Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 250 something. 260. Well, all right. We have traditionally started with corrections. I'm going to correct my assessment that we were somewhere in the... 25010. 25010. All right, done. This is episode 25010. That's how it would be in Roman numerals, I think.
I'm willing to go with that. Yeah. I mean, you know, when not in Rome, I don't know, something. So, all right, there's a lot going on. I'm a little discombobulated. I will say the... response to the backlash against the backlash against the quarter zip has me I mean that that was that caught fire and so I am in a mood to continue with my blazing a trail in terms of fashion so and yet
No quarter zip. No, no, I've moved on. My work there is done. Fashion moving at the speed of science, apparently. At the speed of science. I am now attempting to start another trend. I am wearing only one collar stay. There's no... That shirt has no... There are no collar stays, are there? No, no collar stays. See? But I only have one. I lost the other one from this pair. And so... Is there one on that side? On this side, there's none. Yeah.
so maybe maybe it's maybe i just don't know what a color she is because i see no nothing there it's a metal stiffener but i'm only wearing one of them so you know that's it's it's i'm hoping it catches on are you Yes. Today we are going to talk about... some updates on the fires in LA about which we spoke last week, speak a bit about the mRNA shots and how they move around the body, and of course, everyone's favorite topic, yours and mine, dung beetles in life and in art.
Yeah, so we've got this beautiful art background that we introduced a couple weeks ago, painted by a local artist. Teresa Smith, whose information will be in the show notes. And we've got a new piece of art sitting on our desk here, which we'll talk about at the end of the show. Yeah, I will say, actually, just those of you who are tuning in, noticing the new set, everything here is...
Locally done by some craftsmen other than, you know, the tech and frankly, the chairs, which were modified by a local artist, me. Bye. Yes. Okay. No Q&A today, but we haven't last week. Join us on Locals Now for the watch party and also to pick up on any past Q&As or any other content that we've posted only there that you might want to.
to uh to see uh without further ado since we've got a lot to talk about today let's uh get right into our sponsors as always three right at the top of the hour uh carefully chosen and vetted by us you won't hear us reading ads for any services or products that we don't actually and truly vouch for here in Dark Horse. So our first sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes MitoPure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone, your Lethen A.
Found primarily in pomegranates, Irrelithin A has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies, which suggests that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells, but like everything living, they can decay or get damaged.
the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues. This is in part because mitophagy, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get. Everything seems to become less efficient the older we get now. I resent that. That was my addition. Oh, I still even more. I was in fact asking you and your answer is I resent that.
The age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, which results in an overall decline in cell function. Mitopura from timeline works by triggering mitophagy. To quote one recent research article, Singh et al., which was published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2022, quote, targeted mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline.
We present results from a randomized, placebo-controlled trial in middle-aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound Urileethin A, a known mitophagy activator, at two doses for four months. The data show significant improvements in muscle strength.
at about 12% with intake of urolithin A. We observe also clinically meaningful improvements with urolithin A on aerobic endurance and physical performance, but do not notice a significant improvement on peak power output. So that's three of their four measures in which they found improvement with daily use over the course of four months of Mitropure from Timeline.
timeline. Take two soft gels of Mitropure a day for two months and you can see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. Mitropure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up, and regenerate new, healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, Mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of Mitopure. Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to get 10%.
off your order. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash darkhorse. Did you know, have I mentioned I think I've mentioned to you, I'm not sure if I've mentioned it to our audience, that in Jamaica, where I did my first research gig in biology, there are lots of things where they use words differently than we do. Avocado is called a pear, for example. And pomegranate is called pronganut. Pronganut. Pronganut. Yes. Yes. Anyway, but if you're looking for your Lethene, pronganut is a place to look.
Other words that I remember you telling me about that are apparently in English but used rather differently in Jamaica are words for, is it moth and bat? Yes. Tell us. uh moth now there's a reason for this actually but moth is bat and bat is rat bat Moth is bat because there is a giant black moth that looks rather bat-like when it flies by you. Is this the hawk moth? Or is it not a sphinged? No, it's not a sphinged.
But it has that weird flappy... It's been so long, I hope I'm not blowing it on that front. I don't think it's a sphinged. It's a giant black moth. And obviously rat bat, you know, leaves no doubt. What clade we are actually talking about. Indeed. Yep, flying mammals. Flying mammals. Though not rodents. Right. Our second sponsor this week is Caraway.
which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware, and they've got a brand new line of enameled cast iron as well. The United States is about to usher in a new era of health. On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about the risks of agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, dyes in our food, seed oils, and so much more. One thing we haven't talked much about are the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
In our house, we threw out all the Teflon decades ago. Teflon is toxic. And either by flaking off into your food or by releasing its toxins when it gets too hot, people who use Teflon-coated cookware and bakeware are ingesting or inhaling Teflon.
Apparently, over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon, and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from nonstick cookware in their blood. Cooking with Teflon, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins.
enter caraway caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware they've got their ceramic coated aluminum cookware which we've talked about before it has a slick finish like that of teflon based non-stick pots and pans but without the teflon
The caraway ceramic coated aluminum cookware is so beautiful and functional and light, it's easy to pick up one of their skillets and slide an omelet right out onto your plate or remove muffins from their muffin twins. Twins? The muffin twins. I mean... There are worse acts, but there are definitely better acts. I think so too. The Muffin Twins.
Carraway also has a stainless steel line, which I love. Now they've got enamel cast iron too, which is fantastic. All of Carraway's products are free from Forever Chemicals, and their new enamel cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors. These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant. They'll last generation.
We use enamel cast iron pots to braise large cuts of meat, cook stews and soups, even roast chicken sometimes, because one of the great advantages... i can't read today one of the great advantages of enameled cast iron is its uniform heat retention easy to use and beautiful too you can't go wrong
Carraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It will save you $150 versus buying the items individually. Plus, if you visit carrawayhome.com slash darkhorse, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carrawayhome.com slash darkhorse or use code darkhorse at checkout. Carraway, non-toxic cookware made modern. Oh, yeah. Now... With endorsements from the Muffin Twins. The Muffin Twins. Yeah.
Our final sponsor this week, Heather, is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. And as you know, because you're one of us, we love these guys and their olive oils. Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious. No, really. There are all sorts of health benefits that we could mention from being heart healthy, like actually heart healthy, not the damn slogan being used by the seed oil people, to helping prevent Alzheimer's.
to being high in antioxidants. But if you've been living on this planet, you know these things. Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, and it's used... What did I say? You said cornerstone. I heard a cornerstone.
I was going to ask you what a cornstone was. A cornstone is a stone used for grinding corn. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, all right. I'm sure there must be like a Pueblo word for that or something. Undoubtedly, there is. A cornstone. I don't know it. Sorry. Yes. I'm done. cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, which are famously healthy. And it's used in everything.
If you've never had excellent fresh pressed olive oil, however, you may wonder what all the fuss is about, especially if you've had garden variety, so-called olive oil from a supermarket, which may not be olive oil at all. Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Vanquisher. He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door.
TJ's farm fresh oils are incredible. We've received six varietals now with noticeably different flavors, and we have used them in all the usual ways, a light dressing on a caprese salad, marinade for a grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting.
and we've never been disappointed. We've made olive oil cake. Well, Heather has made olive oil cake with these fantastic oils and rubbed steaks with them and added a nice dose of salt for several hours before grilling the meat.
that was not said in english but you at home can correct it as you like you will not believe how good this olive oil is and how many uses there are for it so olive oil is a succulent delicious food that like pretty much all fats is best when it's fresh But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, and flavorless, even rancid.
the solution is to have fresh pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you from each new harvest when the oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak and they've now got amazing vinegars too these are just sorry i'm now reading in a live fire exercise these are just as surprising fresh and vibrant as they're olive oils with a wide range of flavors and histories
we add a splash of fresh vinegar to bone broth and to roasted vegetables and so much more as an introduction to t j robinson's fresh pressed olive oil club he is willing to send you a full-size thirty nine dollar bottle of one of his finest artisanal olive oils fresh from the new harvest, for just $1 to help him cover shipping. Shipping. There's no commitment to buy anything, now or ever. Get your free $39 bottle for $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes.
getfreshdarkhorse.com. That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping. That is a smoking deal, I have to say. Yeah, and... Yeah, the olive oils are fantastic. The vinegars are amazing. We love these guys. Yes, really, really do. Look forward to every new introduction they make. And I think we have just...
There is nothing we have done with them that hasn't been enhanced noticeably. Exactly. Okay, so let's start by talking again about the fires that continue to rage in L.A. First, a correction. I had said that LA had had a lot of rain recently, and so these fires were particularly unexpected. And that does not turn out to be true. Central and Northern California have gotten hit with a lot of rain. But SoCal, Southern California has...
has been particularly dry. Everything else we talked about, the particular winds, the strength of the winds, the fact of them being Santa Ana winds bringing dry air out of the east to northeast as opposed to the usual prevailing winds off the ocean. and the eucalyptus that's introduced from Australia and burns hot and oily, and it's all over LA. All that is true, but we got that one piece wrong.
The Palisades Fire, which is the largest by far, the least contained still, which at the point that we were live streaming last week, it was unclear. It was just in the middle of... middle of its worst in some ways, or maybe that's just my personal take. That day, it did burn down the neighborhood in which I grew up and really everything, everything that I knew as a young child. So 40,000 acres have burned.
