing a role in the circulation of... pathogens that they're no longer playing, right? In other words, they could be reservoirs at a level that we don't understand or something like that. But something has changed. I'm quite convinced of it.

I suspect that the answer to what it was will at least be fascinating and potentially powerful. Well, it'll be interesting to see. I don't think I have anything.

to offer i guess i thought that you were more confident of the pull forward effect when we were talking about it first as uh contributing substantially um but i mean let's just the problem is i mean and we haven't been on a college campus so i can't say that college campuses aren't as coughing as they always were but my guess is there you would experience the same change if you were on a college campus right now but assuming that's true

That, you know, it's not the direct pull forward effect. It would have to be that the people who are hovering close to death who have now been pulled forward over that line were harboring. disease in a way that was important to the way pathogens spread through the rest of the population in some way that we don't yet understand. So even if it's that, it's powerful. The knowledge is powerful. It'll be interesting to see

whether this changes something going forward. In other words, is this a permanent alteration? Is February going to be relatively coughless from here on in? Is this, you know... A brief period after a massive global disruption? What might it be? Yeah, well, if it's pull-forward effect, you expect a brief period before re-equilibration.

Right. Well, except for the fact that the reason that we've talked so often about pull forward effect is that we are exactly not seeing what you would expect in such a case, which is you have a population. All of it is distributed at some distance, some level of vulnerability. You have a disruption. It pulls the most vulnerable people forward.

What should happen in the aftermath is that you should have a population that's less vulnerable than it is on average. So you should, to the extent that you have excess deaths right after some... negative force has descended, you should have a robust population. And because we're not seeing that... But you get a higher excess death rate followed by a lower excess death rate followed by equilibration. Right. But we haven't seen that yet. So what that means is...

There is this hint of something dire and ongoing in the sense that something is continuing to pull people forward. That's really ominous. That is really ominous. And you and I, because we've been traveling, aren't totally up to date on what all is moving forward and being proposed.

Another thing that's ominous is any discussion of mRNA being used for things like cancer or bird flu within either the American... body politic or more globally yes and actually since you mentioned it this is a great place to remind people of what you and i you know the the hard one insight that we have over this is that

a lot of ink has been spilled over the spike protein and the spike protein is a problem in and of itself to be sure but the lion's share of the harm that seems to come from the mrna shots is the platform itself not the payload and because of that this should be dead on arrival

When we are told bird flu might be addressed with mRNA, the answer is, well, how the hell are you going to do that without causing myocarditis and a bunch of other pathologies that are the result of the immune system attacking your own tissues? You still don't have an answer to that question because we know what an answer would look like. It would look like basically an addressing system that sent the mRNA to specific tissues that were effectively okay to be destroyed.

but it has to be an addressing system that's good enough to prevent it from getting into your heart or the whole thing is you know the idea is doa and we and we a don't have an addressing system at all and b once one begins to be developed there will be of course questions about its efficacy and safety 100 and you would need

honest to goodness testing, and we have a system that isn't even capable of honest to goodness testing. One final thing, as long as we're here, people should be paying attention to the following thing. When you propose an mRNA platform... shot to address a contagious pathogen, you're not going to escape the problem that's being described. There is no known mechanism to address these things.

you should simply say no to any proposal and anytime you hear it discussed the answer is we'll have you solve that basic problem because until you have this is a non-starter there is a difference that we have to pay attention to when they're talking about it with respect to cancer treatments, which I also think we're a long way from anything useful. But the calculus is simply different if you are, you know...

facing a terminal trajectory because you might well be willing to gamble on damage, you know. In fact, we said early on that effectively some of the... the novel COVID drugs and the shots functioned in a chemotherapeutic fashion. That is to say, lots of damage to the body. And, you know, chemo.

hopefully, when it works, kills the patient slower than it kills the tumor. That's the whole plan. So the point is, a dangerous mRNA shot in a patient who has a terminal tumor is a different calculus, and it's not inherently... DOA, though it's not where I would go if I had got a dire diagnosis. Yeah, and there was a question always about what the diagnosis actually means.

and so i don't think we haven't spent a lot of time talking here on dark horse about how how being tested all the time for lots of things means that you there will be a lot more false positives uh with you know even just the stress and psychological harm that that causes but there will also be

um accurate positives for things that exist at a level that don't actually matter that would resolve themselves on their own or would grow so slowly that they would not kill you before you died of something else and so the the number of you know cancer diagnosis just writ large is going is much higher than it has been in the past for a number of reasons like we actually have a lot more carcinogens and geratogens in our environment and and we are just you know swimming in them

in large measure but we also have so much more testing that we know much much more we have many more cases identified than we would ever have known before and that is not inherently for the good

Not that some of that additional knowledge hasn't helped people sometimes. I'm sure it has. But on balance... it is not at all clear that the additional testing and the additional knowledge and the additional stress and psychological pain and you know often physical pain because the you know traditional cancer therapies of chemo and radiation are are terrible for the body are on balance worth it so

I agree with you. I think I said something very much like that also to Jillian Michaels the other week, that when you have a terminal diagnosis, the math changes, the analysis changes. It would have to. but many people are being scared into believing that they have a diagnosis that may even if they're not being told it's terminal because I don't you know

I'm lucky we have had almost no cancer in either of our families. And what has happened has been minor. And so, you know, we have not dealt with these sorts of end of life. terminal cancer diagnoses in the nitty gritty very much. But my sense is that the actual terminal diagnoses are usually fairly clear. and that in those cases you should try anything and everything.