So far in LA total in LA County total so far this year across all the fires Let me just show you guys This is from, if you can show my screen here, CAL FIRE, the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, updates their data fairly recently. Over 40,000 acres burned total. And then here, let me make this a look.
bit bigger um the palisades fire has burned over 20 almost 24 000 acres and is still only 19 contained that said the the winds are um They slowed a little bit, they got going again, and they seem to be... looking to slow. So hopefully the containment there will happen soon. The other really large fire at 14,000 acres so far is the Eaton Fire out in sort of the shadow of the Angeles National Forest near Pasadena, famously as burned Altadena.
is almost 50% contained now, and then two much smaller fires have done less damage, and actually the auto fire is in Ventura County, not LA County. So... If I can get my screen back just for a minute here, just to give a little bit of context in terms of those numbers, because I think... People who have owned homes on land, even tiny little postage stamps of land, have some sense of what an acre feels like. But when you're talking about that many acres, it can be really hard to know.
So an acre is apparently, there's 640 of them in a square mile, but that's hard to visualize too. It's really hard to know what that is. You can know how long it feels to walk a mile, but what is the experience of squaring that? So, um... The, uh... Oh, I've taken off all of my data here. Ah, for scale, Manhattan, the island of Manhattan, is about the size of the Eaton Fire. That's the smaller of the two very large fires that is still burning in L.A.
The Palisades Fire has already burned more than half again as much land as is in all of Manhattan. So Manhattan and a half. Manhattan and a half. And to give some other... some other real comparisons which people may or may not be at all familiar with, the Palisades Fire has so far burned an area as large as Hoboken, New Jersey.
One, it's also burned an area. And so all of these three cities are about the same size. They're all about 23,000 acres. Hoboken, New Jersey, Alexandria, Virginia, Cambridge, Mass. which actually surprised me because Cambridge seems like it should be smaller than that. But that's what... that's that's what grok told me so that's why that's my source on that i it's the first time i relied on that um as an answer and not gone and and dug up the the confirm yeah the confirming evidence um but
All of which is to say that LA County is vast, absolutely gigantic and vast. And so I've seen some so-called analyses on social media saying, look, you know. not much of LA is burning. This isn't really that big a deal. It's a very big deal. frankly in part because of the neighborhoods that have been taken out and in part because of the sheer surface area of land including the residences but also just the the wildlands areas that have been taken out la is unlikely to be the same maybe ever again
If so, if it can rebuild in these areas, it's going to take a long time. Yeah, it's certainly not going to be the same. It's going to be rebuilt differently. And just even thinking about... didn't look today but the number of structures burned is above 5 000 is that right yeah uh cal fire as of uh
As of this morning, reports 12,300-plus structures destroyed, and they say damage assessments are underway for Palisades and Eaton fires. I think it's going to be much more than that. So it's going to be much more than that. If you just think about what that means from the point of view of... of the infrastructure to rebuild. There aren't enough architects in LA to do this because if there were, most of them would be without work most of the time. Right.
is there going to be a huge influx of architects builders probably there's also going to be presumably people who do this at scale because one of the ways to get these homes rebuilt is to not build them one off but given what these homes in many cases were that's going to be an interesting an interesting trick there is also and i will say i
We are going to return several times in this podcast to the idea of the Cartesian crisis, where we are all left with the inability to know what to believe because the institutions that would ordinarily help us sort that out.
journalistic scientific etc are all missing in action yes so what to make of conspiratorial questions here well there does seem to be certain documentation of arson um what what is that about is that you know lone thrill seekers or something else who knows but um nonetheless there is a lot of talk about the fact that there are plans on the table
for LA that involve revamping of perhaps this section of LA, rather as there were with Maui. So whatever that may mean, the idea, let's say it's just opportunistic.
you have a huge chunk of la a very important chunk of la that has now burned will the governance structure which has taken on an authoritarian bent and decided to aggressively pursue certain values above other values will it decide to take this moment and create some sort of i forget what the term is that was used for these pre-planned, hyper-responsible.
uh cities 15 minute cities and it's not really 15 minutes there's another term that was actually used by planners where they had decided to do this in maui in lahaina oh okay um but anyway you know is that However it got there, is that plan now going to radically change what is put in place of this destroyed section of L.A.? Who's to say?
I think it's very clear, as you pointed out last week, this part of L.A. has already been transformed in your lifetime. You've watched it transform. Yes. It is now going to be radically transformed again.
it will not be what it was it will be something else it would be wonderful if it were something as good or better um but will that part of la return no we're yeah we won't see it again in fact um so i wrote for my for natural selections this week for my substack some of some of my memories of my childhood in the alphabet streets where i grew up in the alphabet streets of pacific palisades which are which are gone uh and i was just a couple blocks from the village what we called village then
uh which uh you know i had mort's deli i had the baskin robbins where i had my first retail job a couple blocks down was the video store where i was you know an assistant manager is my second real retail job um in high school um And that had been transformed actually in 2018.
there had been a lot of turnover since mort's had long since gone i think they're doing flavors had long since gone but had been transformed by rick i think is his first name caruso um who is a famous developer in la he had actually run against and Bass for mayor and lost. And his transformation of the village in the Palisades into the Palisades Village, capital P, capital V, in 2018 drew a lot of ire from, at least from former...
residents because I don't really know any current residents. But a lot of people whom I know who are familiar with the area either grew up there or grew up near there, like in the Riviera of the Palisades, which didn't burn but came close. were you know a bit disgusted uh with with with him coming in with a frankly you know beautiful but pretty antiseptic and exceedingly high-end set of stores and winding paths.
and such that I had also walked you and our boys through last June. But that is the only thing that remains standing. in an area because Caruso, the developer, was able to bring in private firefighters and tanker trucks and save it. And so there's a map that I share in my substack this week.
that shows palisades village again capital p capital v uh left standing and all of all of the structures of the alphabet streets and everything else in remaining in the palisades retail area of restaurants and stores pretty much gone So that obviously raises questions about...
about so many things about you know how how we all should be thinking about protecting what we care about and what the collective should be responsible for yeah and i think it is worth pointing out some of the history some of this goes back into antiquity but at the of the country, the idea of firefighting already existed, but it was a service that you purchased.
and if you go through historic parts of philadelphia for example i think this is true for the whole eastern seaboard you will still see badges on historical buildings that told you which private fire department was in charge of putting out a fire should it break out in this structure so the idea of you pay for this as a service is the original idea and the idea that hey we're not going to do that active actually we're going to collectively fund firefighting capability
which makes a lot of sense for the same reason that risk pools in medical insurance make sense. It makes a lot of sense for us to agree. Hey, we're going to buy together enough capacity to fight all foreseeable fires and You know, that way that capacity will be well leveraged. So what you're watching is the decay of a system back into something that we already knew and got over.
Which is, hey, maybe everybody should be responsible for protecting their own structures. Let the market solve this. That is an inferior solution, but it's certainly better than no solution. And as much as Caruso, there are moral questions to be. raised here it's hard to fault somebody for having protected what they built whether you like it or not it's hard to fault somebody for uh you know seeing a fire and getting water thrown on their structures
So anyway, I hope that we learn the many lessons of this fire. There are some very painful ones. need to be learned if we are not to watch this repeat itself again and again. So in response to a tweet thread that I put out after I posted my substack, which I'm going to read just a little bit from here today. writing about the alphabet when I wrote, and this is from my piece, The Alphabet Streets Are Gone.
You can show my screen here if you like. The alphabet streets are gone, as is the elementary school and the library. The car wash and both supermarkets burned down. The fire jumped PCH and destroyed houses and restaurants right down to the sea. So many cherished historic institutions gone. L.A. will never be there. the same, to which Rick Ramirez responded, I worked at Fire Station 69, which was our local fire station, the Palisades, at Cary and Sunset. I remember it well.
I worked at Fire Station 69, Rick Ramirez writes, at Cary and Sunset from 07 to 11. Probably my favorite assignment in 35 years with the LA Fire Department. The doors were always open and people would stop by with food or just to say hi. I told my friends working in other...
parts of the city that I now work for Mayberry Fire Department. It's all bad, but looking at what happened in the Alphabet Streets really hit me. I know the guys from 69s and those from every other part of the city did their best. I'm 10 years retired, but I still feel bad, like we let our neighbors down. And of course, the firemen did not let your neighbors down. That's not where the errors were by the firemen at all. And I appreciated this.
recollection very much um because it reminds me it reminds me of the neighborhood i grew up in and he was there in 07 through 11 as opposed to the 70s 80s early 90s when i still had an association with the place so Let me read a little bit from this. You can show my screen here. Remembering the Palisades, which I posted yesterday on my substack, just a piece from the middle. I encourage you to go read the whole thing. It's hardly a comprehensive memory of the place. But a little bit.