Now, I would also say that understanding cancer potentially as a metabolic disease and going to things like fasting is something that most doctors will never advise you to do and that this is likely to be very useful in many cases. But that. I would be very careful about hearing what you just said. The mRNA platform could be useful under extreme end-of-life conditions as a Hail Mary. Well, hold on. And extrapolating out and saying, well, but I'm told that I've got, you know.

stage three cancer and it's probably going to go bad and I won't have the ability to make a decision later and so I'm going to do that Hail Mary now. The thing is you want to save a Hail Mary until the very last possible moment. Yes. That's the thing. Let me just... refine what i was actually saying i wouldn't be interested in the mrna platform at this point under almost any circumstances all i'm saying is that the calculus that says there's no way this could possibly be safe enough to use

does not apply if you're already terminally young so there is a potential loophole there that i just think in order to be complete about it we have to be aware of i do think A, the history of what we have learned as we have become alert to cancers. A, I think we've had a very wrong model of cancers and how common they're supposed to be. I know that when I did my work on cancers in graduate school,

believed that cancer was one of two failure modes of the body that were effectively balanced. I now believe cancer is in a natural environment probably much much rarer than we than we currently think it is that our environment is so toxic that we're creating a lot of cancer that wouldn't have been there but we also know the story

cancer is you know this is a classic case of welcome to complex systems yeah because you've got a lot of people who are dying of cancer you come to think that cancer is an inherently terminal disease you start looking for cancer you find oh my god there's all of this breast cancer and you're doing radical mastectomies and stuff and it turns out as you point out oh well there's a range of how quickly these things grow and some of them

can be addressed with a lumpectomy. Some of them can be addressed with radiation that's hyperlocal, where the radiation source is embedded in the tissue. And some of them don't need to be addressed. And it would have been better. if the person who has the thing had never known.

right and we you know we we will never get that down to perfection like well right but the point is the body was dealing with a lot of cancer and we didn't understand that we thought that cancer was what happens when the body is mechanisms for dealing with stuff have given way and the answer is no if you look at breast cancer if you look at prostate cancer there's a lot of these cancers that are very slow growing and depending upon how old you are and how rapidly growing it is

doing nothing may be the right thing to do. We also know, you know, in the case of something like squamous cell carcinoma, one of the skin cancers, that it's really not very deadly at all. So anyway, there's a whole landscape of the body managing these malignancies.

And we discover the ones that are worst because they're the ones that, you know, somebody dies and this shows up on autopsy or however it works. But understanding that... there are a lot of mechanisms that we're not aware of because this is a hugely complex adaptive system that's been you know preventing and managing cancer for you know tens of millions hundreds of millions of years so

Our walking in and panicking over every cancer is a mistake. And also we know that as a result of our pharma... and by pharma i mean patentable novel drugs uh obsessed medical culture that we're missing all kinds of therapies that have potential value that aren't potentially profitable and therefore you've got a whole industry acting to ignore them

um so anyway there's there's a lot a lot there indeed uh did you i feel like there were more things you wanted to say about global health and maybe bobby and uh you know he got confirmed

Yes, this is an amazing moment. We were in transit as this was happening, but Bobby has been confirmed, almost a straight party line vote. Of course, many of the usual suspects are... panicking and trying to create a panic over the false portrayal of Bobby as a crazy person who, you know, believes fanciful things and is unqualified where that's really not who the person is.

of us who I think do know the score medically and have woken up to how broken our system is and how much iatrogenic harm there is are thinking this is a a beautiful and improbable moment, and hopefully it reaches its full potential. So that's marvelous. I'm really amazed. i'm amazed that we've gotten this far and i'm very hopeful at what bobby will be able to accomplish it's incredible uh and you know obviously the whole what is it now it's the

15th of February, so we're less than a month into this new administration. Oh my goodness. It's not really an administration so much as a defenestration of the old system. Yeah, it is.

enthusiastic hopeful terrified angry you know optimistic pessimistic everyone uh it better you know hold on just like hold on right because there's going to be a lot there's going to be a lot more even than what has happened yet and um you are keeping a more even keel about this than than i am and then many that we know

uh and so i mean i guess i wanted to say a few things about this and then and then speak speak to science uh and what what i think you know the the doge people in particular need to know about science because i will say you know we have we have been very clear um this time around we were uh we we voted for trump and we were proud to do so and it seemed like the absolutely only choice and i actually um other than you know and we spent an episode talking about

what some of the very early executive orders were. And there were only a few that I found issue with. I don't appreciate the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. I think it's unnecessary and petty. and I don't know about the reinstatement of the death penalty. I know that I don't like what that appears to be doing, but pretty much across the board.

What Trump has been doing and what he has been apparently standing behind has been remarkable. There are very few among the executive orders, including the newest one basically saying Maha is now going to be policy, like make America healthy. and is going to be policy. And here we have Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the office as Secretary of HHS, ready and willing and enabled to do it. That's extraordinary.

um but the one big exception to that and this is true for a lot of people i know is is doge and and elon and

I know that I was concerned at the point that we learned that Vivek was not going to be involved. Even if you don't think that Vivek necessarily had a... you know a better more nuanced whatever you wanted approach just having two people in charge of such a thing can be can be useful can be tempering and obviously a lot A lot is going to get broken and some of the things that will get broken in a...

in a widespread reduction of corruption, some of the things that will get undermined or defunded or broken will be things that were actually working. And there's no way to do it with a scalpel. So that's part of why you just got to hang on. We're on this roller coaster together. Here we are and hope that... I hope that Trump continues to have his eyes on this and is ready to pull back if he feels it is necessary. Well, I just wanted to say...

I think you and I have a slightly different view of what remained of the system. And so as much as this does look like a wrecking ball, and... you know in the abstract i'm concerned about approaching anything with a wrecking ball i'm not sure that there was any more surgical way to do this. And so I'm not worried about what Elon is doing, not because it could possibly...

be careful, but because I think the system was malignant as it was. And I will say, I also think we have to pay attention. Okay, you have Elon and Doge. tearing apart a bunch of what i think was the racket and most of the people involved in it did not understand they were involved in a racket but that's what it was it was

you know, cryptic welfare programs, vast numbers of people who didn't do anything for a living or obstructed things being done for a living or whatever was going on. So you've got that massively destructive force coming in and... you know, ripping out the wiring of a bunch of stuff that didn't turn out to be essential to our functioning as a nation. But you also have a radical...

president who is entertaining possibilities that were almost outside the thinkable before. And because of that, if you... tear open all this stuff. And you think, oh no. how many good people are going to get chewed up in the destruction of these systems, never mind whether the system should have been what they were. You've got lots of people who are depending on these things for an income to feed a family. What are we going to do? You're damned if you do.

You're damned if you don't. But at the same time, we have President Trump contemplating the impossible. trilateral negotiations over a 50% reduction in military budgets between the U.S., Russia, and China. And that's the kind of thing that, you know, if a child... proposed it, you'd laugh at them and you'd say, well, here's why that can't be, Johnny. But if President Trump says it, the point is, actually, that's a serious proposal.

And I'm not saying it will or won't happen. I'm not saying I know how you would do it because there's obviously a military advantage that could come from signing up for such a thing. And, you know, this is back when Reagan famously said, trust but verify. It was about this very question. How do you negotiate such a thing and be certain that your adversaries are going to do their part? That having been said, the expenditures on the military in a world where...

They are arguably necessary because of the hostility of your adversaries. Well, if you sit down with your adversaries and you say, we're all spending a huge fraction of our GDPs on this wasteful process. What if we cut it out together? Then the point is, well, I don't even know how to think about what Doge is doing because Doge is part of an executive that is also...

potentially going to free up a huge amount of resource that we are currently wasting. And so what I'm really hoping is that Trump is going to be of a mindset to... I don't want him to build massive, but I want him to build something elegant in place of the... monster that is being destroyed, something that does the necessary work and does it well, including the scientific work. And therefore...

negates our worst fears about what happens if you come in with a wrecking ball and you don't have a plan for what happens in the next chapter. Well, as I said, I haven't seen Trump do almost anything here yet.

that actually worries me and i've seen many things that worry me come out of doge and but you know doge is underneath it's subservient too and so uh you know if if it makes giant missteps it it can be corrected potentially um but there's always a question of okay look at the system that you know best and see what you can see because i was aware of USAID

I knew people who were benefiting from USAID in Latin America and Madagascar. I knew some good programs that were coming out of it. I knew of many bad ones. I didn't know of many of the ridiculous sounding ones that we've all heard of now. But overall, I just... don't really have a sense and so my overriding sense of oh usa id was so corrupt that the entire thing needs to go is i don't know enough to say you're wrong i'm going to i'm i'm

i don't i i don't know enough to have an opinion that is going to have me fight back on this one science though academic science academic grants this is where this is where i know things and and we talked actually on uh evolutionary lens live stream number 84 on june 19 2021

about exactly this and uh by i think by chance i think it wasn't this conversation but the conversation about ivermectin this is one of the episodes that youtube took down and was the basis for the demonetization of the channel which

again persists to this day if you see ads on YouTube they are making money off of us and we are not so they demonetized us mid-2021 in part based on evolutionary lens 84 so it only exists at this point on odyssey because rumble hasn't gone back that far so i'll hot link that in the um

in the show notes but uh we talked at some length about some of the stuff i want to revise today and so one one of the things that came out shortly before we were supposed to do this episode so probably close to a week ago now is uh elon and his team's uh discovery apparently they really did not know that when federal grants when science and medical grants were given to universities the universities um got an indirect rate uh that uh that was in addition to the amount of the grant so uh with a

69% indirect rate at Harvard, as I reported back in 2021. For instance, a million-dollar grant.

that was funded that was fully funded by say NSF or NIH would actually be a million six hundred ninety six hundred ninety thousand dollar grant in which a million dollars went to the principal investigator who had written the grant for all of the things that they had requested and there would be a 69% of that with lots of caveats like equipment doesn't get indirect and like all of these caveats it's not as simple as it sounds but you know

the simplest version of this is that that grant wouldn't have been a million dollars that the federal government was giving to the pi at harvard in this case but a million dollars at the pi at harvard would get the principal investigator the principal researcher and then an additional 690 000 it was going to Harvard itself and that sounds maybe at first glance appalling and I as I said again in Livestream 84

I actually worked in the grants office at a research one university at UC Santa Cruz in the year between graduating from college and going to grad school. So I knew I was going into grad school. I knew I was going to grad school in a science or I wouldn't be. I hadn't applied yet, but I knew that was where I wanted. what I wanted to do. And I was amazed to see how much money, in that case, the University of California at Santa Cruz was getting from the work that the faculty were doing.