From kindergarten to third grade, I walked the several blocks to my elementary school, crossing Sunset and ending up on Via de la Paz. It had been remodeled since I attended and revisioned into a charter school, but in the summer of 2024, I went back, walking through old neighborhoods and taking pictures.
this is now all gone also on via de la paz was the hobby shop that would later become a radio shack i think but when it was still independent it provided hours of intrigue i would look through the tiny motors propellers and parachutes and imagine what i could make with them i spent my money on wire electrical sockets and plugs and balsa wood which all came together along with beautiful papers into boxes and lamps that i built
I still have two of the lamps and many of the boxes, their homes built from the goods and a hobby shop long gone, and a neighborhood now burnt to the ground. The father of one of my friends flipped houses for a living. Maybe they didn't call it that then.
maybe it wasn't exactly flipping i only know because every two years or so her family would move the latest project done and sold on to a new property i don't really know what the rest of my friend's parents did they were professionals up and coming there was already considerable wealth in the palisades when i grew up there but it wasn't uniformly wealthy lots of people like my parents had come from places far to the east the california dream beckoning
Like so much in Los Angeles, and in California more broadly, this was a place to aspire. From one window in my parents' bedroom, if I climbed up onto the back of a loveseat, I could just barely see the ocean. it formed a different kind of thin blue line a trick of perception as if the vast pacific ocean were just a border between land and sky sometimes in elementary school i walked all the way down to mescal to the ocean itself
When I was in middle school, my mother and I got up early every morning for a few months and ran on a path on the beach, training for a 10K. We stopped after a homeless man was found dead there. a few years later a friend and i wandered cluelessly on to the nude beach marveling for a few moments then becoming embarrassed and concerned before realizing that it was not just a nude beach but a gay beach as well and we were quite safe from all the men whom we were now among
And it goes on. So it's very hard to imagine it all being gone. And it's, you know, I kind of wish I was down there so I could see it.
see it now before before whatever's going to happen begins to happen because even as much as we've talked about the rebuilding being really hard to imagine and i talk in this piece about um not knowing where everyone is like where have they all temporarily gone to uh but also what will the cleanup look like and you know how how could cleanup possibly be done especially given the what we've seen of the leadership in la
uh that helped contribute to this and the leadership in california um as is demonstrably incompetent right so uh saying that i wanted to finish up this section on talking about the LA Fires, showing a two-minute clip from a podcast with Patrick Sunxiung, whose name is... Can we... I have a couple other things I want to say about FIRE if you want.
I mean, he's talking about the fire, but if you want to do this before the video, sure. Doesn't have to be. You just said you wanted to finish up on this. The big last topic on the fires is what I'm getting into next. Okay, so then let me... say a few things first one i think you're um what you said last week about feeling strangely homeless even though this is not your home uh really resonated not just for me but a number of other people and i can model
what it would be like if I was in the same situation the home I grew up in, which also doesn't look anything like it did when I grew up in it, was gone and the whole neighborhood was gone, my elementary school, etc. And I feel it too. And I did some thinking about why that would be in effect. If you don't have a connection to this place, why does it feel like some part of you is gone at the point?
that it vanishes and it occurred to me how unusual it is for someone if you think back into antiquity lots of people leave a place and they live out their lives somewhere else but it is very rare and in fact it is an artifact of the way we now construct places that they can be gone If you were a hunter-gatherer somewhere, you might move on to a different valley or something. But the valley you were in, even if it did burn, is going to come back rather a lot like it had been.
And so the idea of your ancestral home not existing anymore is abnormal and new. Not entirely new, but it may be part of this loss of place. may be so difficult for us that it's part of why we also find the changing courses of rivers so difficult.
to to abide part of it is that we want to build on waterfront and we don't want the river to decide that it's no longer waterfront or it's now underwater and rivers will do that and so we are we are fighting nature um but also you know river channels do change right and um And so a place that looked one way could look very, very different, usually fairly suddenly if it was within a lifetime. Otherwise, these changes are pretty incremental. But I do think they affect us.
They affect us a lot. And, you know, I've seen some thoughts with regard to the fire around... You know, the obvious and true thing, that it is the people and the animals, it is the social connections that are the most important. a sense of place is a is a very real thing and it is valuable and frankly i know some people who don't seem to have a sense of place and who you know even people who've lived in la so i don't yeah i live such and such oh where oh i don't i don't know
I find this impossible to understand. It's like an alien life form when I run into that kind of mind. And I know a number of, I'm friends with a number of people who really don't have that kind of map in their head, I guess, of... where they've been and it feels just because we can't point to it as a physical tie anymore doesn't mean that you know time has passed but you can absent the passage of time you can go back and say this is where i was when And this is what happened here.
And we know that we can go back to a place to remember what we were doing the last time we were there or to trigger memories. So not just do smells trigger memories, but being in a particular place triggers memories. And it has... very real meaning for people. Yes. And I would also point out that narratively there are a number of stories. I bet we could name a hundred if we were careful about it, but, um, you know, iconic narratives, Superman.
comes from a place that is no longer the doctor and doctor who comes from a place that is no longer and this has a kind of you know it's obviously a melancholy fact in the origin stories of these uh these mythical people but the idea that somehow obliteration of where you're from is both empowering and liberating because you're you're effectively untethered And so I don't know what all the full implications of it are, but I do think there's an awful lot of it that is very unusual.
for it to happen the house you can have come from can be replaced by a different house but in general the you know the wiping the slate clean of the place you grew up just that's that's pretty pretty novel and important
Yeah. And, you know, as we talked about a little bit last week, when I walked you and Zach and Toby through the neighborhoods, both the actual street that I grew up on, on Embry, and around the village, and the park, and past the school, and all that, and into the library, you know, I said to you,
You know, the village doesn't look anything like it used to. I don't know that any of the, and they weren't original then, but I don't know that any of the stores that I remember are there, with the possible exception of Norris Hardware, were there as of last summer.
but the park still had you know the park had been updated as i as i wrote about then and posted this week um but there was but the the lay of the land was still the same And we didn't, but we still could have walked down to Mescal to Will Rogers Beach and, you know, put our toes in the sand and our feet in the surf. As much as presumably that coastline has changed in 40 years, it hasn't changed that much. Not much. Not much. Not much. Right?
All right, so I had a couple other things I wanted to say. One, I think it's interesting. We have talked many times on this podcast about many different issues, and of late we have... pointed the lens of the difference between a complex system and a complicated system and the danger when people who are expert in some complicated system think they're expert in a complex system.
And of course, there's a reason for this, which is that if you don't know a system, like most of us don't know exactly how our computer works, it feels like a complex system, but it isn't. which is to say it's totally predictable. So when people who are expert in a complicated system take that expertise with hubris into a complex system, the result is always the same, right?
nature bats last it teaches you that you didn't understand a quarter of what you thought you understood that you can't predict the outcomes of things and so i wanted to just point out that it's amazing and at the same time not surprising at all that in this story
you would land right there. So you've got... a complex system a truly complex system the natural environment in which all of this is taking place and then you place a increasingly technological civilization in its midst and you bring power in and you let the market solve the problem of how to bring power in and basically you end up with power lines because it's an efficient way to do it it makes it easy for them to be repaired blah blah blah blah blah and of course the rare santa anna winds
cause those power lines to have to be constructed in a very special way in order to not spark. So power lines play a big role, and it's not surprising to anybody who's been paying attention to the power line issue that they are part of the problem. There's forest management. Everybody thinks they know, and mind you, it's bugging me that people keep talking about forests around LA because it's really not forest.
mostly but there's oak chaparral woodlands but it's it's it's scrubby even though there are trees there are native trees um there were native trees but i wouldn't i wouldn't call it a forest almost anywhere yeah um But the point is... Angeles National Forest, actually, east of LA. Not where the Palisades Fire was. Right, but where the Eaton Fire was down a slope of. But the idea that everybody thinks they know what you're supposed to do and that...
All of these habitats suffer from a now understood to be overly simplistic notion that fire should be stamped out because fire is bad. And the answer is no, fire is bad. part of a recurrent pattern and letting the fuel build up when you stamp out the fires. Oh, it makes fires worse when they do happen, which of course they will. So classic error, stepping into a complex system. And then I hear in the aftermath of this fire, a lot of Monday morning...
quarterbacking where people are pointing to hey why aren't the power lines buried indeed great question and we should be removing the dead trees and frankly what they mean is other dead plants from these habitats now not only is that a gargantuan task but you're talking about
compounding the initial error of allowing that fuel to build up with the next case of hubris born of the idea that you understand this complicated system and so the point is really the only way to get to a system that doesn't show this is to learn the lesson of trying to interfere as little as possible in the systems that you don't understand, didn't build and don't control.
Right. So I'm not saying that you can have a city sitting next to this wild habitat and not do any fire suppression. But I am saying the aim. to modify it intentionally as little as possible because in general that system functions on some basis that you don't know and may never understand right is key and so i just want people to track the difference between these two proposals bury the power lines is that interfering in a complex system with too little information no
We built the structure with the power lines in it. That's a complicated system. Can you say bury the power lines and have some sense of what that will do? Of course you can. That's not hard, and frankly, it's been done in many places, including where we live. Power lines are underground in a lot of it.
was done in berkeley very intentionally so that's a proper intervention in which you have a reasonable chance of understanding what the implications are you know we should be clearing the dead plants from the habitat around la I'm not arguing that you should never do that.
Certainly you should clear them around structures, but the idea that you're going to intervene that way, it could conceivably even make the problem worse because what you're doing is you're biasing in favor of creatures that are not dominant there now by removing the... uh plants that contain the nutrients in this system well that's exactly it you're going you're going to um make the ecosystem nutrient poor because the
The biomass of the dead plants returns to the soil under normal conditions. And so you will have probably a species composition change ecologically. But certainly an impoverishment of the quality of the soil. soil uh which will make the entire ecosystem until and unless it transforms itself into an entirely different thing in a healthier ecosystem which will in turn make it more susceptible to fire and that's just like off the top of my head what would happen if you just got rid of all the dead
You can't just get rid of the dead stuff and assume that you still have an ecosystem there. You don't. And can you imagine the Monday morning quarterbacking after the increased mudslides? Because what you've done is reduce the amount of stabilization by plants because you're removing...
the dead stuff because you're afraid it's going to burn it's like you know this it's an endless problem yes i would also just point out that the leadership issue this is something that needs to be understood a to the extent that what you have in la and it really does look like a pattern is a belief that what we must do is change the leadership and the composition of all of the structures that protect us so that they are increasingly diverse and equitable and this that and the other
It should not be surprising that we find embarrassing failures here where hydrants don't have water, even though, yeah, this was an unusual fire. But the idea that, you know, various... uh factors would eventually come together and create a fire that was a bigger hazard and therefore we needed to be prepared for that which would involve the institutional knowledge of the best possible people who have been in this line of work
The aquifer in or nearest to the Palisades was empty? Empty. Empty. Empty. Offline for why? I don't know. Yeah. Who knows? So anyway, this is another case. The fact is the proper leadership. of an of a structure like fire suppression which involves the power company it involves the fire department it involves multiple municipalities that is something that you can't just decide hey you know diversity is our strength go and i've forgotten maybe you
read it to me but somebody involved here was talking about the most important thing when a person needs to be rescued is that they're rescued by somebody that reminds them of themselves yeah that looks like them it was it was one of the um i don't have access to it here but it was One of the women who's currently a firefighter, or maybe she's moved up the ranks and is not in active duty now, but still in L.A. Fire Department, who, if I remember correctly, is a woman of color.