And I do want to say that I spoke imprecisely in a way that sounds like I'm... very confused in this evolutionary lens 84 as if a million dollar grant with a 69 overhead means that the university gets 69 of that million dollars and the pi only gets the rest and that that has never been the case

But the problem is not that there are indirect costs, because imagine what it would be to run an entirely private research institute. What you would have to do... to do science that a faculty member on what's called hard money, a salaried tenured faculty member at Harvard or any other university doesn't have to do independently.

so you know what all do the universities provide well yes they provide a salary to the faculty member for you know eight or nine months of the year and so you can request summer salary on your federal grant but you can't get salary for the for the whole year uh and you can request salary for your postdocs and for your grad students and such but

But your benefits as a faculty member, your medical benefits, your retirement benefits, your contributions, that's all paid for by the university. You've got your office, you've got your lab space, you've got the libraries, you've got the entire...

or the entire campus on which you work. You've got HR for better and for worse, but every corporation needs HR at this point. You've got compliance officers to keep you in compliance with whatever kind of work you're doing, whatever kind of regulations exist. so all of that is being done by the institution that you're at and that is what um it is imagined the indirect is the indirect cost you're supposed to go to and if there's not

perfect accountability. There may not be much accountability at all, but you know, why do indirect rates at universities vary? why it was harvard's when i looked this up in 2021 harvard's was 69 university of washington's was 54.5 ut austin was 58.5 university of utah was 52.5 um i

went looking and found all of them in that kind of range, 50 to 70% indirect rates. Why would they vary? Well, it's more expensive to do business in Cambridge, Massachusetts than it is in Salt Lake City, which I think is where University of Utah is, right? there's just going to be a difference in the cost of doing business. And so you would expect a different indirect rate. Well, one of the things that Doge did... Hold on. There will also be things like what are typically called... Uh.

economies of scale, which I have always thought should be called efficiencies of scale. But depending upon what kind of institution you are and how large a network you can leverage, the cost of facilitating a particular kind of work may be radically different. In any case, there are reasons that these rates should vary, and I think your overarching point is the idea of grant overhead is not inherently corrupt.

not at all it's necessary it is absolutely necessary because the university is doing things that anyone trying to do science in the modern system would have to do and if they were doing it at a private institution they would be paying for that directly and that would be part of the cost of doing business so part of the cost of doing business of doing science that is that is a kind of business

uh is taken over by the university if you're at a university and uh therefore the university gets a piece of the action and another another way to say this is let's say that you've got I'm not saying that you do. I think most of our science that is being done is obscenely low quality at the moment. But let's suppose that you had some...

brilliant scientist of some kind working on some important puzzle that we agree would be wonderful if it were solved, whatever it is, whether we're talking about astrophysics or health or whatever. Do you really want that person? to have to also be good at managing the laboratory supplies and getting the network hooked up and sourcing all of the publications.

What you really want to do, if your point is actually that work is really valuable to us, then the point is, oh, we'd like to free the person to do... that work as much as possible so that that's all they have to do so they can do as much of it as we could get them to do over the course of whatever period of time so institutions facilitate people being allowed to do that which benefits us maximally. That's inherently a reasonable thing. The system in which it's embedded is no longer defensible.

So you can look at any of these instances and the whole thing looks ridiculous because the work itself probably shouldn't be done. It shouldn't be done in the way it's being done. The people who are doing it aren't especially good at it.

the institution has the incentive to inflate these numbers for its own reasons but if you were to build a system that worked it wouldn't have zero grant overhead it would have there's always going to be grant overhead and uh reducing it to a flat 15 across all institutions which is what the proposal is that has been made by doge isn't going to work A flat 15% rate.

uh across all the institutions be they r1s or r2s r1 and r2 just being descriptions of how much i mean actually i'm gonna i'm gonna save the r1 r2 discussion for another time but basically an r1 university is a universe that has the highest amount of research activity. as measured in dollars at it and the highest number of phds being granted every year as well and it's the r1s that tend to have the biggest overheads precisely because well

In fact, actually, you might find the economies of scale working in the opposite direction for the R1s, but they tend to have the biggest overheads because they also then just have more of the stuff behind the scenes. Because one of the things that has happened at universities that is... running in parallel but not entirely contingent on this is the massive increase in administrators and so you know the more grants you're running the more administrators you have and and and you just get

you know, the obesification of university admin. I think that's actually, that's exactly the right analogy. And actually, it may even be a detector. You would expect efficiencies of scale. You get the opposite. Why? Something's off.

yeah so indirect costs universities have indirect costs that are very that are varied between universities and that sound like they are higher than maybe you think they should be are not inherently a problem however once you have universities who are taking especially big indirect costs off of federal grants you're going to have a perverse incentive at those universities by the administrators to encourage big science.

And when I say big science, I don't mean good science, I don't mean important science, I don't mean basic science. What I mean is expensive science. Because the more expensive your science, the more expensive your grants, the more grants you will write, hopefully the more grants you will get, and the more grants... will get the more money the university gets and it does not necessarily scale at all that the more expensive your your science is the more

expensive it is to have you on campus in fact maybe quite the opposite right but what you have as a result of the very real need for university to say actually we're doing things that support that science so we're going to need to take some indirect costs there is then the beginning of the perverse incentive to say oh well we're gonna first we're gonna privilege scientists who tend to be the ones getting the the grants over non-scientists and you know we see that

And then within science, we're going to privilege the scientists who do expensive science over the scientists who do less expensive science. And less expensive science tends to be theory. it tends to be field science and we're going to talk a little bit we talked a fair bit about theory back in episode 84 we're gonna i want to talk i want us to review that uh talk about both the value of theory in addition to empirical or experimental science and also talk about the value of

field science in addition to lab science which is a distinction that most people you know would immediately recognize but haven't probably considered why why it matters but one of the effects of administrators wanting expensive science because expensive science brings more money to the university. that they want to give some goodies to the scientists who were getting the big grants in order to encourage them to be more productive in terms of getting more grants. How do they do that?

Well, there's three basic categories of things that university professors do. They do research, which is what the grants are for. They do teaching, which is what are the original reasons that universities exist although increasingly a lot of tenured professors don't do much teaching at all and they do governance and governance is the big kind of slush pile and includes everything from

uh sitting on committees to decide if there's going to be a new building built um to hire in committee so deciding who not just um what particular person we're going to hire for a particular job but what job positions will be advertised what will um the new

initiatives on campus look like and how will they be funded so those are those are the positions that faculty are supposed to fill on campus as part of their work as faculty and you know in various positions you might have the expectations split you know.