I was saying, yeah, the most important thing, you know, what you want when the firemen arrive at your door to save you is to have someone look like you. And when the interviewer asks her, well, but are you going to be able to... to carry a man out, she says something truly jaw-dropping, to use that phrase again, to the effect of, well, a man probably shouldn't have gotten himself in that situation in the first place.
um a there's a lot of people who know that they do not want their firefighters looking like them because most people do not have the capacity to actively fight fires and if the firefighters are actually saying in advance that they feel like half the population probably got themselves into this mess
and therefore maybe don't warrant saving anyway, they have no business in public service. Yeah. No business. None. And the fact that these kinds of statements pass as normal. I mean, that interview, I think we played a little bit of it last time. with the uh the fire chief um talking about you know how important it was that uh her presence at the top of the fire department was gonna
be a beacon to lesbians so that they would know that this was a career they could follow. It's not that I don't get what she's talking about, but the idea that that news report was broadcast and it didn't cause everybody in LA to say, well, wait a minute, what price are we paying? for that benefit? And is it going to end up being flaming homes, right? So there are a lot of lessons here. It's possible to impose lessons on a story like this.
that don't belong there just because it's sort of they get shoehorned in but wow there are a lot of lessons and tracking this complex versus complicated issue once again is going to be a key lens for understanding the important ones so the question of leadership is exactly uh where we're going here um so it's a good segue um this i'm going to show two minutes of this podcast with patrick sun xiong who is among other
considerable accomplishments and roles, as I learned when I was looking into him a little bit. He's the owner and executive chairman of the Los Angeles Times since 2018. So if you want to show that two-ish minutes now, that would be great. I sort of, at least from out here on the East Coast, have seen more people in the LA community that-
probably were very supportive of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass in the past, openly be critical of both of the two. Where is that line? Where is that line right now in the middle of a crisis and how much are they holding them accountable? Well, first of all, we'll accept some blame, right? So at the LA Times, we endorse Karen Bass. I think right now in front, that's a mistake. And we admit that.
i i thought it was very early important early on for me to come out and i think we were one of the few to say competence matters and got like maybe 20 23 million views to show how that was really due to the heart of most people, whether you're right or left. And it's an interesting thing is that maybe we should think about how we elect people on the basis of did they actually run a job? Did they actually make a payroll?
Do they understand what it is? And rather than having professional politicians whose only job is ready to run for office, there's nothing, I'm not going to be disparaging, but I think we are at the stage now of the nation. and the world and um there's many things we'll talk about even in healthcare that you really need people to understand well how it affects a man in the street you know how it affects the the working type of a person
I think President Trump in this election has understood that, and he's become truly a Republican Party, as you said. He's become the Democratic Party in terms of addressing the problems of the man in the street. So competence absolutely matters. And I'm glad that that's been taken up as almost a meme now that competence matters.
Go on. Well, I want to hear what your reaction to that is. Well, I've already seen it several times. Yeah. So I'm showing it because I find it remarkable. It is possible. that it is like Zuckerberg, having made considerable errors in the past, now trying to quickly apologize. But I don't get that read off of... I've forgotten his last name again.
Sun Xiong, he actually seems to be changing his mind. And, you know, as the leader of the Los Angeles Times, that's an incredible person to be doing so. about whether sort of blanket endorsement of Democrats, and I don't know that that was exactly the position, but I think it was de facto the position, whether Blankman...
blanket endorsement of Democrats has in fact been good for the people of Los Angeles. And he, at least in the immediate... wake of the ongoing fires is saying we were an error this this was wrong karen bass mayor of la gavin newsom governor of california he doesn't speak specifically to newsom um were not the right choices
I hear that, and frankly, there's something about the way he presents it which feels unguarded, and I greatly appreciate that. There is also a part of me where my blood pressure goes through the roof when i see an acknowledgment like that because the problem is the la times has been terrible across the board on the issues of wokeness and its implication for civilization this was not impossible to predict in fact we have been
predicting it since 2017 and before, not publicly because we weren't public figures before 2017. But the idea that if you prioritize something other than competence, that competence will fall. and the bridges will not come down right away is something that we have said again and again and again. And what happens when something makes the Cassandras of the world makes it obvious that they had been correct. What happens is those who steadfastly refuse to hear it, those people find a middle ground.
that allows them not to acknowledge the Cassandras and to be viewed as in keeping with the lesson that we just learned. And the point is, if you want this to happen less often, The key is to take the people who saw it coming and reverse the damage that you did to them by saying they didn't know what they were talking about.
right you have to take the people who were prescient and some of them may have just gotten lucky if it happens to you once you just got lucky but the people who are prescient have to have their credibility rise and the people who got it wrong have to have their credibility fall in order for us to get smarter over time. And the problem is there is an undercurrent of power in which the powerful decide that they're going to remain in power.
And so they have to shut down the people who got it more right than they did. Right. So what they do is they adopt this middle ground and it is strategic. And again, I don't hear that in this man's voice.
but that is definitely the posture that he has taken given the role that the la times has played over the whole course of the woke revolution so you're part way there brother you've got to embrace the reality that some of us did see this coming and were very specific about why it was happening and what the implications would be and you've now had a big chunk of la burned down because you weren't listening
That's all true. And I don't know more than what I can see on Wikipedia, but he is perhaps the richest man in Los Angeles. He's a medical doctor who made his initial money as the inventor of a pharma drug. uh that's used to treat lung breast and pancreatic cancer and the founder of a network of healthcare biotech and artificial intelligence startups so he's no stranger to power and
and narrative manipulation, presumably. Yeah. Well, there you go. And I'd be very curious how he did across the other domains in which he is apparently expert. He's also a minority owner of the LA Lakers. Of the LA Lakers. Well, go Lakers. I don't know how the Lakers are doing. I don't know how the Lakers are doing either. But I know they're still playing basketball. Some of them.
True, but then others have been. There's an equilibrium number of Lakers, I'm imagining. Yeah, I think so. Yes, lake levels are held constant by an equilibrium. The inflow of Lakers and the outflow of Lakers should be equal over time. Yes. Yes. A important, if useless lesson. The word not important and also useless. Both of the above. Yes. That brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department. Yes, indeed.
so um i guess i was i wanted to show that video as an indication uh that the tide of public sentiment in LA and California may be changing. which may change voting patterns. And presumably those voting patterns, if they change, will be done also without acknowledgement to the individual people who's, you know, who harmed by...
by whatever means, their family and friends with their certain beliefs that turned out to be wrong. And that is, that is appalling. And that is, you know, exactly the point that you are... are speaking to. And my focus in showing it was, but also there may be change coming. Yeah. I mean, I think there's an important lesson how change should go.
And the real point is it's not the fact that you are grudging about acknowledging that others had it right and you demonized them is not aesthetic. This is a question of how quickly you would like us. to adapt and prevent the next disaster so those who are grudging whether they are voters whether they are owners of important periodicals those who got it wrong should acknowledge those who got it right
because that's how this happens less often. So, I mean, I think part of, you reminded me as you were just talking, part of the error I think that people make is that they, it's impossible. it's almost impossible for people to understand that they are actually part of history. That they're living, that their lives, as soon as anything passes, that is now history.
History is described various ways, often badly, often incorrectly, but that there are things that, that kinds of things that happen over and over again, even though no actual event from history can repeat itself exactly because history is unitary. And I think part of the error that perhaps Patrick Sun-Chiong is making and many others, if there is honesty in the error, is, well, this whole thing is one-off.
Right. Nothing like this has happened before, so I can't add this to a battery of evidence. And because it's one-off. as opposed to one of many of similar types of things, I also have no reason to expect that it could happen again. And so the only reason this matters is to fix this current problem. So let's get on it. Let's get on it, guys. Come on, let's focus.
The point that you're making and the point that we've made on a lot of issues with regard to wokeness, with regard to COVID, with regard to so many of these issues is in some ways they are all of a type.
and so how is it that you must structure your behavior and your actions so that you reduce the probability that you yourself and therefore the system itself will repeat the same mistakes all right this is good because history does not repeat itself as people now frequently remark but it rhymes great so you have events They look like past events, but not exactly like events. And the question is, what does the mind do with that setup?
It's going to happen a thousand times in your life where you're going to have an event that is not exactly like what has gone before, but is not totally unlike it either. Well, what do you do? are going to focus on that which makes this different than the past and the reason that they do that is because it relieves them of the obligation to change their model
If you don't want to change your model, if you want to basically keep going as undisturbed as you can be, given that the event has happened, you focus on the things that make it different, which mean that there's no lesson to learn because it's all one-off. If you are trying to get better over time, and civilization must do this, then you have to focus on the other part. Yes, there are going to be elements that are unique.
But there are going to be so many elements that are similar. And then, therefore, the lesson, the hard work of figuring out what the actual lesson of what happened is, is where the wealth is created. We need to focus on that. And this is going to come up in the next thing we discuss too, but the reflex of so many people. to lean towards the reasons that this does not mean that those who predicted it were right that reflex is anti-progress and it is full-fledged dangerous
It creates the next disaster by not learning the proper lesson from the last one. And somehow we have to get good at spotting that habit of mind of focusing on the things that make this time different. And we have to stamp it out so that we can learn the lessons. And sometimes there will be very few, but often there will be many and we will tend to miss them until we get this right. So I disagree with some of this.
Because I think that the description of there are people who will look for the similarities and try to learn the lessons by finding pattern is certainly that is a group. There is a group that will look for dissimilarities and thus declare that there is no pattern and thus this is singular and there's nothing to be learned from other things that the people over here in the pattern recognition group are saying.
there can be lessons learned from but i would say the vast vast majority of people belong to either of those groups the vast majority of people who do not who did not see this who are still who are still voting for the people who helped bring you these disasters etc are not paying attention either way. And I just, in talking to people, I do not see largely a willful...
I do not see an analytical approach to, no, this is not like the other. Certainly that happens sometimes, but much more often I see just like a fog. It's the fog of the pandemic. It's the fog of... everything right that's being produced there's too much information i don't know what to think this isn't what i'll be thinking about anyway i need to you know figure out what i'm having for dinner tonight how to feed my kids how to get like i have too many things to do um
Oh, yeah, I guess. Maybe you were right. I don't know. Can we just live? Yeah, it's over. It's not going to bring the Palisades back. Right. And I mean, there's that, but that also is a little bit different. I just, I guess. I think you and I are focused on different levels of this, but I also... I also didn't resonate with the analysis of there's like these two kinds of people, because I think the vast number of people actually belong to a third type, which is...
Don't know what to think. I don't know. And frankly, I don't have the time. I don't think that I myself have the analytical chops to think in the sphere. Not my thing. Like, I'm going to go think about something. Look, I don't disagree with you about where most people find themselves. So I'm not really arguing there are two kinds of people here because I agree with most people.
i think actually understandably do not know what to think one way or the other and so what you get is everybody is sort of looking at what's said and having a kind of vague yeah that sounds right this is true and so the point is it's the people everybody in proportion to their contribution to the discussion The people who have a lot to say and the conversation hears them because they get quoted and their videos get seen.
They do this at scale. And then a lot of people have conversations at their backyard barbecue. But the point is you're doing you're typically doing one of these things or throwing up your hands because you don't know which of them to do and going with those people who basically sound. the least frightening and the most comforting or whatever it is that causes people to embrace it. But my point is actually there is a process. It is ancient. It absolutely predates writing.
by which we come to understand what is true do we understand precisely what's true almost never but do we understand what's true enough to increase our odds of making it into the next round of the game yes we do unless a process interferes with it and in this case there is so much money and power at stake that preventing the people who saw it coming
from rising when it finally becomes clear that they were absolutely right is like an obsession of those who currently hold wealth and power. And the point is, when the fire comes, it's their fault. It's those people's fault because they are obstructing the process that would allow us to see it better the next time, which is to take the people who had the predictive power and say, hey, welcome to the conversation. Sorry, we called you a kook, right?
that's what normal would look like that's what mature would look like and this is juvenile power stuff that keeps them from saying that and they will come up with a hundred reasons if you talk to them about those of us who did predict maybe it wasn't the fires but predicted that across civilization all of the things that require competence would fail and it wasn't going to happen right away but it was coming it's down the line those of us who said that if you ask well
what about dark horse didn't they get this right they will come up with a bunch of ivermectin but they've got ivermectin wrong well no we don't you still have ivermectin wrong but that's still a safe place to go if you want to dismiss us
then you can do it by talking about ivermectin because most people still don't get what happened there. So that obsession with dismissing those who have correctly predicted failure, that is... interference competition taking place in our intellectual space and frankly it kills it kills people people die from this
they do doors blow off of airplanes bridges fall down fires that shouldn't have gotten out of control do borders are opened oh that's the other thing that i wanted to mention here this is unrelated to the fire story in la but i wanted to show a little video that uh i ran across again i'm also a victim of the cartesian crisis do i know what stock to put in this story i don't but jen can you show that video
Oh, you can't show the video. So what this is, is from Chicago. This is an interview with an HVAC service person who in the. course of her work servicing an HVAC system inside of a building discovered a huge number of materials that are hard to interpret as anything other than a preparation for some kind of a an attack she found where did you say this was chicago i believe um she found uniforms from police and fire explosives all kinds of stuff stockpiled
in a way that she, in the course of servicing an HVAC system, discovered, reported, and it turns out there's no obvious explanation for why they would be there. So, how does this story connect to the open border that has existed which many of us said you don't think our enemies are
going to notice an open border and take advantage of it by bringing things into the country and people into the country who are then capable of doing things to us that somebody would only dream of being able to do with an army.
What does this story have to do with, again, Cartesian crisis? I don't know that the videos I've seen of people throwing gasoline at fires in L.A. are real, but assuming those are real, We are living in an environment in which we have a huge number of non-citizens in the country whose purpose we don't know, whose entry has been facilitated by the same... executive branch that has told us diversity is our strength and we must do absolutely everything to blah blah blah blah blah.
Those people have created an obvious breach in the firewall that protects us. It may have something to do with the fire story in L.A. in the sense that arson is an obvious hazard.
The inability to track people or to hold them accountable for their behavior makes the danger all the greater. Does it have anything to do with the story in Chicago? I don't know. You all who did this, you who... created a catastrophe for civilization by prioritizing diversity and equity and inclusion above all else, you have created a system in which we don't know what's going on.
things befall us there is an unfortunate uh implication that these things are connected and we are unfortunately on our own left to figure out uh what if any connection exists between them Well, I have a spider on my microphone. Hell yeah. Congratulations. Thanks. I'm going to call her Henrietta. All right.
It's going to be a little hard not to focus on the spider right next to my face, but a little one. She's small. She's now camera side. I don't know what to make of that. I haven't seen the video. And I don't know why there would be a connection between stuff in Chicago and the open border at the U.S.-Mexico border. But just put it aside for a minute. like the attack on merit and incompetence and on the idea of meritocracy
We were hearing this at Evergreen before Evergreen blew up. The idea of hierarchy itself, the idea of there being any hierarchy, if there being differences between people. was imagined as itself a sexist or racist prospect. And so we end up with this DEI insanity. the fact is um that hierarchies exist that they're that
Everyone is better than someone else at something, even if they are not on average better than most people, or they are on average better than most people. But I'm reminded of... um bjorn lomberg's um book and uh framing of best things first and i think you had him on dark horse yes yeah um i i I didn't agree with most of the conclusions he came to in that book because I think that the way that he was assessing what was best and the evidence for why they were best were wrong.
But the overall idea is exactly right. You can want. there to be diversity in the fire department and that might even be understood to be a good by a majority of the people who are making such decisions But you have to put that on a list with all of the other things that all the people who have a say in this want for the fire department. And then you get to rank them.
Because saying this is a good, this is a good thing is totally insufficient for making decisions. You have to say, is it better than having people who have the skill and the strength to pull people out of fires? Is it better than having people who have the insight and common sense to make sure that fire hydrants have water in them? And the answer is clearly no. And no one was doing that really basic analysis, at least recently with current leadership at the Los Angeles FART. Yes. And this is.
communism is one of the things that recurs in history i think we have made a singular point here on dark horse that communism is not a karl marx invention he enumerates it but the idea is communism is the consequence of the failures of a system to take care of those who fall off the bottom so if you have a meritocratic system and it is ruthless and you have large numbers of people who know that they are ill-equipped to make their way in that meritocratic system they end up coming up with
to overthrow it and those reasons to overthrow it look like hey all of that stuff that's accumulated in those other hands isn't the result of the creation of wealth, it's the result of theft. And unfortunately, they often have a better point than they should. And so the stinginess of the one side results in the rebellion of the other.
That communist rebellion is going to happen again and again and again. Here, that communist rebellion has shown up as wokeness, and the product of it... is the product that communism always produces, which is the complete collapse of capacity, because that is what a system that punishes those who are productive and rewards those who are lazy will do.
So the fact that it has happened again and the language is different doesn't make any difference. This was completely foreseeable. And when people like, you know, Jordan Peterson stood up and started talking about the communist leanings. of the folks who were overthrowing the system. And everybody went, well, that seems a bit extreme. No, he was one of the people who had it right. And you owe him an apology now, right? This is the way, if you want this to stop happening, we've got to understand.
What occurred? Yes. Yep. Yes. All right. All right. Well, to the next topic. Molecular biology. Molecular biology. Amazing as that sounds. All right. So I wanted to talk a little bit about something that just showed up yesterday. I became aware of it through a tweet. Let me just show this paper. Kevin McKernan. Let's start with the tweet. Kevin McKernan. Wow, that is really hard to say. Okay, so Kevin McKernan tweets, holy shit, PJ Buchholz just sent me this.
And he says, file it under does not stay in the deltoid. You're actually reading that through the binoculars. Hell yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean... i mean i think a spotting scope would have been a little classier i couldn't get one because i got these at al's binos and they don't have spotting scopes no no they wouldn't um no they they wouldn't no no um
These are also not very good binoculars, but good enough for this apparently. In any case, so Kevin McKernan, who has also been a guest on Dark Horse, is pointing to this paper that Buckle sent him.
and the paper is which is which is this if you want to show my screen here jen um i'm you're going to be doing the one sharing stuff from this paper yeah uh but uh the paper is amazing On the one hand, and I've got to be careful here because Kevin correctly points out in the replies to his tweet that everybody is saying we already knew this and there is a way in which we already knew this and there is a way in which this paper
blows the doors off of what we knew um what this paper is is actually a report and this is in nature biochemistry i think biotechnology nature biotechnology the title of the paper is just hold on just um just a tiny bit of like scientific journal history we've said this before but science and nature
were the preeminent scientific journals in the world nature coming out of the uk science coming out of the us science being the publication of the american association for the advancement of science science as far as i know and I'm probably going to be proven wrong, doesn't have a bunch of like... Spinoff journals. Dozens of spinoffs, right? Nature has dozens, if not well more than 100 at this point. And so when you hear, oh, it's nature by technology. Oh, it's published in Nature.
No. Nature itself is deeply flawed, as is science at this point. The publications I'm talking about now, not the concepts of nature and science. But even more... arcane and less reliable presumably are the any of the very many nature spin-off journals including nature biotechnology nature fill in the blank are always a spin-off journal if it comes with this font and uh it's nature first and then some word second yeah so this is published in nature biotechnology and um
I will just be dizzy. Sorry. Check this out, though. list of authors and their affiliations appear at the end of the paper i know since when do the authors show up at the beginning of the paper because it's so long i know it's weird like i had to go there and find it to name my file yeah really yeah but in any case um I will acknowledge up front, part of what we are going to discuss here is whether I have been out of my depth talking about COVID vaccinations or so-called vaccinations.
and its interaction with the immune system. What's it called? Spoiler alert. I have not been out of my depth. In fact, I slam dunked it.
That said, we are about to talk about this paper in Nature Biotechnology, and when we are talking about biotechnology, I am out of my depth. This is not my specialty, and this is... complicated stuff at the very least and i'm not going to pretend to understand more than i do but in this paper what is reported is a new technique and what this technique allows us to do is see the fate of the mRNA messages and their products as they have distributed around the body. This is done in mice.
And this paper allows us to see at cellular scale. So in the past, we have seen distribution analyses, but they have been very coarse. And what this allows... the authors to do if they have done their work correctly and i can't really evaluate that but as as much as i can evaluate it looks quite credible and it obviously has been published in a very high high tier journal but maybe
That was my point about, like, I don't know that the spinoff journals of nature are inherently high tier. I think they vary widely. They're high tier. They're not top tier. But in any case, the... report is of a technique that allows basically cellular scale analysis of the distribution and as kevin mckernan hints in his tweet he says
These shots did not stay in the deltoid. In fact, they go everywhere that the circulation tells them, and they... are taken up as i have been saying haphazardly around the body so they show up in the brain they show up in the liver they show up the gonads were not uh analyzed here but they show up everywhere and of course
course in so doing that provides evidence for the mechanism that i've been arguing about or arguing for that i've hypothesized and i've taken an awful lot of crap for having done so or i said Problem with these shots is the mRNA messages are going to be taken up haphazardly around the body. If that happens in a tissue that you can easily replace, then when your own immune system attacks that tissue,
The damage may not be severe, but if it happens in a tissue like your heart, it can be deadly. So here we have on the screen my tweet, which I think I'm just going to read to you. I said, if this result holds up, then I will have been precisely right about how the mRNA COVID shots damaged the heart. This means a few important things. One, the mRNA platform is at fault. The spike protein may make matters worse.
But all mRNA lipid nanoparticle shots are expected to trigger immune-mediated heart and circulatory damage, irrespective of what protein is encoded in the mRNA payload. The damage does not require spike protein. and has nothing to do with COVID or SARS-CoV-2. 2. Accidental intravenous injection likely increases damage, but is not required to injure the heart. This stuff leaking out of your deltoid is sufficient. 3.
The shots should never have been allowed to be injected into humans and should be immediately pulled from the market. Four, mRNA gene therapies are not suitable for use in medicine or food production. No mRNA gene therapy will be safe enough to contemplate using until and unless a precise cellular targeting mechanism is created and the entire package properly tested against true placebo controls. We need to know.
what the health outcome is compared to not taking this stuff. We knew all this extrapolating from autopsies, molecular studies, and case reports, and it was a clear hazard working from first principles. And then I suggest people see the Dark Horse podcast. which I've linked in the reply, in which Brett Swanson and Jumi Kim and I discuss this very hypothesis at length, and we respond to the supposed debunks.
this studying employs a new and much more sensitive assay and leaves denialists like peter hotez and dr paul offutt and sophists like debunk the funk who is dan wilson nowhere to hide And I guess Sam Harris owes me another apology. I've lost track of the total, but it's a bunch. I would say, Claire Lehman, your apology is also due. So, what are we talking about?
What we're talking about is a technology that now allows us to see the shots distribute themselves, be taken up by cells across the body, and to change the proteome, that is to say the proteins, that are being transcribed in each place so what this is saying is that the shots are doing what the manufacturer tells us they are doing they are causing the production of new proteins and that that
I have extrapolated, is the reason that we see the immune activation here, which is the immune system responding to your cells producing a foreign protein, in this case spike, but it could be anything. responding as if they have found any any foreign protein they will respond to that combination a cell of yours producing a foreign protein assuming it's virally infected and they will attack and kill it which if it happens in your heart is very dangerous if it happens in a few cells
you'll be all right. If it happens in a lot of cells, you might not be. So let me read a little bit from the abstract here. The abstract is, efficient and accurate nanocarrier development for targeted drug delivery is hindered by a lack of methods to analyze its cell-level biodistribution across whole organisms.
Here we present single-cell precision nanocarrier identification, which they call SCP- an integrated experimental and deep learning pipeline to comprehensively quantify the targeting of nanocarriers throughout the whole mouse body at single cell resolution. SCP-nano reveals the tissue distribution patterns of lipid nanoparticles and LNPs after different injection routes. This is interesting. This paper actually administered this.
transfection agent by different routes to these mice and then checked where it went at doses as low as point zero zero zero five
milligrams per kilogram, far below the detection limits of conventional whole-body imaging techniques. We demonstrate that intermuscularly injected LNPs carrying SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA reach heart tissue leading to proteome changes suggesting immune activation and blood vessel damage scp nano generalizes to various types of nano carriers including liposomes polyplexes dna origami and
adeno-associated viruses, revealing that adeno-associated virus variants transduces adepocytes throughout the body. CP nano enables comprehensive three-dimensional mapping of nanocarrier distribution throughout mouse bodies with high sensitivity and should accelerate the development of precise and safe nanocarrier-based therapeutics. All right.
There's some of the stuff in there I don't understand. What I do understand from this paper is that their technique increases our resolution by orders of magnitude, our ability to tell where the stuff went and had its effects. they have leveraged deep learning here essentially they've leveraged a kind of
artificial intelligence to help them analyze the data. Because part of the problem with something this sensitive is you have to figure out what the patterns are so that you can actually interpret them. You can't go through the data points. individually and they have reasons to believe that their method for leveraging that ai is successful which i can't evaluate but in any case if you want to Show us, Jen, the first of those images. This is from the paper. This is from the paper.
So, I can't believe I'm actually going to have to use this. Yeah. This is going to be figure 3A. This is... Figure 3A, and what this does is this analyzes the different administration routes and where the hotspots are for the... lipid nanoparticles and proteome changes. So you've got oral route, nasal, dermal, IV, intravenous and intramuscular. Yep. Left to right. Next image. Cranium? Yeah. I don't know. So this is. Figure six now. I bet this has never happened on a podcast. I don't know, man.
I don't know where you're going. Yeah, so here you see distribution in the brain, including the hippocampus. You see it in the spinal cord, etc. So the basic point is this stuff goes everywhere. Okay, so I want to read to you now a little bit from the discussion.
The ability of SCP-Nano to reveal even minor off-targeting and to assess. So again, these people are not primarily focused on the consequence of these shots. They're primarily focused on this technique that they've generated that allows them to figure out what the consequence is. of the shots are.
Well, they're excited because, I mean, the last line of the abstract tells us that they're excited because they think this will be the thing. This is the magic thing that will finally allow this technology to move forward because now we got it. Now we'll discover all the problems. Sure you will. Yeah, they do say that. So anyway, there are some quirks here in terms of their viewpoint here. They still do appear to have this kind of techno-utopian sense about now we've got...
the tools we need after we've done all this damage. All right. The ability of SCP-Nano to reveal even minor off-targeting and to assess their molecular consequences by combining imaging, spatial proteomics analysis has direct implications for clinical translation. Our finding changes the expression of...
immune and vascular proteins in heart. However, further research is needed to determine if similar effects occur in human subjects and to establish whether these molecular changes observed in mice are causally linked to reported clinical symptoms now it is effectively always safe to say this. More research is needed in order to know if what we've found actually implies what it seems to imply. No. That's not true in this case. In this case, you have causal hypotheses that pre-exist.
before you did your technological study what that means is we now what you should have said in your paper is we now have strong evidence that the clinical symptoms are connected to these shots in this mechanistic way because that explains the sum total of the observed phenomena in the least elaborate way.
This is the simplest explanation for the clinical symptoms, the hypothesized mechanism connected to what you've discovered in these mouse bodies. Further, to say further study is necessary to know whether this applies to humans. Well, what exactly are you talking about? Are you talking about injecting humans with this stuff and seeing how it distributes around their bodies? Presumably not, but...
What more do you need? What you've got is you've got a lot of data. We injected a huge number of people with these things. We've got the clinical patterns. We've got the autopsies. Why don't you just take a look at the evidence that already exists and say,
actually the picture that we have now painted at cellular scale and the picture that had already been painted at clinical scale is now unmistakably related through this obvious causal mechanism that was already on the table right those things tell a complete story is more data better it never hurts
but you don't need it. You've got it all right there. It's quite clear. Let's see. We also use laboratory produced LNP and mRNA spike formulations, which differ from approved good manufacturing processes.
So basically, there's kind of a precursor here to their next grant application for all of the things that you now need to do. And really, if you leverage science... right but that's exactly that's exactly what a lot of this sounds like it's both typical it's it's scientific paper boilerplate as insurance against um its hedge right and it's also this setup for the next grant
So how shall we extract more money from the NIH? This is important. We've got to publish in Nature Biotech. This will go on the list of papers that were published from the last grant. And we've already described what needs to happen next. And here it is. Boom. Yes, and the idea that in order to get a paper like this published, which frankly does make those of us who pointed to this obvious hazard look quite prescient.
In order to get a paper like this published, you effectively have to presumably say something that suggests, oh, actually, that technology that this really suggests should never be used in people. In order to get it past the people who don't want this technology declared dead, you have to say, well, effectively, this allows us now to fix it. Okay, yes, it did do.
the bad thing but it can be fixed and this is the technology that will let you do it so it basically everything is predicated on whether or not it keeps uh hope alive for these stupid techniques As I've said before, the techniques at a laboratory level, they're quite clever. At a clinical level, they're DOA. They never should have been injected in people because there was no way this wasn't going to happen.
They have no targeting mechanism. And, you know, notice that this paper says exactly what I've said about targeting mechanisms. I've said the problem is there's no targeting mechanism on a lipid nanoparticle. They'll be taken up haphazardly. What they will do is trigger the immune system to destroy whatever tissue it is that's translating.
the mrna message and that's just simply not safe if it can be your heart so this paper is focused on the fact that a targeting mechanism is necessary i agree it would be necessary but notice that all around the world we are now experimenting with many new
mRNA shots you know even self-replicating ones yes self-replicating doesn't mean they spread from one person to the other by their design though it's very hard to rule out that that will happen but self-replicating is yet another level of frankenstein's monster here we are experimenting with these things we're experimenting with them we're introducing them into agricultural spaces none of this makes sense because the mechanism that i hypothesized means this has nothing to do with
the problem is the platform itself the mrna platform itself will do heart damage as long as you load into it the message that creates a foreign protein period the end the evidence is now absolutely overwhelming and frankly I don't trust anybody who said that wasn't true who doesn't acknowledge it. If this result stands up, that is absolutely clear and every discussion should take it as an assumption. Excellent.
I don't have anything to add, but I don't remember when you started saying precisely that, making that very precise prediction. I suspect it was in late 2020 or early 2021. And you have been resolute since then. Well, it's amazing the pushback. This is actually Brett Swanson's point, but the pushback has been high. amplitude has been very loud, but has no content. And Brett's point is, wow. What would explain the fact that none of what comes back is sensible in any way?
Right. So it's like it's it's some version of the dog that failed to convincingly bark or something like that. You know, I guess, and this goes back to this point about what most people are doing. Most people. Yeah. are kind of trying to listen to who sounds like they have the expertise. And they really don't like us radicals out here. You know, they're just too scary. It's too contrarian. It's too something. They have all kinds of epithets they throw at us.
but right i mean that's why props help unfortunately right like that's that's yeah i used i used to say to my students you know here's the stuff you need to do science right lab coat and some glassware and a fancy degree it's like you know of course you don't need any of those things to do science but you are more likely to believe that the person who claims they're doing science is doing science if they have those things because you've been trained to imagine
that that is what scientists look like. And so Fauci used that and all the rest of them did as well. Yes. I mean, and at the end of the day, it looks like a bunch of people in the same strata of society.
who go to the cocktail party and they assume that the person with the you know the the fancy scientific title sounds credible and uses lots of terms you don't quite understand but you've heard before that that person hey you know that was that was our scientist you know he was at our cocktail party and you know i trust him he seems like a great guy and you know
Right. So the point is, you know what? That doesn't work. The coin of the realm is and remains predictive power, period, the end. And if the people who are successfully predicted stuff. Don't look like the folks at your cocktail party. That's not on them. The point is you have to acknowledge those who get this stuff right if you want this not to happen again.
in this case people took these shots on the basis that the folks at their cocktail party were saying all kinds of reassuring things and if those people now pivot and you know they they do this middle ground scramble thing where they're going to scold the radicals, and they're going to scold the official narrative, and they're going to steer that middle path. Well, it's not good enough.
This was totally foreseeable. You and I foresaw it enough not to take the damn shots and not to inflict them on our children, right? That's where you want to be next time. And so I don't care whether you like how we present.
The fact is predictive power is how you know who knows what they're talking about. And, you know, it's not that we got everything right from the beginning, but we've been good about acknowledging our errors and we've gotten some stuff really, really, really right. And now you're seeing it at cellular scale. Yep. Yep. All right. Is it time for Dung Beetle Cam? I think it is time for Dung Beetle Cam. All right. Finally, I'm going to...
Talk slowly until we get to dung beetle cam. All right. Oh, yeah. I know. Move this out of the way here. Oh, is that me? That's you. That's your glass of water. I'm going to put that over there for you. There we go. Okay, so dung beetle cam. Tell us a little bit. So tell us a little bit about this beautiful piece of art. This beautiful piece of art was made...
Well, you got to know a little history here. The San Juan Islands where we live are half of an archipelago. The other half was won by Canada. Well, I think it's really the other way around. Canada had claimed all of it and the U.S. stole, took. We were very generous in not stealing the entire archipelago from the Brits. But in any case.
half of the archipelago is canadian half the archipelago is american there is a famous battle in of course 1859 the year everything happened including the carrington event the publication of the origin of species and the pig war uh on san juan island anyway it resulted in the current distribution of islands among nations and that is all a long way of saying that the artist who made this beautiful dung beetle sculpture Sean Goddard is on the Canadian side.
of he's on salt spring which many people will have heard of salt spring island which is part of the same archibelago in which we live but it's part of the gulf islands rather than the san juan islands yes and we've been to uh to sean's studio he does amazing stuff in any
way he made this uh this beautiful dung beetle for us so anyway why would we have a dung beetle of all things should we show the little piece of video while we talk let's do that so when when brett and i were in um the last time we were in the amazon
Alas, was January of 2020. We're at Tipitini. We've talked about this before. We came out just as COVID was hitting the world. And one of the many pieces of video that I took with my cell phone was of just a dung beetle, a beautiful green dung beating.
beating dung beetle i don't know what species uh rolling uh her probably although depending on the species one or the other or in some cases both sexes create and roll balls of dung uh through through the forest and here here you have it uh we're gonna call her she even though i don't actually know um there she gets turns herself over it's rolled on by by the dung ball
So you want to start walking us through some of why this happens? Why dung beetles? Why dung? Why balls of dung? Why balls of dung? Well, balls of dung, so first of all, there are multiple things in the world called dung beetles.
um because the ecological habit or some variation on it has evolved multiple times which is totally typical for evolution this is like mangrove there is not what mangrove did not evolve once there's lots of evolutions of things that we now collectively call mangrove yeah or we could say leglessness in lizards has evolved many times the most specios of the legless lizard clades is snakes yes snakes are legless lizards see amazing stuff um and actually
If you're thinking at all about it and not just running away screaming because you hate snakes, if you find a legless lizard that is not a snake, one of these different evolutions of leglessness in lizards, they are demonstrably different. If you look...
You don't even have to get that close. And none of the legless lizards that aren't snakes are dangerous to you. In fact, most of the snakes aren't either. Many of the snakes aren't either. They look really different. It's clear that they got their... Yeah, a different route. A different route. And you can imagine it, you know, because really, you know, snakes.
now going to backtrack and not tell you why snakes evolved leglessless because I know there are many hypotheses and it's not well resolved. But going down holes is one of them. And creatures that go down holes actually often have very reduced legs. And there comes a point at which reduced legs are just not worth the freight and getting rid of them entirely.
It's valuable. That's a good hypothesis. I like that one. Burrowing. Burrowing. So anyway, the point is, okay, snakes have nailed this, but it doesn't mean that... again and again and again lizards that still have their legs won't face a habitat in which the stuff that they want to eat or the way to hide from things that want to eat them is down a hole and legs get in the way and well but i mean some of the other hypotheses involve aquatism that's not a word is it
aquatism water life um but also sand swimming yeah and i don't know i think at least one of the other clades of legless lizards does some sand swimming and it's just much easier to swim through sand if you don't have appendages yeah but i would argue that that's a variation on tunneling that it is just a constantly collapsing tunnel that you are. You would. I would. You would. Exactly that. No, because you don't have to. Oh, yeah. We'll have this argument off air. Yes, we will. But OK, so the.
The vast majority of dung beetles in the world are scarab beetles, and they do not all roll balls of dung. Not all the scarabs. Not all the scarabs. Not all the scarabs. And not all dung beetles roll balls of dung either. There are three types of dung beetle, ecologically speaking, behaviorally speaking. There are rollers like this one.
There are tunnelers that take dung down into a burrow. And there are dwellers which just live right in the dung. Inside a perfectly round ball of dung? Yeah, not a round ball of dung. I think they find dung and they... burrow into the pile of dung yeah they we don't need them as these are these are low standard scarab beetles yeah okay but in any case because often also the scarabs are usually gorgeous
They're beautifully colored. Marvelous. Yeah. So why would you hide all that in a pile of shit? Because nature is not primarily about being watched. Well, but if you know this, if you have that color. That color is expensive, and so someone's looking sometimes. Yeah, they get seen frequently. But anyway, the dung is both a food source and, yeah, more importantly.
they lay their eggs in the dung balls now interestingly i thought and i learned recently in looking up dung beetles i thought that it was going to be all females doing the rolling because they lay their eggs and because insects um are almost never um monogamous in this case what i've learned is that both males and females roll dung that's partly about the fact that both males and females
used dung so rolling dung takes it away from other creatures that will find it but this again is going to vary between species varies across the 5 000 species massively but i also found out that there are 5 000 is the same number of scarab beetles as there are mammals right See, this is the point that Dick Alexander used to always make about insects. He was my advisor, and he was the curator of insects at the Ruthven.
natural history museum and he had students refugees from all of the other parts of the department who came to his lab because it was fun because there were other smart people who liked to argue about biology and Anyway, so he was the curator of insects who was taking care of a lot of us refugees from the mammal division and the bird division and the fish division and whatever else it might have been. But he always told us that we were...
fools to be studying these creatures because there were so many insects and that if you look hard enough, you'll find some insect somewhere doing whatever it is you're trying to study in mammals or birds or other creatures. So anyway. He does turn out to have been right about that, though I wouldn't change the thing. But anyway, there are apparently within the Scarab family of beetles, beetles that appear to be monogamous.
and there are certainly beetles who are collaborative in raising their offspring there are even and i haven't delved very far here there are polyandrous scarab beetles dung beetles which i did not know polyandry being a rare pattern in which one female has multiple males partner with her. And the polyandrous dung beetles are the males rolling the balls and then maintaining the brood after she lays her eggs in them? I have only just begun to dig.
yeah making me a tunneller actually do you jen want to show a couple pictures of dung beetles that i sent you all right so these guys um Those scarabs aren't gorgeous, are they? No, they're rather drab. But this is the genus Canthon. These guys are in the genus Canthon. This is a male and a female collaboratively rolling a ball of dung. What part of the world are we in? Do we know?
we are in the new world and i believe these guys are neartic meaning this case it would be north america they also are quite speciosas heather's video indicates in the neotropics. That was just one species. Okay. As Heather's video illustrates, they are in the neotropics where they have high diversity. You were going to say.
Oh, I just wanted to, so I knew you were looking into dung beetles, and I just did a real quick search. And yeah, keep this picture up. Can I just, this is, the picture is not the species I'm going to read from, but I found this paper from 2012. in the journal of insect behavior by reynolds and byrne called alternate alternate reproductive tactics in an african dung beetle cerceleum bacchus from the same clade actually that you were just talking about um if i'm gonna scroll here um i think um
So this is just some background on another species of dung beetle, which I found interesting. Again, a little weird because it's not this species, but I just like having pictures of dung beetles on the screen. Sure. Although both sexes roll food balls, only female Cercillium box... make brood balls. Male see Bacchus typically compete for access to ball rolling females, with larger males winning significantly more fights. All pretty standard sexual selection mating strategies so far.
This male then follows closely behind the female after having won the fight as she rolls the ball away in search of a suitable burial site. The victorious male perches on top of the brood ball as it is buried by the female and subsequently copulates with her underground.
The male reemerges after five to seven days and continues in search of additional mates at dung piles, while the female remains underground for the duration of larval development, which may take up to six months. Wow. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah, it is really cool. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that this is really kind of a hint about the way ecosystems work. And there's a bias in our study of ecology.
which is and it's not true to say that ecology i used to say that ecology was born in the temperate zone and that was the reason we were so confused about that's actually not true it was born in the tropics but it reached its zenith very much in the temperate zone with temperate biologists studying temperate creatures and we got it all wrong because most creatures are tropical
and the temperate zones are really the exception in terms of how things work ecologically the tropics are much more representative for many reasons but what you see here is this incredibly efficient use of resources this dung is literally the stuff that the animal is not processing because it either can't process it
or it's not worth the effort to process it. It is more productive to go and eat more stuff. So you're not talking about the beetle now, you're talking about the producer of the dung. I'm talking about... the dung is an incredibly valuable resource that is no longer worth the time of the creature that produced it but it is very much worth the time of a lot of other creatures and those creatures in the tropics find dung very quickly and use it for a bunch
of different things so here you have this i won't say massive but it's a very big clade five thousand species of creatures many of which are involved in dung collection which is sort of the centerpiece of their niche and that's not terribly surprising because that dung you know these animals mammals in this case are
you know foraging widely and finding materials that they can process and then doing the processing which solves the problem these beetles if they were eating the leaves themselves or the fruits themselves labor involved in climbing the tree and all of the stuff that they might do is astronomical so you know there's an aphorism which I'm forgetting about One person's junk is another person's treasure or something like that.
Yeah, it also feels like we've kind of come full circle in discussing the error in the suggestion that what needs to be done is to clear all the dead stuff away in order to make ecosystems fire resistant. Everything will get used.
is not the same thing as saying that everything happens for a purpose or that everything exists for a purpose. What evolution does is it finds a way to make use of the things it's not that all the all the purposes already existed and now it's those purposes are being populated quite the opposite yes and i would this is one of the places where ecology gets it wrong because of its um overwhelming tempered bias which is finally breaking but um but not soon enough
which is that in a tropical habitat almost all the resources are in some creature they don't last very long whether it's dung that falls to the forest floor or a tree that collapses into the forest the number of things that are going to extract those resources and put them back into some other living creature is high, which means this is why the so-called paradox about tropical soils being poor is what it is. It's not a paradox at all, of course.
The creatures are very good at finding free resources and putting them to use, which means they're not sitting in the soil. Or if they're sitting in the soil, they're sitting in soil organisms. Or often in seedling banks.
right so you have quick growth because there is such high competition for the nutrients uh that whereas in a in a good fertile temperate area you will have soils that are rich into which it is easy to plant seeds that if especially if you keep the competition away you will be successfully able to grow things whereas in a
in a soil in which you could grow things in the tropics the soil as you meet it is not going to be very rich hence one of the reasons that sweden agriculture that small-scale slash and burn farming actually works, because what it does is it slow burns the nutrients in the dead stuff on top back into the soil.
till that in and then you actually very briefly before everything else you know takes the nutrients out of the soil you have a very rich soil into which you can grow things yeah you have a very rich very shallow soil and
I would just point out Sweden agriculture has kind of a crude reputation because it's very early in the discovery of how agriculture is done. On the other hand, it is... exactly the approach one ought to take with a complex system and tropical forests are as complex as any systems on earth so the point is you're not
clearing a bunch of land and figuring out how to grow things on it, which doesn't work very well in the tropics because the soils are so thin that you use up the resource and then you're just done. So then you're just constantly destroying new habitat. So in agriculture, damages a little piece of forest, enriches it temporarily, uses it, and then moves on to the next piece of forest. And what happens? The forest fixes it.
all right this is a complex system doing what complex systems do no one needs to understand how it works because the disruption is sufficiently small that it can be corrected by nature small both spatially and temporally yep
All right, so I didn't have a ton more that I wanted to say here other than dung beetles are so fascinating. I mean, just, A, there's this... the sense i always get when i see something like a dung beetle which is this could and did happen here for millions of years with nobody there to remark on it to think about it this isn't for our benefit this happened this invented itself and it goes on silently with nobody observing it you know everywhere all the time
And then we find it and we're like, huh, that's odd. What's it doing? Oh, it lays its eggs in that thing. That's interesting. Oh, you know, that fits with our understanding of this, that and the other. But, you know, this is really not about us. This is. Yet one more miracle of biology. It shows the hallmark. So there's a very famous...
And I won't get the story exactly right, but J.B.S. Haldane, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, was apparently seated by a mischievous person next to the archbishop of canterbury at a fancy dinner and they were struggling against the awkward pauses and the
archbishop of canterbury leaned over and said so dr haldane what has twenty years of the study of evolution revealed to you about the mind of our creator and j b s haldane said an inordinate fondness for beetles which basically is a reference to the fact that beetles are hugely speciose for reasons that at that time and i think still is not well understood i made an argument for what it is in my dissertation but never mind that anyway the point is let's suppose
that this is all the product of a creator who likes critters and enjoyed making them you could imagine such a creator deciding to make a dung beetle because it was something that seemed like it was necessary in the habitat but five thousand of them like why that seems obsessive Now, did you run into, in your thinking about dung beetles, you said about 5,000 species of scarabs, scarabidae. Do we have an estimate on how many species of beetles?
is it coleoptera yeah why am i forgetting it's coleoptera right um do we have any estimate on that i'm thinking it might be might be two orders of magnitude more uh oh yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't know it's uh Well, I don't know that we have, you can ask AI, but I'm not going to trust an answer without vetting it. So I think we're there. Right? Well, apparently Grok can't figure out an exact number. No shock. So that's this week.
We are going to be back a day late next week on Thursday with stories to tell, I suspect. No doubt we will have stories. And there will be a new president in town by then. Not in this town. But in some town. In the president town. Yeah, in the country generally. So, you know, big changes are coming.
Let us see. Let us see what happens. Check out Locals in the meantime. That's the watch party's been going on. That's where our Q&As are. That's where early release of your conversations with guests happen and lots of other great stuff. Our store has fantastic merchandise and darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, that's darkhorsepodcast.org, has updates to the calendar, links to the store, links to locals, all that good stuff.
You can check out our sponsors this week, which were Timeline, Caraway, and Fresh Pressed Olive Oil. And just to remind you, we will put links to both... Teresa Smith's work behind us and Sean Goddard's work in front of us into our show notes. We will put lynx and not bobcats into the show notes. We have neither at the moment, but we have a bead on a lynx and we don't have any bobcats. No.
So, yeah, I think we appreciate you. We appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing, full episodes, links, links. Again, with the links. Clips is what I actually meant there. And I can't speak anymore. That's good because I only have a few more words. Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.