60, 30, 10. 60% of your time is supposed to be spent on research, 30% on teaching, 10% on governance. I just made up those numbers and they're probably not accurate for any particular school. But imagine that you actually have a fairly explicit expectation for most tenured and tenured. track faculty and you know and adjuncts too but adjuncts are not expected to do governance or

or research, usually they are just hired to teach because that is a way of freeing the tenured and tenure track faculty from having to teach as much. So what can administrators do? as a way to basically sweeten the deal for big science type researchers to just spend their time writing more grants, they can take some of their teaching load off. which means the undergraduates are getting less teaching from the professors who presumably are the most informed about the most up-to-date research.

presumably, and even more easily they can take some of the governance load off. And so once you take the governance load off of scientists what you have are these committees. the hiring committees the committees that decide whether we need a new department at the university maybe we need a maybe we need a latinx studies department Maybe we need a DEI initiative. Maybe we need to dedicate an entire portion of the new building to race segregated housing in the name of anti-racism.

These sorts of decisions get made by committees that are peopled by faculty, which have been depopulated of scientists because the administrators have said to the scientists, and this is not across the board true, but there is a truth here.

They have said to the scientists, in order to give you more time to write grants which is good for us because it affects our bottom line more directly we're going to free you from governments and so governance and so you end up with committees that are filled with people who are not scientists that doesn't mean that they are inherently don't know what they're doing, but it means that you have fewer and fewer people with background in analytical, quantitative...

mathematical hypothetical deductive thinking and reasoning people in these committees and fewer and fewer people when a proposal is made to say oh yes i know we got a new latinx major last year but let's like now we need a Pacific Islander major, and now a studies major, and now we need a this studies major and this studies major, there are fewer and fewer people in the room who, as scientists, are going to be likely to say, hold up.

What is that again? Why do we need that? Isn't that redundant? Won't that take resources from X? Because scientists, for all of our flaws, do tend to be better equipped to understand things like zero-sum games. like there is a budget you have an x amount of money and if you keep creating majors and dei initiatives and racist anti-racist things over here you are going to have less money to do the actual job at the university so let's paint a particular picture okay

The university has an incentive to free up the people who are capable of getting the expensive grants to do that. So it wants to free them from teaching and governance. That means you depopulate.

the realm where it is decided what the university is going to dedicate its resources to that space gets abdicated to people who are not doing the big expensive science and let's take an example you've got some fraction of the university, social sciences, that come up with the idea that there aren't two sexes, that sex is somehow some highly complex realm of many subtleties.

they propose this with nobody in the room to say hey wait a minute that's actually not true and here's how you know yeah right so then the university dedicates a lot of resources to the you know gender madness and that gender madness then ultimately ends up holding a gun to the head of the science departments which actually do know how many sexes there are and those

Science departments are in no position to stare it down. So this is what happened to the university is the perverse incentives surrounding grant overhead actually turned the governance of the university over to people who didn't have a scientific mindset or an investment in us being scientifically correct about things, who then ultimately caused the entire university system to become scientifically incoherent and to accept it.

departments accepting that sex wasn't binary when they damn well knew better so that's an amazing downstream effect of what initially seems like a prioritization of science right yes it reads it presumably read to almost everyone at first as a prioritization of science it turns out to have done the exact opposite and um so i already said obviously you get um

The faculty who are being prioritized are scientists over non-scientists. But within science, within scientists, scientists who do expensive science get prioritized over scientists who do cheap science. And fast science is prioritized over slow science because fast science means quick turnaround, quick grant cycles, and more grants per unit time.

and empirical science over theoretical so expensive over cheap fast over slow and empirical over theoretical and what we get therefore is fast and expensive empirical science which more likely to be able to be done by rote. which is more likely to actually not really be science so much as have the trappings of science. To look like science, if you kind of squint at it, go like, ah, it's wearing a lab coat and it's got beakers, so it's got some expensive equipment. It's probably science-y enough.

in a way that slow science and, frankly, cheap science and theoretical science cannot be done by rote. Those are the kinds of sciences that are much harder to do by rote. And to add to that... and you know all of this but expensive science is the kind that will produce systems in which what the whole system wants is to do just more of the same more of that rote expensive fast empirical science and so who do you get to do that grad students you get grad students to do that and so what you get

in a lot of PhD programs in the sciences is students coming in and yes they have to be admitted to the university but they also specifically have to be admitted to someone's lab and basically have to sign on to say yes I'll do a piece of the research that you've already got the grants to do and maybe I'll help contribute to more grants and I'll just do what I call a little brick-in-the-wall piece of science. A little brick-in-the-wall science which is necessary and it's good.

if the foundation on which the wall is being built is sound, but if you don't have any of the big paradigm shifting science being done, which tends to be slower, which tends to be theoretical, which tends to be really, really cheap.

If you don't have any of that being done, you'll never know if your foundation is broken. And you'll build the wall higher and higher and higher until the entire edifice crumbles when someone like Fauci shows up and starts yammering on about being science when what he's actually doing is just filling his pockets.

of his friends and killing people across the board. So I want to recast this just slightly. What you're saying, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that this incentive, which... initially seems to be a prioritization of science ends up being a prioritization of a piece of science that cannot function in isolation that the system starts feeling rewarded for its inefficiency right

The more grant money that you are throwing at these big, high-tech puzzles that require an army of people to do this, that, and the other, the more successful and science-y you feel. But the problem is, what do you do when science functions the way science...

always has right yeah you have an idea it unleashes a flurry of discovery that flurry of discovery peters out what you are waiting for is the next discovery but what is the system that is built around this perverse incentive do as the idea peters out and stops returning on the investment.

It pretends that that's not happening, so it can keep filing grants that it knows how to write. The last thing the university wants to do in that situation is have a bunch of people standing around in rooms arguing with each other about what might... explain the failure to discover anything new. That's what theorists end up doing. And the point is, the theorists are fundamental to the productivity of science. they can't they're not the whole edifice the theorists alone do not science make

but they are one of two components. And if you decide to cut them out because they look unproductive to you in their land of grant getting, what you get is that the grant getting stops producing anything useful and then it starts lying.

Right? Why is every single field broken simultaneously? However could that have happened? Well, you put a perverse incentive in the system and each of these fields ran to the end of the tape of whatever it understood, and it couldn't figure out how to get to the next big thing because it had gotten rid of all of its theorists who seemed inefficient, right?

Absolutely predictable. And the point is, if you like science, then this should horrify you. This is like the pharmacological obsession in medicine. Well, and I think, frankly, the technocrat problem. in part is one that is utopian for sure that mistakes complica complex systems that conflates complex systems with complicated systems but also cannot imagine that efficiency isn't a good. It seeks efficiency. And like we are, isn't the E in Doge efficiency? Right. So awesome.

We want efficiency in lots of things. We want less waste. We can't have less waste within the scientific process. We can have less waste within a number of things in how science is done, but the scientific process itself... cannot be streamlined so that we don't make mistakes there will be errors errors is part of the process that is that that is part of how we end up moving forward it's not linear

it's branching sometimes we have to go back several branch points because we've gone down several wrong turns and haven't seen them because we've been building on again that wrong wall that that brick in the wall of science that goes up and up and up until you realize oh crap the foundation is failing so you have to be able to go back all the like constantly in science it is not an efficient process

it will never be an efficient process imagining that we already know the right way to go about things suggests that we have already gotten there we are omniscient we're just like what we're just describing what we already know that's not what science is We are actually trying in science to engage in the act of discovery. It's discovery and exploration, and discovery and exploration don't go neatly, and so, so too.

And, you know, this is maybe a different conversation. We will save this for our next live stream mostly, but it's really easy. And for, you know, for decades, I've been hearing typically conservatives. complain when you start hearing about some of the crazy grants that get funded by nsf and nih and i didn't pull any up now so i'll pull some up for next time but you know some of these things just sound nuts and it's really easy to dismiss how stupid it is

you could possibly want to study. What was the one with the shrimp? Oh, the shrimp on treadmills? Shrimp on treadmills. I feel like maybe we even talked about this last time. Pretty cool video. So I haven't, I don't know, I didn't look, I didn't read the grant. I haven't seen, like I don't know anything about it except that people were getting all pissed off about shrimp on treadmills. What could you possibly...

could you possibly want to know? There are so many reasons you could possibly want to know. And again, maybe we'll specifically save this for next time.

the idea that if you cannot abide the idea of basic research which asks questions with the aim of wanting to know more about the universe without any explicit knowledge of what it is how it is it is going to serve human beings then you're not interested science and you're not interested in human flourishing and you're and whatever you do is not going to help in the long run

If the only thing that you were interested in funding is that which already knows exactly what it has its eye on and how it's going to get there, then you have imagined that we are not creative, we are not productive, we are done. like it's the end of the line for humans if that's the only kind of things that you're going to fund yeah and i would point out at the risk of uh opening a uh a wound not yours but others This was...

Part of what you saw at the University of Austin was that there was an obsession with engineering and a total deafness to the necessity of science. And the whole point is, at the point you say engineering, that means... you're talking about solving problems we understand right you're talking about figuring out how to accomplish tasks that's inherently applied if you're going to abandon the idea engineering so you know stem stem sounds awesome tem

Without the science, it might help people, but you're not going to make amazing innovations in the long term. You're not a university. You have to, a university. has to be committed to the idea of figuring out what is true without having to defend why it is important to know each thing in what way it is going to contribute. Now, it's not to say that there's no right to prioritize based on which things are likely to be the most useful stuff to know.

But in general, we are committed to science because understanding the universe we live in has been massively helpful to human beings, right? In the end, it produces progress. Anybody who thinks it is efficient to cut out that which you cannot defend on the basis of its application is misunderstanding how we got as sophisticated and capable as we are in the first place. And they will do it again and again. It seems inefficient.

Why would you want to know that? Who cares what's going on in a quasar, you know, 100 million light years from here? But the point is actually understanding the universe is productive in the end, and you can't specify how it's going to be, nor should you need to.

we've learned that if there's one thing we've learned it's that yeah that's that's exactly right and so just to bring it back full circle the reason that i am less even-keeled about what's happening at doge than you are in part is i see i see in musk someone who looks too confident too certain too uh utopian and specifically tech utopian in his understanding of the universe someone who i think is imagining that the human body is like a machine that everything is like a machine

that a linear, efficient approach is the right one. And that's not going to end well. It has to be...

It has to be held to its zone of application. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so I mean, I guess part of why, like the specific... recommendation i guess uh to you know just drop all indirect grant rates uh indirect rates on on federal grants to 15 feels like it's outside of the zone of application uh maybe not but it doesn't it doesn't feel like the right move and it feels like it's it's built on a lack of understanding

That, of course, raises the question of, across the other things that I don't know as much about, is there a similar lack of understanding? You will counter with, but the systems are too far gone. And there's no way to do this surgically. And I think that I agree with that. But that doesn't mean... There are no guarantees here. I don't think anyone would say that there are guarantees.

right right um and you know what you said to me the other day was look i thought this should have happened 30 years ago So the fact that this is going to be even more catastrophic, even more destructive, including of good people, including of good programs, including of good initiatives, directorates, etc., is because it waited too long.

Yep. Not because we shouldn't be doing it at all. Right. The catastrophe which is coming is the result of us having put this off. It's not the result of us finally having gotten around to it. And the fact that it is... You know, there comes a point, right? Think of it as a building. You've got a building. It's got termites. There's lots of room.

to remedy the termites. It's not a pretty process. You may have to hack sections off the building and rebuild them. You may have to fumigate it with stuff that you'd really rather not put in a building you're going to live in. But there's stuff to be done, but not forever.

comes a point at which there aren't enough timbers that aren't riddled with termite damage for the building to stay up and a wrecking ball is the right instrument right and that's not the fault of the person who brings the wrecking ball it's the fault of the people

who didn't do the job for the entire period in which it was obvious that it was necessary. You know, there is a question here of the ship of Theseus, the bark of Thebes, which is a story that we know from grad school that my advisor, Arnold Kluge. used to teach about in his intensive, you know.

months focus every year on the philosophy of science and about which i wrote um for county highway last year and republished in natural selections this week on my piece about metamorphosis the the question is

Theseus, having returned home in a ship that had overseen success, then has an annual festival. And because the ship is... aging and it is not in active use every year that they bring it out before the annual festival they realize that a few boards have rotted and they have to replace the boards and after decades of this

every single piece of the original ship has been replaced and so the philosophical the philosophical the philosophical question is is it in fact the same ship this is not uh it doesn't exactly apply to organisms because with metamorphosis because of course there is a continuity even if all of your cells are different even if through metamorphosis a frog egg

hatches into a tadpole and then undergoes a metamorphosis such that it is a wild transformation the genetic instructions in those cells are still the same but It is confusing to children, even adults, not so much once you've heard it once that tadpoles become frogs. It is confusing that tadpoles are frogs. And they are. It's the same species.

It's less confusing to say that about people. Well, children are humans. Children aren't adults. We're not, you know, we aren't all of the developmental stages at once, but we are humans fundamentally. We happen to use the word frog, which is the adult form of 5,000 species of vertebrates. Yet, whatever species it is we're talking about, it's the same thing as the tadpole, even though it looks wildly different. And so with these systems that we have, maybe we've got a ship of Theseus problem.

And they still have the same name. But all the pieces have been traded out. And they, in fact, aren't the same thing anymore. Well, I think we have. And we'd like the thing that used to be called this back.

we need it back i think you've got the right analogy but it's like okay suppose you didn't replace all the rotten boards each time of the festival and eventually you get a pile of dust and you have to rebuild the ship based on your best understanding of what it was is it the same ship and the answer is no well that's not perfect though because there's still there's still so many people depending on that pile of dust right i agree um but

Well, two things occur to me. One, I don't know how in all of the discussions of the ship of Theseus, this never occurred to me before. But the right challenge for that philosophical puzzle is actually true fossils. A true fossil, so for those who are not familiar with this, we have something called a subfossil. Subfossil is something, an ancient bone.

that's been buried but it has not been replaced by minerals that have turned it to stone so it's an actual bone that exists and tells us about what was taking place 20 000 years ago for example but a true fossil is A bone has been buried. Geological processes have removed the biological entity that was the bone.

but they have replaced it with rock in which you can see the shape of the bone because the way the geology has replaced the biological stuff, one molecule at a time, has created a rock that has the... imprint of the bone or the shape of the bone and so the point is is that really a tyrannosaurus and the answer is for what purpose i mean certainly not a tyrannosaurus at an ecological level but is it capable of telling us what a tyrannosaurus

did for a living yeah it can and they do and that's what the the paleobiologist does in studying these things so yeah it's not one at the molecular level right Not at all. It's a rock. So certainly it's not the ecological. Once it dies, the ecology dies with it. Yeah. But... But the complete replacement, yeah, I don't know how. Seems to me that that should have come up in all of those discussions. But the other thing that occurs to me is, I'll just say I will confess.

I myself am an evolutionary theorist. And when I hear the word theorist, I hate it. Because theorist has this sort of beard-stroking connotation. You don't do anything for a living. You just say stuff that sounds high-minded. I hate that vial of work. I've got to tell you. I don't think I've ever seen you stroke your beard. I've done it occasionally. But you do it ironically. Right, ironically. But in any case, the thing is, good theory.

is not beard-stroking theory, right? Good theory has this role that... cannot be removed from the equation of scientific progress. And so here's the counterintuitive thought that your exploration here has crystallized. Theory. seems like the most maddeningly inefficient first thing you should remove from science, right? It does not look productive in and of itself. But long term...

It is the key to making science as efficient as possible. The higher quality your theory, what theory really does is it tells you where to look. It tells you what... might be there that you could find that would be useful and what you don't have to bother looking at because there's nothing over there, right? And most of the things that could be true simply aren't. And good theory saves you.

from having to explore it inch by inch because you don't know where the good stuff is. Theory elegantly tells you, hey, there's a huge patch of good stuff and it's liable to be right there.

So it is the key to efficiency long-term. But short-term thinking, so smart but not wise thinking about efficiency causes you to purge the theorists. And I mean, I swear, in our field... you basically have the pseudo-sophistication, that theory, yeah, we all know that we need theory, but theory is just something that the empiricists kind of do at the end of the paper, right, or in their off hours, you know, once they've, you know...

shut down their computer for the night. They're no good at it. The fact is, it's actually really hard to do theory well. And so what you want are theorists who are really good at it. And yes, you have to tolerate the fact that they are not productive by themselves. but firing them because their grants aren't high-tech and therefore don't bring in... I mean, think about it from the university's perspective. The university is trying to figure out how to do its job.

You've got two people who are going to inhabit an office. One of them needs millions of dollars of equipment to be humming along day in and day out, and the other one needs time to think, pencils, chalk. a library right and the point is a paper bag and so the university thinks it's clever

to hire the person with the expensive apparatus because it brings in, you know, $600,000 on top of the million dollar grant. And it thinks it's clever not to worry too much about having enough theorists around. And the point is short term.

Yep, that'll work. Long term, you're dooming the goddamn system. Yep. Right? That's what you're doing. You're, you know, you're deciding to fire the engineers and you're considering yourself clever because the bridge didn't fall down the day you did it. And the point is eventually it will. It'll fall down, right? That's what you did. You did the thing that will cause the bridge to fall down. And even if you're dead when it happens, it's still your fault. Yes, it is. Well, awesome.

Awesome. I don't know that this is still broadcasting, but we've had a very nice discussion. No, it is, actually. I've got it up here. We've got 1,200 people watching. Oh, hell yeah. Do you know who they are? Let's see. There's Roger. Roger again. Oh, they're all named Roger. I don't know why that is. It's the seals. Yeah. It's the seals. Yeah. All right. I think we're there. I think that was a productive discussion. You and I are both a little bit...

Frazzled. Frazzled by the situation. But it's good. Here we are in Spain. We'll be coming back to you on Wednesday at the usual time, but also from Spain. In the presence of Zach, our first producer, who will help make this. Our first born producer. Both of those things. Yes. Totally. Okay. So I think the watch party was going on in Locals. Definitely join Locals. Check out also today was released your conversation with Joe Ellis. Is that? That is correct. Yep.

Joe Ellis, who is the Blackhawk pilot who was falsely portrayed as having been present on the Blackhawk that hit the jet. coming into Reagan International Airport just after the inauguration. Anyway, she's trans. I will call her she. I am not confused about the fact that she is biologically male, nor is she. But in any case, this is one that's got me in a lot of hot water already.

But I really think you should listen to it because to the extent that you have a position on this, this is going to challenge some of the things that you... you believe and uh you'll probably if you were one of our listeners and you hold the position that either you hold or i hold about trans issues and the danger that they have posed to civilization, this one is going to make you think because Joe holds a lot of the perspectives that you probably hold in spite of...

her having landed somewhere different with respect to how she's navigating her own life. So anyway, give it a listen. I will say, so you have asked me to listen. I don't manage to listen to most of the stuff that you do. There's just too much of it. And I will. uh but we had a we had a good i think productive conversation today about uh what i not having listened to it uh you know feel about about this and the i'm unwilling to use uh female pronouns and

and have become radicalized by the trans activists. And it is important to know. that there are good, honest, capable people out there who have felt a need to do something that I feel never should have been allowed, right? The technological...

The technological solutions to what amounts to a personality disorder, I think, are not appropriate. But... and so just we'll probably talk about this some but just to give a little bit of a hint of sort of part of where i'm landing on this is Part of the reason that people are saying you shouldn't have trans people in the military is that the chemicals, the pharmaceutical solutions are going to render them

potentially less capable than they would be if they weren't on those pharmaceutical interventions. The same can surely be said. of things like SSRIs and benzos and a number of these other insane pharmaceutical solutions.

solutions that so many americans and presumably many in the armed forces are on so i would rather that people in the armed forces on whom we are relying at some level are not on any of these fundamentally human altering drugs but it's not clear to me that cross-sex hormones are worse than many of the other classes of drugs that people are on yeah i agree and i think one of the things that

the discussion i had with joe ellis will challenge people about is that uh essentially what she's arguing for is a pure meritocratic system in which those who are best capable of doing the job are able to do the job irrespective of whether they're trans or not now that's a challenge to the view that i held going into this discussion which is what

that i've said many times that i think if you want a society in which people are free to navigate issues like gender dysphoria in, I'm not talking about pharmaceutical ways, I'm also not a fan of the medicalization of this, but to navigate those things as they see fit. What you need is an extremely masculine military to make the homeland secure for people to live lives as they will navigate them. In this case, I think what you've got is somebody who's actually... A highly capable Blackhawk.

pilot and also mechanic and most blackhawk pilots are not going to be mechanics this is somebody who understands helicopters far deeper than most of the people that we have flying them for the military somebody who's clearly patriotic and so this is a tough one for me I feel like, do I want somebody who understands how a helicopter works and also how to fly one who's also a deeply committed patriot to be the person at the helm?

yeah i do and do i want them not to be able to because they've got gender dysphoria which didn't clear up even though they wanted it to you know that's tough i guess i guess i feel like this person is probably you know, the right person to be piloting the helicopter, even though that challenges my prior. So anyway, have a listen. It will challenge you. I'm pretty sure of it. Excellent. And come back on Wednesday for our next live stream.

In the meantime, consider visiting our sponsors this week, Peak Life. fresh pressed olive oil and crowd health. A reminder that we are supported by you, our audience. We appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing our full episodes and our clips. And I've got just a few more words, but are you going to be ready to send us out of here?

I'll prepare a little. Yeah, before I get right there in the dead air. I think I'm on it. You're pretty ready? I'm on it. I will just say, before Heather closes us out here, go into some public space and listen. See if you don't hear the same thing that we've heard. Which is to say, again, no coughing. Nobody's coughing. Or very little coughing. And it is February. It's February almost everywhere. If you're in the southern hemisphere, it doesn't count. I guess that's true.

but who's in the southern hemisphere all right until we see you next time be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone