MAGA, MAHA, and the Unity Movement: The 267th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 267, if I'm not mistaken, and we are still, I believe, the only... podcast with a realistic rendering of a dung beetle center stage oh i think so yeah Yeah, I don't think anyone has copied that yet. Not yet. It's coming. But for the moment, we are alone in the category. 267, not prime. Three times 89. Three times 89. I'm going to...

Check your math later, if at all. No, you're not. No, I probably won't. You are Brett Weinstein. Yes. I am Heather Hying. Here we are with another episode of The Evolutionary Lens. part of Dark Horse. We're going to talk about wheat and gluten today. Yes, we are. Trump and Musk and elephants and hoses. Elephants and hoses. All right. I'm looking forward to that.

That's going to be interesting. Yeah. And following our live stream today, we're going to have a Q&A on Locals. Please consider joining us there. We are grateful to you, our supporters on Locals. And we had a Q&A this last Sunday. It was a lot of fun. And that's still up on Locals. well and um and we have one following this live stream without further ado now you want to do some more do

Well, I did want to point out, I believe if my calculations are correct, this is the penultimate winter live stream. We have one more that will just be on the cusp of spring, but it's pretty exciting. I'm sure you would agree you can feel winter. breaking yeah march is great here and i suspect that um march is um kind of great everywhere uh in the northern hemisphere with any it's far enough from the equator to have seasonality that uh it's highly variable although

Our March so far, the part of it that we have been present for, has been quite cool, quite rainy. Still, a lot of the plants are making a bid, right? You got... blooms forming and beginning to burst on trees. You have crocuses and daffodils and other things coming up through the soil. And a lot of evidence of life. You can sort of squint across a forest and see a tinge of green, even if a close you're hard pressed to find any leaves yet so it's happening the frogs are ringing you know i have not

really heard the frogs yet and i'm usually particularly tuned into that but uh but i'm i'm sure it actually seems a little late for the frogs honestly i feel like we missed most of the frogs i have heard them ringing i believe am i correct we have one frog species here Oh, I think we have more than one, but we've got pseudocris regilla, which is what you're going to be hearing. We have more than one. All right. Well, all right. I'm interested to know what else we might have.

um but anyway uh it's super exciting that uh that spring is happening and i know that winners get pretty long uh here and a lot of us are raring to get on to the next phase yeah and i'm seeing um we within a month or so we will begin to see fox kits above the surface um which means that probably the birthing season is about now and in the last two days i have seen not one but different foxes doing that stereotypical fox leap where they're hunting and they're kind of cocking their eyes

at whatever it is that they're hunting, and then they get ready and they do a vertical pounce. And in both cases, I know it was two different foxes because one was a red fox. They're all... common name red foxes but one was phenotypically red one was phenotypically black and they both failed uh and in both cases uh almost as if to

prove that they hadn't really wanted it anyway. They then marked some grass nearby and wandered off. Very cat-like maneuver. Very cat-like maneuver. But your observation leaves no doubt that black foxes can jump. Yes. Black boxes can jump. Black boxes can jump. Yeah, indeed. All right. Our three ads right at the top of the hour, as always, carefully chosen if we're reading ads.

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definitely because you know i could imagine if i you know even if i had my reasons it was a white lie and i told you the dog food was good and it wasn't and then you found yourself in some kind of a situation having been assured by me then you discover in what's bound

be a pretty rough moment if you're forced to eat dog food you discover that i've been lying as well that's like a double whammy right adding insult to injury rubbing salt in the wound we can't have that i don't know if it would be a discovery that you were lying inherently but just that our palates were not as similar as

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dark horse switch to sundays and feel good about what you are feeding your dog all right all right yep so um you wanted to begin uh by following up talking about your european weed experiment yes and i will just say we should have talked about this last time but due to a miscommunication that was entirely me we

We blew it. And so anyway, thank you for being patient to all of those of you who've been waiting for the final analysis on the great European wheat allergy experiment. For those who don't know... I hope it's not final. It's not the last experiment, but I think the... Well, you will see why there's some question about it when we've talked more in detail about what the experiment was and how it turned out. I actually want you to set this up.

with something that I don't think you did put in any of the videos that you put out.

tell something about our trip over on british airways and the steward uh who was who seemed hostile we were talking about after it's like god that guy was hostile like we we like to um have two windows so we don't we're not sitting next to each other and so we didn't have directly identical experience like we didn't have simultaneous experiences with this guy um and after he's like man one of the stewards was really hostile and you said so i i had found the guy hostile

I mean, not really hostile. He was irritated and it was evident. Yeah. And my asking questions. So he asked me. about the meal and i inquired about whether or not one of the entrees was free of gluten which is what i say because if i say free of wheat it confuses people so anyway we'll get into the details of my allergy and why i don't think it's gluten shortly but

Anyway, I asked him if one of the entrees was free of gluten, and he was clearly annoyed by this. And, you know, at one level... he had a point which is that they have a mechanism for dealing with this which is that you alert them before you you know you alert them through the app and

They take care of it and it all just happens. And I hadn't done that. So that's on me. But anyway, he had some information and he came over and he was going through the information, trying to figure out if he could answer my question and clearly wishing that he was somewhere else.

And anyway, I always take the gruff individual as an interesting challenge to see if I can sort of overcome whatever their annoyance is. And so I... struck up a conversation with him and his annoyance kind of gave way a little bit and then anyway we settled our issue and he came back over 20 minutes later or so and he said you know um

I forget which relative it was, maybe. An aunt is what you told me. An aunt, yeah. Or an aunt is the way I should actually say that. He has an aunt who claims to be allergic to gluten, and he finds her... A, not very credible, and B, kind of a pain in the butt. And so anyway, he has a kind of built-in resistance to the idea of gluten allergies, which I must say, I did too.

when i discovered that i have a severe allergy to wheat it was because i needed to check to make the story clear i had a case of what doctors said was cough variant asthma which they said was being triggered by something in my environment they told me that it was that i'm allergic to cats that i'm allergic to dust mites that there's dust in the ducts of my house

All sorts of things. And you and I spent a tremendous amount of effort and a whole lot of money trying to correct the various things that were supposedly triggering me. None of it worked. And I read offhandedly somewhere. that a number of people have asthma triggered by a gluten allergy. And I thought, no way. Sounds like bull to me. But given all the other things we've done, I've got to run the experiment.

Can I just, can I try to put us back into, this is going to be like late aughts, early teens, 20, you know, 20, 2008, nine, 10, something like that. Already there are such extreme peanut allergies in schools that are among children that schools are prohibiting them. Preschools are prohibiting them. Airplanes are beginning to prohibit peanuts.

And in the circles that we were then traveling in, which is to say we were professors at one of the country's most liberal institutions, we were seeing a lot of signs up about, like, this is a fragrance-free zone, and there were lots of vegans around.

vegetarians like you know just lots and lots and lots of dietary specificity and claims of allergies um aversions that seem to be coming under the banner of allergies and environmental sensitivities uh to things like fragrances as well and at that point Everyone listening now lived through that moment. If you can think back to that.

I, at least, and I think many, many people had this sense of like, oh, for fuck's sake, could you get over yourself? This feels like a, I believe Douglas Murray calls it a look at me. you know an excuse to be like hey look at me look how special i am it's like i don't care that your hair is purple i don't care that you claim to have this disability that you have like whatever just like could you be actually interesting in some way as opposed to finding some weakness

by which people are focusing on you. And so I think both of us had that sense about, you know, the rise in, you know, people claiming gluten sensitivity. It's like, oh, another one. Well, I didn't think that about peanuts because obviously, I mean, no doubt there are people. are hypochondriacs in every category of illness but obviously the allergies people have to peanuts are deadly which does not tend to be true for but

you know, observe. Oh, now the signs are like, it's tree nuts. You know, does this thing contain tree nuts? And then when you look at it, it's like, under tree nuts is included coconut.

like i'm sorry but that's a different allergy that's a different thing because coconuts on walnuts are so disney related that no one who is allergic to walnuts is inherently allergic to coconuts so that just tells you right there that there is something so wrong with the entire category that some number of people like yes well i'm allergic to tree nuts you know i can't eat coconut therefore like you know you were you were

full of crap well i mean i now having thought such things and having discovered how sensitive i am and then chasing it back to what the likely cause is which we will get back to shortly yeah um I now feel that, oh, actually, it is not surprising that huge numbers of people have become allergic to a wide array of normally consumed foods. That's not on them. That's on the system that exposed them to the.

causal agents and we're going to come back to a distinction between causal agents and triggers here a little later but nonetheless i didn't think i was going to turn out to have a wheat sensitivity in fact it sounded preposterous to me because i'm jewish on both sides of my family ashkenazi jewish my ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years how the hell would selection have allowed a wheat allergy

Your people are definitely weed eaters. Yeah, weed eaters. So anyway, I just ran the experiment just to knock it off the list so I could say, well, one more thing that turns out not to be.

the causal agent here and lo and behold it didn't happen right away but if i took wheat out of my diet completely and i mean one hundred per cent completely absolutely rigorous about it in a matter of weeks the symptom that i was chasing off-variant asthma as my doctors told me i had vanished along with a whole bunch of other stuff that i didn't know were symptoms of anything most conspicuously the nightly battle where my hands would fall asleep in bed

tingle like crazy and all that so that went away migraine headaches which obviously are a pathology but i didn't know that they were going to be related to the same thing that was causing me to cough especially in the winter So anyway, all sorts of stuff vanished. And I thought, I've still got to be imagining this. And so I went to a doctor and I said, test me for a gluten allergy. Test came back negative.

okay i am imagining it went back to eating wheat holy cow everything came rushing back quickly like in a matter of a day and I went back to the doctor and I said, why do I test negative if my experience is that wheat reliably triggers this suite of symptoms? He says, that's not uncommon.

so okay that was interesting this is a mainstream allopathic doctor telling me that he's seen that part of it before so there's something more complicated than a simple you might have mentioned that when he gave you your results yeah he should you should have yeah um but nonetheless so It turned out I have a wheat allergy and the pattern has been if I'm absolutely rigorous about keeping wheat out of my diet, my symptoms go away. I'm much healthier and happier and it becomes clear through this.

that I was living in a state of constant body-wide inflammation, which is really unhealthy, and that if I take the stuff out of my diet, then except in those rare occasions when it slips in somewhere because it's not listed on an ingredient list or somebody doesn't understand the question or whatever happens, except in those cases,

all of those symptoms go away and so that was the state that i was living in many people have of course reported that they have an allergy to wheat oh and i should say the reason i don't think my allergy is to gluten is that my allergy involves a sensitivity to oats including so-called gluten-free oats

So many people have a cross reactivity. I appear to have that cross reactivity. I react to Bombay Sapphire Gin, which this is a pretty good test because I didn't even know gin had wheat in it at all. I didn't know that it was made with wheat. I assumed, like most people assume, it's made with wheat.

with juniper berries. No, it's flavored with juniper berries. It's grain alcohol. And Bombay Sapphire Gin is certified gluten-free. But I accidentally discovered that it had wheat in it when I ordered a gin and tonic. Didn't. connect it to the symptoms that then showed up and then several weeks later ordered another gin and tonic and it happened again and so then i started chasing it down oh lo and behold bombay sapphire is made with wheat but gluten-free

So I don't, and I react to spelt. We tried the ancient grains thing and they triggered me as well. and there are a whole host of other pieces of evidence where there's one instance in which somebody gave me a drink that we later discovered had grain alcohol in it. And you didn't tell me because it was a good test. You'd already drunk. I'd already drunk it. And so the question is, well, will the symptoms show up? Lo and behold, they do. So anyway, that's the basic picture.

Many people have told me, you know, hey, when I go to Europe, my weed allergy goes away. And I've never run the experiment before because I never go for long enough that I feel like... you know, destroying days of a trip across the pond. which I felt certain would happen because the allergy is so broad that I felt like, yeah, some people aren't reacting to European wheat, but I'm not going to be one of those people. So it's like, yes, I would like to know the answer, but it's not worth ruining.

a bunch of days of a trip well this trip was long enough and i decided to run the experiment uh you and i talked about it and um February 26th, I believe, I started eating things made with European wheat, and I expected the symptoms to show up.

i started with uh a croissant and then upon that not triggering the symptoms in the ways that i was expecting i got a little aggressive about it and i started just eating like a normal person to see if it was going to trigger and it didn't which shocked me because whatever is going on with american wheat

it's a close relative of european wheat and i was eating a lot you know this wasn't a question of testing a trace amount this was a question of a sizable quantity of wheat and so anyway i reported out on that on a video that we put out on on x and i thought huh well this is a revelation i'm free to eat whatever i want here in europe and then somewhere in the neighborhood of

30 to 36 hours, I'm in bed, and lo and behold, I realize my hands have gone numb. And following day, I get a headache, and the headache won't go away. It's not a terrible headache, but... Doesn't respond to water, doesn't respond to aspirin, doesn't respond to coffee, which are things that typically I can get rid of a normal headache with. So I thought, ah, damn. Must have been that I overwhelmed.

the system and i'm less sensitive to european wheat but i'm still sensitive damn and then you and i started talking about whether or not that actually was the most reasonable interpretation of the pattern that we had seen of the evidence we had at our disposal and what's more a bunch of people responded to that first video and told me some things that i didn't know they told me

for one thing that although i had imagined that europeans being enlightened about things like glyphosate simply wouldn't import american wheat that in fact there is a fair amount of wheat being imported

into the u.s i mean into into europe from the u.s and so it became clear that there was at least one other possibility here which was that i'm not sensitive to european wheat but that i had encountered some regular old american wheat in the european text and that I needed to run another experiment.

You are accurate in describing yourself as having eaten a lot of things with wheat in it, but for the most part you were discerning. Like I had found this fantastic bakery from whence we got croissant and bread. And we went to an excellent restaurant that had excellent bread. But then there was one mid-afternoon meal where we just stopped in at a place that was advertising churros.

Well, and I had felt this being a classic Spanish thing that I, you know, felt like, well, if I can try it, I should. And we got gazpacho, which was quite good, but it came with... not interesting bread which you know i tasted that this isn't worth eating but you had a little bit of it and you had a churro and um in thinking about um all the things that you ate with wheat in them it feels like that you know

That restaurant is most likely to have used cheap wheat, and the cheap wheat may be precisely what is being imported. Which, you know, the number of things that we have discovered about this wheat story is many. growing regularly. So among the things that I want to get back to, I think it's actually one of the punchlines of the story is why is American wheat any different? And there are a couple of different reasons. You found one of them.

which we can get back to the bromination issue. But the one that fascinated me was that apparently American wheat is souped up with respect to gluten. now this doesn't exactly explain why i should have a different reaction to it because the tiniest amount triggers me so you know the fact that the each per unit of wheat there's more gluten and it shouldn't make any difference but again it's not gluten that's

apparently my trigger but the interesting question is well why is american wheat souped up why would you increase uh by you know a multiple of something like five the amount of gluten and wheat why would that be a desirable thing to do and the answer i think is going to hint at a a large number of health implications of the american diet the thing about the gluten is that the more of it you have in the bread we all know that gluten provides that sort of spongy feel

The elasticity. The elasticity of the fibers in the bread. the problem is it goes stale and that elasticity disappears and the more gluten you have the longer it lasts so what i'm coming to think is that american wheat is different because it has been heavily modified due to a supply change it's like the tomatoes that have been bred so that they can last for a couple of weeks in transit they can be picked unripe

you know these things have consequences downstream and in this case the desirability of having bread that feels fresh even though it's been a long time getting to the shelf is desirable in the context of a mega economy like ours where the bread isn't being sourced locally so somewhere cryptically in the change from you go down the street to your local bakery to source some bread

to you pick it up at the supermarket and they get it from the bakery to actually it's a factory product from some factory that's two states away. You know, that has implications that we haven't thought about. It's a classic welcome to complex systems. you're going to modify the wheat so that that doesn't cause the bread to be less appealing. But what are you going to do to the health of the people who are eating it? Right. That kind of thing. So. So let me just say.

briefly with regard to what what are we doing to our flower that other people are not yes we have increased through through selection the the relative content of gluten in our flour, which is problematic for the reasons that you're talking about, but at least it's increasing something that is already there.

And so the potassium bromate that is also in many, many American flowers has actually been outlawed in many of the countries around the world, including China, including most places in Europe. And potassium bromate... is a known carcinogen, but the advantages of it are that it increases elasticity and rise.

And so it actually does the same sort of thing that gluten does. And I don't know if bromated flour actually increases the shelf life of bread, but it does, it is a stand in for gluten. Oh, and it decreases the time. that you need to mix the dough in order to get it to rise so it's just you know it's a time-saving measure and it's an appearance of quality

Enhancer, not an actual quality enhancer because, you know, it's a carcinogen, but it's an appearance of quality enhancer, which unfortunately is something that many American products are particularly good at appearance of quality enhancement. Interesting. So. This then fits into a couple of categories. We've got a supply chain issue which starts affecting the ingredients. The ingredients are bent to the will of those who are

in the production process. And it also goes into a category of things where something natural is modified cryptically by the market. So years ago, it was never published, but I wrote a piece called Of Mice and Markets about what had happened to the mice that we used to test. drug safety on and as far as i understand the story and i could be wrong about this but as far as i understand the story as an outsider to the mouse production industry the desire to efficiently produce mice

was causing an official bias to reproducing young animals rather than old animals. Old animals are less efficient at producing offspring, so if you're in the business of selling mice, you are rewarded. for breeding young animals but that had caused this modification to the mice themselves that had made them wildly prone to cancer and wildly resistant to tissue damage which then had impacted their utility as a drug safety test impacted it

in exactly the way that pharma would like it. It makes drugs that are toxic look safe. So general category is market impact something in a way you don't anticipate. It creates an unanticipated... consequence in a complex system like a mouse and then that has implications for human health that creates a vioxx problem where you think you've tested a drug for safety and you haven't um so

I bet we're going to find a lot of things in these two categories. So that's one of the punchlines here. Now, I must say many people who have heard my story and I haven't finished it yet, but I've heard my story. to this point say what about glyphosate yep it's probably glyphosate it's not in europe that's probably the yep the reason that you're okay here's the reason i am all but dead sure that's wrong

I do react to organic wheat, which does not have glyphosate in it here in the U.S. Well, but. So one of the questions that we didn't get to in our Q&A last time. claimed and i have not uh followed through uh that organic farms are sometimes placed near non-organic farms precisely because they get some of the benefits of some of the sides, some of the herbicides and pesticides and stuff that are sprayed on the organic farms. non-organic farms such that

you cannot actually be certain that organic products are free of the things that you were hoping that they are free of. Because I think by and large, I mean, the organic standards are crap in the US and they're being, you know, they're being... dismantled as well. But I think in general, the standards, the tests are about like, how did you grow this stuff as opposed to across the board testing of the actual products? Empirical test. Yeah. Okay. I agree. I've heard.

that same argument i don't think it applies here and there are a couple reasons for that one if that were true then my sensitivity would be highly variable in a way it doesn't seem to be right there'd be wheat that didn't affect me there'd be wheat you know organic wheat that didn't affect me there'd be other organic wheat that did affect me further and here we have to go on reports that are not themselves it's impossible to check how rigorous they are but

even though wheat so wheat is not roundup ready there is no planted wheat for agricultural use that is roundup ready the reason there is define roundup ready again so roundup is a monsanto product roundup is glyphosate Yes. It is a glyphosate-based herbicide. A glyphosate-based herbicide that kills insects, interestingly. We'll get back to that in a second.

roundup ready is a genetic modification of a crop that allows it to tolerate roundup so that you can dump a bunch of roundup on the crop and it will kill the plants that have not been genetically modified that is the weeds that's in theory kind of a cool system except for the fact that you're ingesting the stuff that you know does damage to animals like insects what damage does it do well it tears holes in their guts

Is it doing the same thing to us? Well, very probably, in addition to being carcinogenic and having other negative effects. So there is no Roundup Ready wheat. Why is there no Roundup Ready wheat? Is it somehow resistant to genetic modification? No, apparently it is not. But Monsanto decided not to genetically modify wheat.

to make it roundup ready because they thought it was going to be an economic loser and i've forgotten the exact rationale here but they thought that the backlash over roundup readiness in wheat wasn't worth it they have however discovered that it can be used as a desiccant which is a disaster so a desiccant in this case means they haven't modified the wheat to be tolerant and in fact they use it to kill the wheat at the end of harvest

so that it dries out and doesn't get overgrown with mold. So the problem with that is that not only is there glyphosate on the wheat, but it's at the very end. So it hasn't had the time to degrade through natural biological processes. You're spraying it on so it's concentrated on the product that people are eating. So it's potentially even worse than a Roundup Ready crop. So this may be too inside baseball here, but we know that glyphosate...

is an herbicide, it kills plants. We know that it also works against insects by creating holes in their guts. So it's also, it goes after plants, it goes after animals.

And then it's used as a desiccant to make the growing conditions unlikely for mold to grow. It doesn't make it an actual fungicide, but it's effectively a fungicide. So glyphosate, you can begin to understand why, in terms of the market, it is... so popular it can be used to keep unwanted plants animals and fungus away yeah all of those three massive clades that all three of the multicellular clades on this planet um can be tackled with this one molecule it's a

highly effective bias side um and that ought to cause you to wonder you're intervening in a complex system in a way that is general enough i don't know whether it has effects on mold specifically right it's strictly through the desiccation but it but it's but if it creates the conditions that uh that don't allow mold to grow and so i mean i was careful what i said and not say it was a fungicide but that it

It can be used against all three major multicellular clades. Yep. It's a one-stop shop for getting your wheat to market without any of the things that might compete with it. That said... The fraction of the, so no organic wheat should have desiccant glyphosate sprayed on it. And the fraction of the wheat that is not organic that has it is apparently very small.

like single digit percentage. So again, if it were the glyphosate that was triggering me, I should have a wide range of reactions to wheat based on whether it's present or absent or how concentrated it is. And I don't. I seem to be... super reactive to anything that's got weed in it. The other piece of evidence is even though you and I are incredibly careful to buy organic

you know, corn tortillas when we can find and that kind of thing. We do go to restaurants and restaurants are very rarely careful about this. In fact, they are, the market favors them.

to do whatever is economically efficient that produces something that you like and it's a very rare customer that is you know going to reject a restaurant based on the fact that they're not shopping all organic so in general i am eating gmo corn that presumably has glyphosate on it and i don't react to it yeah so anyway the point is glyphosate does not appear to be the trigger here i do think it's highly likely that it was involved involved in producing the allergy

that the combination of adjuvants in vaccines, and I think it was likely to be a flu shot in my case, and the glyphosate that... does gut damage or potentially does gut damage that combination is likely to have put molecules of food that i was eating in contact with my immune system in a way that the immune system is not supposed to have contact with your your food um and to be hyper activated by the adjuvant that

i would say is the most likely that is the hypothesis that i believe is most likely to explain why i picked up a wheat allergy in the first place so production i think glyphosate's involved trigger absolutely unnecessary and insufficient also because the gml corn would trigger me okay so as the experiment ran wheat did not trigger me in a way that i expected it to that went on for a long enough period of time that i'm confident that it was at least very different and then my symptoms came

back and you and i wrestled with what that meant and we ultimately concluded that the likely explanation was that i had encountered american wheat that triggered my american wheat allergy and that i actually am okay to eat european wheat and that required a second test but in order to run the second test to go back to wheat and have my immune system which was now on alert for wheat because i'd had a recent reaction to it in order to see whether or not

I really am insensitive to the triggers in European wheat. I needed my symptoms to clear.

And then at the point that they cleared, I needed to eat some more European wheat that we had carefully established was indeed European in origin. But to be precise about how to interpret this somewhat fly-by-night experiment... um because you had recently triggered yourself for the with wheat for the first time in a long time had you upon having more european wheat even after your symptoms had cleared had symptoms again that would not

that could not be taken as compelling evidence right um that yes for sure you are allergic to european wheat even if the new wheat that you had eaten was certainly european in origin which we made sure it was whereas if upon reintroducing for sure european wheat back into your diet even just a few days after you had been triggered by maybe non-European wheat, if you did not get triggered, then that seemed like relatively definitive evidence that actually, probably you had something either else.

That you're triggered by or non-European wheat and that European wheat is clear for you. Yeah. And the punchline of the story is that is exactly what happened. I went back. I ate some wheat. I... expected to get the ambiguous result. It did not happen. I had no reaction whatsoever. A delicious croissant. A delicious croissant followed by a...

I am now blanking on the Spanish word for snail. Is it caracola? Yeah. Is that right? Caracola, I believe that's correct. Anyway, another pastry, which was, I will point out, also delicious but um anyway and a bag of little dough balls oh the well where are those all right delicious so yes i went back to european wheat we established by talking to the person that it was

going to be european in origin and no triggering effect whatsoever so what this now raises the question so first of all i will say that there's some part of this that is just strange, right? My reaction to American wheat and apparent insensitivity to European wheat when those two things are at least closely related, and yet I'm sensitive to American spelt.

Maybe we should even rerun that experiment. Oh, I think so. So ancient grains, sprouted grains, and we now have relatively good evidence that European wheat... is is working for you i think i was i was always highly disappointed by and suspicious of the result that uh ancient grains were just as tree ancient wheat spelt was just as triggering for you

Well, we should rerun that experiment. And also, of course, the... But then an additional one would be European wheat grown in America. Because I... There is something going on that is complex and bad in the combination of American air, water, soil that people report. And I don't know that this was our experience exactly.

the people report that they go to europe and they eat a ton and they feel healthier and they come back and they're eating less because they're in their normal lives you know if if that's the kind of humans they are and yet they gain weight They gain weight eating what should be a healthy diet in moderation in the United States. And in Europe, that doesn't happen.

Yes, of course, there are differences in expectations of movement and not snacking all the time and portion sizes and, you know, all of these things are true, but it also... is certainly true that we have done a very thorough job of poisoning our soils and ourselves and you just you can't get away from everything that we've done over the last decades in the u.s if you're eating

locally in the US. Yes. I suspect a lot of this is going to turn out to be supply chain modifications, either intentional or accidental. thing to worry about i agree with you that in theory it would be great to test the question of a european strain of wheat grown in the u s but it would have to be grown away from regular wheat So it doesn't cross. Yeah, that's the thing I'd be concerned about is that it wouldn't be a pure experiment because what you think is imported wheat may not.

genetically be that so anyway i'd love to run that experiment but short of that experiment the obvious experiment is imported wheat which is available in the u.s just make the stuff here and just establish that uh the wheat itself is um a sufficient modification which will be a cool discovery anyway but um so so that's the uh the state of it i will say uh mark girardot i should have dredged up the tweet but he

responded to one of my videos and said you know this doesn't really make sense because if this were an allergy your reaction to it would be instantaneous and it would be all across your body and on the one hand I think he's got it. So Mark Girardot is the guy you will recall has been advancing what he calls bolus theory about the hazards of the COVID shots that were connected to the failure to aspirate the syringe.

And therefore that a lot of people got accidental intravenous. Oh, here's Mark Gerardo's tweet. He says. Brett Weinstein, something doesn't add up. If you are allergic to something in the wheat or a contaminant, the allergic reaction would be a quasi instantaneous, would be quasi instantaneous, especially in the gut. And when you...

So you'd have issues in your lungs, your skin, your feet, your nose, even your heart. The fact that it's only giving you a headache is possibly more symptomatic of... BBB link leakage. and numbness is a possibility indicative of the place in the brain where the inflammation occurred indeed the pesticide in the brain tissue could trigger stronger than normal inflammation reaction bbb linkage

The leakage, sorry, drives neurodegenerative disease but is easily fixable. What's BBB leakage? I'm not sure. But nonetheless, the... I disagree with Mark here for a couple of reasons. The expectation might be an instantaneous blood brain barrier, blood brain barrier. Right. The expectation might be an instantaneous reaction. On the other hand, there are lots of things, like let's suppose that, first of all, here's a piece of evidence from my own life.

I mentioned in a couple of different places, but in one of the videos that I released from Spain that... at the same time that i had picked up a wheat allergy i also picked up an allergy to marijuana which i was smoking too much of when i was in college the interesting thing is in later life i have experimented with eating marijuana instead of smoking it and the reaction i get is in my lungs right my lungs fill with fluid just as if i had smoked it so

What do I derive from that? That the immune reaction is localized, which is actually quite consistent with a lot of what we know about the way the immune system functions. So I think it is easily possible that the allergy in question has a local component, that the place where the immune system encountered what it thought was a pathogen, which was really just an antigen, was

in the lower gut and that it would therefore take a lot of time for it to reach there and it might take time for the symptoms to manifest strongly enough that they were detectable so i don't think it is true that an instantaneous reaction is a required consequence of of an allergy. But I do agree that there's something about this whole story that

It feels strange. There's some missing component that we need to understand. And I'm as eager to figure out what it is as you are, Mark. I think it's a fascinating question. And the more we figure it out about this, the better it's going to be because I'm certainly not the only person. with an allergy like this. Okay. Um, is there something else? Maybe, maybe that's it for now. I want to run this. Oh, I guess one more thing just, um, prompted by our sponsors this week.

so peak mandaka says okay but you know unlike other unlike some other mushroom based products we only use the fruiting bodies we don't use the mycelium and therefore it's also free of grains and so if you haven't thought about how mushrooms are grown

captivity um you may not it may not make any sense mycelium are effectively they're analogous to the roots of the mushroom uh and um they're grown in grains a lot of a lot of organizations will just like scoop up the entire thing be like that's all mushroom little bit of effectively soil but

as it turns out, grains, too. But this raises the issue of the potential for cryptic allergens and things. So just like you turn out to, you know, we discover that Bombay Sapphire Gin somehow... has wheat in it somewhere right because you react so too may people be triggering themselves so even people who have tried to put themselves on elimination diets or you know feel like oh you know what it's going to be

It's going to be eggs. It's going to be, you know, dairy, whatever it is that they've convinced themselves. And it may well be true. Like, ah, I really don't want to have to. kick this out of my diet. But if I can find the thing and get rid of it, wouldn't that be amazing? And yes, it would be like your life really changed once you figured out what your trigger was. But the number, the amount of complexity.

in our diets. And the hidden complications are so diverse and so numerous that it is extraordinarily difficult to actually do a true elimination diet. unless you are cutting processed foods out. entirely and so i guess that's that was the one additional thing i wanted to say that um you know you would think that a mushroom-based coffee would be inherently free of of wheat but nope like not inherently and um while you know labeling

is great and truth in labeling is important, you're not going to get a full explanation of how absolutely every part of the process was done on any given label. As much as it's easy to mock the sort of Portlandia style like i want to know exactly you know where that chicken was raised and what its name was and the conditions and everything and like i feel that like i want to know that for the for the food that i bring into our house and we don't ask those questions at restaurants

um it's still impossible the more processed the food is uh the more unlikely you are to know what each decision was made and therefore we're um allergies allergens may be hiding right and i also want to point out that part of this um phenomenon the allergies to you know the hypersensitivity to the tiniest you know fleck of a peanut

is part and parcel of the system that has been disrupted where you get a non-proportionate response and the reason for that is because what the immune system is built to do the reason that a good vaccine is highly effective is when you get a disease and you beat it your body creates memory cells that allow it to react so quickly the next time that it sees that thing that you have no idea that you've had a little mini infection right you just don't get the thing

and so what a good vaccine and i don't know that any of the vaccines that are available are good vaccines but what a good vaccine does is it gives the information in a context that the immune system creates memory cells so that The slightest hint of an infection with that thing triggers an immune response that overwhelms and kills the pathogen. So the point is, how much stuff is there if you get one particle of a flu?

Right? We're talking about, you know, nanoscale stuff. You're talking about an overwhelming response by your body in response to the tiniest quantity of pathogen.

and so when it's a pathogen is what you want right and when it's pollen or a peanut it's not what you want right or wheat and so you know it's almost if you think in linear terms you begin to disbelieve that you have a sensitivity to strong like you know oh the little tiny bit of wheat in some soy sauce that somebody put a dash of it into a big pot of soup is enough to trigger me like how could that possibly be there's not enough

you know even if it was a poison there's just not enough and the answer is oh yes there is because your your body's surveillance system is on the lookout for molecules that's literally what's happening it's looking

for molecules that tell it you've encountered a pathogen and then it's going to mobilize an army and you're just constantly mobilizing the army. So I guess I'm not sure you said linear, but it is not... this is not the place to invoke the solution to pollution is dilution right this is it's it is not that situation it is uh it is not

density-dependent response. Yes, it is not a quantity-dependent response in this case. And this is a feature of a number of biological systems. You will notice that the FDA... uh claims that it you know can't find detectable hormone in the milk or that there's no distinction you know between the hormone infused milk and the milk from cows that were never treated with rbst

but what they don't tell you is that by the very nature of rbst as a hormone it should take vanishingly small amounts to trigger the animal in question the cow to have a response and the idea that we can't detect this thing in the milk therefore it's safe would be true if you were talking about a normal poison. But if you're talking about a chemical message that triggers your system into a new phase, no, it's not true at all.

Yes, static. Yes, reductionist. Yes, metric heavy. But also, like, materialist thinking. in some ways it's like this is inherently just about like how much of the thing there is as opposed to what it will unlock what it will unleash what process is this the key to and when you're talking about something unlocking process like all you have to do is get the door open a little bit and then it's pandora's box yeah and in a in a related context i've used the example of um paul revere

let's take the myth never mind that paul revere didn't do most of the ride but the point is one if by land two if by sea right you've got somebody looking out for ships they put some lamplight in the old north church bell tower and it sets a horse and rider in motion across the landscape that mobilizes thousands right the point is it's completely disproportionate you're talking about a tiny number of photons that reach somebody's retina resulting in a couple of you know candle lamps in a

bell tower and the point is the response is thousands of people with guns you know yeah so that's what biology can do and this actually this i think is a decent segue to talking about um trump and musk all right um i think you had you had more to say about trump and i have more to say about about musk um and i'm gonna let you go first but the segue here is The tech utopianism that I see in Musk is I am concerned precisely because

uh that approach to the world imagines that we can solve all problems that our resources are infinite that human ingenuity has no bounds and that no matter what problem

we find ourselves facing or have ourselves created, we will inherently solve it. But it lives in this engineering schema that is static, that is... that imagines these you know materials as static things that you can move around as sort of the the grandmaster looking down the chessboard as opposed to recognizing that things like the immune system don't act that way

And so there's a naivete and a total lack of wisdom in combination with a tremendous amount of power that is worrying. Yeah, I mean, and we've said it many times here, but it's what happens when a complicated mindset. Especially a truly complicated mindset. Somebody who has mastered highly complicated systems confronts a complex system and assumes that it's not distinct. The point is, no, a complex system is capable of upending you.

Right. You know, at the drop of a hat, because it can take something like, you know, a small number of molecules and turn it into a body wide response. Right. You don't anticipate that if you're working in the realm of the complicated, because that's.

not typically how complicated stuff works yeah um just get it done yeah well only if everything that you were overseeing is uh fits correctly in the categorization scheme that you that you're already working in and you know it doesn't right it doesn't so we what we have is you know one needs to spend

a bunch of time on a mountaintop somewhere thinking about chesterton's fence and the precautionary principle and complex systems and how hyper complicated systems look like complex systems but aren't right you need to spend time with that in order to understand what you're risking uh by messing with a complex system uh you are always under informed about it and i will just say the punch line of that story i think is this is not

the suggestion that you have to surrender in the face of a complex system but you have to meet it on its terms and so what does that look like imagine a surfer who you know sat down at their computer or their whiteboard or whatever and planned out their day of surfing, right? The first quarter second is going to upend any plan they could come up with. You cannot blueprint your day of surfing, but you can surf.

You could surf, but it also, that doesn't mean that you can't say, okay, I know where I'm going and we've mapped the underlying landform and we know historically what waves tend to come at this time of year under these conditions. So you can do a whole lot that does inform you and that does give you a better sense of what is coming.

but it's not going to actually ensure that you catch the best wave you've ever caught. So you can be somewhat informed by all of the data that you've collected. The error is in imagining that those data are... sufficient.

It also doesn't mean that to surf that those data are necessary. And so that's another kind of arrogance that's happening over in tech utopian lands. Like, well, you know, we're data forward and like, therefore, you know, we're data driven and that's the thing that we need to be. It's like.

not your kind of data may be useful under some circumstances but it isn't necessary to do some of the jobs you're doing and once you have a bunch of data in your hand you are much more likely to think that is now enough And I guess I'm going to argue in the abstract here that neither necessary nor sufficient and the certainty that is emerging from the people who are armed with all these data and confusing complicated systems with the complex system.

are putting us at risk. Yeah. The key is understanding what tools that apply to a complex system. or what tools that apply to a complicated system don't apply to a complex system. And the idea is a surfer can be a master of the complex system that is the water. Anybody who is a virtuoso uh has the ability to basically modify course on a fine enough scale to correctly find their way down the wave uh find their way across the court whatever it is

The metaphors are you can't blueprint it, but you can navigate to it. You can prototype. But the key under all of this stuff, what makes it work, is that you don't think you know ahead of time. it's feedback right yes i did this and the consequence was that and that wasn't what i expected and if i increase the amount of this the next response

really isn't what I expected, therefore I need to think about whether that's because some other force is drowning it out or the thing I'm doing isn't having the impact or there's some third factor that is causing the consequence to reverse. Or I can grant that I've been surprised.

by what i found i didn't see this coming let's rethink yeah There has to be room for everyone involved in these processes in which they are trying to either create whole new systems or radically reform by either burning the old ones to the ground or using some of the bits and pieces to... to at any moment say huh

i did not see that coming this is not what i thought this was going to look like and i am actually not prepared with the data i had in hand and the models that i had in hand to move forward right now i'm going to need to think about this yeah that that needs to be a possibility on the table and we're not I'm not seeing evidence of that. Yeah. It's what our friend Alex Marinos calls epistemic humility. Epistemic humility is the key when you're navigating in complex waters.

Anyway, it's a culture that we're going to have to build and taking the people who have most mastered the complicated systems isn't going to get us there. All right. So I have more to say, but I thought you wanted to talk about Trump. Well, I wanted to talk about the Trump and Massey thing. I don't know based on what you want to say where that fits best. Why don't you just you. All right. So let's talk about some things that I think are going on in.

the Trump sphere that are revealed by the episode this week with Thomas Massey. And so for those of you who don't know what's going on, there is a continuing resolution in congress designed to keep the government going for i think three months based on the failure to have reached a budgetary agreement but basically congress routinely kicks the can down the road by providing a continuation of current budgetary allocations.

that buys them time and what happens is if you fail to get one of these continuing resolutions the government shuts down there's some famous back and forth history there who gets blamed by the public is a game played by both sides right if you think you can get the government to shut down it can cause americans to feel pain and that the other side is going to get blamed that in the american context of you know blood politics has been taken as a win um so

we are at the point where congress is trying to hash out a continuing resolution uh i think the conventional wisdom is that Trump stands to lose. If the government shuts down, it will look like he's not in control of things and that the pain being caused is the result of the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing. So he wants a continuing resolution. The problem is the continuing resolution contains a lot of budgetary.

garbage of exactly the kind that doge is set up to eliminate so it looks bad the optics are bad and it may indeed be just simply bad thomas massey being the unusual creature that he is Republican from Utah. Republican from Kentucky. Did I get it wrong? This is embarrassing. It's going to be... Sorry. I'm now thrown by that, but let's ignore that for the moment. Heather will figure it out. Yeah. Massey.

exempted himself i was thinking of mike lee sorry yeah massey exempted himself from the continuing resolution and said that he was going to vote no on the basis that this is a game that congress plays repeatedly and um that he wasn't going to participate. So he makes the case that he is going to vote his conscience here, putting... The government in danger of shutting down. And Donald Trump. You were right. Kentucky. Kentucky. Okay. Okay. Donald Trump put out a tweet, which I should read to you.

Can we get that up on the screen? It's a little hard to read from here, but it says. I can do it if you want. Yeah, would you? Thank you to the House Freedom Caucus for just delivering a big blow to the radical left Democrats and their desire to raise taxes and shut our country down. They hate America and all it stands for. That's why they allowed millions of criminals to invade our nation.

times it takes great courage to do the right thing. Congressman Thomas Massey of beautiful Kentucky is an automatic no vote on just about everything, despite the fact that he has always voted for continuing resolutions in the past. He should be primaried. And I... We ran out of text, Jen.

He should be primaried, and I will lead the charge against him. He's just another grandstander who's too much trouble and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Cheney before her historic, record-breaking fall, loss. The people of Kentucky won't stand for it. Just watch. Do I have any takers? Anyway, thank you again.

the House Freedom Caucus for your very important vote. We need to buy some time in order to make America great again, greater than ever before, unite and win. Okay, so many of us had a pretty bad... reaction to that tweet by Trump. And I will say I had a very negative reaction to it. And I just simply took a picture that I made when I visited Thomas Massey in Washington.

uh and i just put it out and i said i stand with thomas massey do you want to put that up again jen um now to my surprise this tweet i I don't keep careful track of these things. In fact, I don't really keep track at all. But I think it might be my most liked tweet of all time. It's like 54,000 likes and counting.

Having not even found its way, as far as I could tell, it was not even in the Twitter trend, which can sometimes increase the amount of traffic on a tweet because lots of people who don't follow you see it in the trend. This wasn't that. Something like 54,000 people have liked this tweet, apparently, also standing with Thomas Massey. I did also get a lot of pushback in the replies. But the question is, what the hell is going on here?

And I will just say, first of all, when I said I stand with Thomas Massey, I do not mean that I stand with his vote against the continuing resolution. I take no position on that. i don't know whether the horror show that is the continuing resolution is better than the brinksmanship that will unfold if it fails what i mean is i don't like

President Trump threatening Thomas Massey over a vote of conscience that is consistent with many of the values that Donald Trump has expressed. That is not how this should happen. What should have happened, in my opinion.

is trump should have called massy over to the white house and said look i agree with the values that you're talking about we need the continuing resolution for the following reasons and here is plan going forward here is how i can be helpful there should have been some sort of a negotiated settlement in which thomas massey could go to his constituents and frankly the rest of us who support him and say

i am persuaded that in this case as much as the continuing resolution is extremely troubling in its content that we are trying to reimagine an airplane in flight that's not an easy thing to do there's going to be a certain amount of carnage i'm going to vote for this even though i don't you know in my heart of hearts support the idea of continuing resolutions being used in this way and i don't support the content of this one etc

But that fantasy that you just put forward imagines a world in which Trump is a bit more forgiving and open, perhaps, than he is. But that seems... possible but it also relies on massey's changing his vote and that i don't know why inherently even if even if trump had come to him and say and said look here here are the reasons you really should

Massey might well have said, you know, I hear you, Mr. President, but I don't agree and I'm going to continue to vote my conscience. So, you know, that I feel like, frankly, that might have made things worse. Well, if Trump had invited him for a conversation, Massey had said, I hear you, Mr. President, with all due respect, still no. I don't know. But my sense is having a president threaten a congressman.

With primarying him for disagreeing over a legislative matter raises questions for me about separation of powers. It's not appropriate behavior. But it is really interesting to me. that the response many of us who supported Trump in this election were thrown by this interaction because we support. massey as a you know almost unique in congress person of principle and um and i think it is actually emblematic of

This is a very important moment in the Trump presidency. And I want to point out what I think is going on. So first of all, let me just say the responses to this were highly varied. Very creative. They came in a language that Trump speaks. So here's the famous meme of the guy oogling the new gal. Did you say oogling?

I think so. I think it's ogling. You don't oogle. No, I wouldn't. You google. I wouldn't ogle or oogle. I was going to do one of them. I'd probably ogle. Okay. So anyway, in this ogling meme, the new... sexy girl is played by Thomas Massey and the prior very similar girlfriend is labeled Donald Trump and the guy who's had his head turned by the

New thing coming the other way is people who actually want to MAGA. So that's a pretty interesting... I think that meme kind of encapsulates what's going on is that Trump is now... taken out of the land of rhetoric and back into the land of policy where he has all kinds of constraints that, you know, we can't see, right? He's juggling all kinds of stuff. And that is causing him to confront his own constituents over matters of principle that he may have been very clear about.

on the campaign trail but is now you know it's a messier business he needs to get stuff done so what is this moment that we are at where uh thomas massey stands up to the president, the president threatens him, and some huge fraction of the president's supporters actually stand with Massey and not with Trump. Well, I hate to... I hate to say I told you so. Yeah, I really do hate to say I told you so. I don't like saying it. But the victory that President Trump experienced in this election.

was not MAGA. It contained MAGA as part of a much larger coalition. It contained MAGA, it contained MAHA, and it contained what I would call the unity movement all sorts of politically homeless people who don't like the republicans don't like the democrats needed somebody to champion the people and donald trump having decapitated the republican party was the unique person in the race after bobby left it who they could imagine supporting

because he was going to do their bidding. And the problem here is that I think, as much as you and I have said, and I still believe, that Donald Trump was profoundly altered by all of the exotic weaponry that was deployed against him in the years and months running up to this election that he still i think did not understand the extent to which a vast army had showed up at his disposal because he was uniquely speaking for that army but that it was not its not occult of personality

it is a coalition of people that finds common cause and that that means trump because it's not a cult of personality president trump has to be much more mindful of doing the bidding of that coalition in order to keep it together and supportive because he needs its support. He has, you know... a party that is not entirely supportive of him and he's got a hostile party that would take any opportunity to to destroy him and so he needs to maintain a careful understanding

of what that coalition is built of and continue to speak for it. And if he does that, he's going to find that he's extremely powerful and can do the things that he dreams of. But if he starts threatening people like Thomas Massey, it's going to... Yeah. I mean, it must be confusing for him because, you know, the first assassination attempt on July 13th.

was at a rally and the rallies are mostly the trump rallies are mostly presumably filled with maga folks who were participating in at least partially a cult of personality certainly i think everyone can acknowledge that right so um the people whom trump was seeing uh were part of the same group who had elected him eight years ago and who voted for him four years ago as well.

And the new thing that happened, that really July 13th changed a lot of people's minds. A lot of people had their minds changed when they saw his response to almost being killed, even those who did not vote for him, ultimately. And, you know, he, as I said then, you know, it seemed that he, he seemed transformed. He seemed more like an adult. He seemed like he was.

uh taking counsel now in a way that he has not taken before but one of the things that uh that that opened up uh was the possibility i think of this coalition that he did not exactly acknowledge and i am i'm going to want to share a little bit from an excellent actually county highway piece that they've just made public that they just published today But one of the things that opened up was the relationship that Trump then formed with Elon Musk. So Elon Musk definitely helped get Trump elected.

Everything from getting vans to get Amish people to the voting places, to showing up at events with him, to you know, having X open up effectively for him. Musk helped get Trump elected and I think it may have been an easy error to make.

in trump's mind uh that the coalition that he was now involved with was him and elon as opposed to mega and maha and the unity movement and almost all the disaffected democrats and you know the union movement is a giant um you know giant tent but you know just like there's so many people you know the libertarians and the hippies and the you know vaccine injured moms and you know so many people

found either enthusiasm for Trump or, okay, not sure, but definitely the best option. And I'm really hopeful that he will do what he promised about Kennedy. Do what he promised about Gabbard. Put the people in whom he says he's aligned with and actually allow them to do some of the things that are really important to me. And frankly, he has done.

a lot of that, right? Like Kennedy is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Gabbard is now the, what's exactly her role? DNI. DNI, Director of National Intelligence. So, I mean, these things are amazing. And other than this... thing that you've just been describing, in which Trump goes after Massey publicly for doing what he is employed by the American public to do, which is vote his conscience.

Other than that, I actually continue to feel pretty good about most of what I see that Trump is doing, and my concern lies with what increasingly seems like the other half and it's not half like musk should not be the other half of the of the duo you know i you know vance should be the other half if there's a half and you know we don't see much of him and um

And certainly, you know, Kennedy and Gabbard had to sort of keep their heads down until they cleared the Senate confirmation hearings. But you will remember the Twilight Zone episode. in which a young boy has powers to send people into the cornfield. Oh, yeah. Right? Wish people a way to the cornfield. It aired first in 1961, before we were born. It's called It's a Good Life. And I just looked it up to remind myself.

IMDB summarizes it this way. On an isolated family farm in Peaksville, Ohio, young Anthony Fremont, who has vast mental powers but lacks emotional development, holds his terrified family and neighbors in thrall to his every juvenile wish. I find, unfortunately, that that sounds like Elon Musk. He's not a young boy, but vast mental powers but lacks emotional development, holding terrified family and neighbors in thrall to his every juvenile wish.

I keep waiting for Trump to pull back on the bromance and say to Musk, you need to be responsible. Well... I don't know what to think about that. I have concerns about... I have concerns, frankly, about a complicated systems mindset being applied to complex systems. I have concerns... a plenty that said i don't think there's an elegant way to do this i don't think there's another person so i don't think there's an elegant way to do it either but let me just say that

Trump in his first term made a ton of errors. He's presumably making a ton of errors now. But in his second term, especially with the four-year break that he didn't want, but that was probably very, very important for him if he's going to accomplish things here. He has more nuance. He has more wisdom. He is behaving more like an adult. This isn't Musk's second term. It's not actually his first, but he's acting like it's his first term. And he's...

He doesn't have the nuance or the wisdom yet. And I'm not saying he couldn't develop it, but he doesn't have it yet.

And he is supposedly being overseen by someone who does. And we need, you know, at the very least, some mentorship here. Yeah, well, I agree with that, actually. I think there's... i think mentorship is a perfect description of what is necessary and you know probably musk is an impressive guy he's done some amazing things and probably the president looks at the things that musk has done

Very few, if any, others could have done. And he's impressed. But the point is, actually, now we're in the space of governing. And that's not... you know at best it's a loose analogy to what one does in a corporation but it's decidedly different in so many ways that that there is a need for mentorship there yeah um but to the point that

There is a vast coalition that Trump is not powerful enough to do what he needs to do. He's got a limited amount of time. He's got two years before midterms and only four years. to get this done, it's going to be, you know, a hat trick at best. So he needs the unity coalition. You're right. It's not.

him and musk that's not the coalition and i do think that that's kind of how the campaign read that he felt that it was certainly the last six weeks or so yeah right um but i would point out that there are some places here where i see some dangers and some missteps that specifically speak to a failure to understand the coalition that put him over the top. Okay. One has to do with speech. So Trump benefited, and rightly so, by partnering with the face of it would be Joe Rogan.

Right. Coming on Joe Rogan's program, inviting Joe Rogan to the inauguration. The fact is he brought Joe Rogan in and Joe was skeptical, but he came on board because it was the right thing to do in light of the situation. if you are partnering with joe rogan you know and yes us and the rest of the unity movement rescue the republic all that but joe rogan as the face of that entity speech is front and center right

Joe Rogan has been at the tip of the spear responding to all of the speech violations in the last, you know, nearly decade. And to have President Trump...

going after people who are legally in the country based on their political opinions is completely unacceptable. And I understand that he is... demonstrating in his own way a sensitivity about anti-semitism and i frankly i haven't looked into the cases at all but the point is actually you know what Americans are allowed to have opinions, and people who are legally in the country are protected in the same way.

Free speech is the core of this project. And people can have opinions that people can have terribly wrong opinions and you don't get to legally toss them out of the country. um over what they say and think and so i don't want to paint this overly clearly in either direction there are a lot of anti-semit anti-semites in the pro-palestine movement but it is not

anti-Semitic to be pro-Palestine. It is not anti-Semitic to challenge Israeli policy. Any more than it is anti-American to challenge American policy. Right. Exactly. I mean, in fact, a vast quantity of the people in the unity movement took huge risks critiquing an American regime that was absolutely out of control. And many of us think of ourselves as patriots. Right. We are patriots. So there's the speech issue. There's the.

strategic error at least of going after thomas massey thomas massey is a person of principle many of us regard him as special in this regard and he's going to have a lot of backing so you know this is another place where i think trump misunderstands where he is there's the issue of tariffs and while i'm not going to pretend that i understand the

implications. Many people claim to understand the exact implications that tariffs are a mistake. I'm not going to claim to know, but I will say that so many people. are convinced that the tariff maneuver is a massive error, that it is, as if I'm to understand what's going on, causing a massive hiccup in the stock market, for example. But your first two examples there, speech.

and what he's just done publicly against thomas massey appear to be changes in form changes in what he was promising in advance of being elected whereas one of his planks was tariffs and so like i I do not have an opinion about tariffs. I don't know enough to have one at this point. I may develop one if I become more informed, but I don't know that he has changed his approach to tariffs. I don't remember where tariffs showed up, actually.

where the first mention of a... He was talking about tariffs well before he was elected. All right. So let's put an asterisk by that one. The fourth one on my list is the COVID and vaccine issue. Again, not a change. It's an error, but not a change from before he was elected. Right. But again, I would just say if the overall rubric is, hey.

you've got the power to do frankly necessary radical things in the office that you have ascended to but that power comes from a vast coalition from both sides of the political aisle yeah right That unity coalition is the key to making this work. And that unity coalition is, if not totally united, mostly united around the idea

Terrible things happened surrounding COVID. Many of those things happened on Trump's watch. He is not held responsible for the content of it. He didn't invent the shots or pretend they were safe and effective. He was presumably handed something that said they were, and he proceeded from there. So, you know, as I've said many times, he should just acknowledge that he was bamboozled by the same people that bamboozled many of the rest of us. But...

To keep that coalition supportive, he needs to recognize what the signature issues are of that coalition. And I would say he's a brilliant politician. He understands it. people in some ways better than anybody else, enough to have essentially single-handedly defeated the duopoly.

He decapitated the Republican Party and he seems to have, you know, left the Democratic Party bleeding on the battlefield. That's an amazing accomplishment. But somebody who can do that can also understand that actually, whether he likes it or not. The coalition that put him where he is or that allowed him to get there with a comfortable margin. That coalition has certain things that we require.

Protection of speech, I would say, is key among them. Protection of people in other branches of government who are acting out of conscience and getting to the bottom of, you know, COVID. the vaccine fiasco and further. And I don't know. I imagine that he's hoping.

presuming that kennedy now installed in hhs will take lead on thinking about covid maybe that's maybe i'm wrong maybe that's an unrealistic expectation if i'm not wrong that that's what he's hoping for you would hear a huge sigh of relief if we got the sense that Kennedy was going to be given leeway to do that job.

The concern, of course, in the health freedom movement is that there is going to be a limit and that Kennedy is going to... be dedicated to dealing with, for example, the food safety crisis and that we haven't heard very much about. Yeah, I mean, he takes such a hit on every single stance that he has. And I was going to say reasonable or not, like I haven't heard unreasonable stances from him, but the idea that people are freaking out that he wants to focus more on.

chronic than infectious diseases for a while is insane. Right. Like this, you know, the left, meanwhile, are the people who are valorizing chronic diseases and, you know, talking about how, how weak they are and how, you know, how sick everyone is. We can work on this. And so, you know, Kennedy is going to get stuck, probably, taking on one big problem. And the problem is that there are 87 big problems to solve.

You know, I take the usual approach here, which is it's not 87 problems, it's 87 symptoms. And, you know, that there is effectively, if it's not one problem, there's a couple. right there's a complex versus complicated systems issue there is an informed consent which used to be bedrock which has been sidelined by industry after industry and so just a simple reminder that this is a principle we don't get to violate under any circumstances and then a recognition that the way it was codified

after World War II was specific to experiments, but in a complex system, it's always an experiment, right? You never have enough information. So anyway, I do think that there's an approach. Bobby Kennedy can't make us healthy in four years.

But he can set us on the course where health outcomes as a result of interventions in complex systems are being properly monitored. And we are in the course of... altering our trajectory towards health i think that's readily doable but okay so all those things and then just as a final asterisk it's newer but President Trump seemed to be on the trajectory of generating peace, at least, with respect to

ukraine and then there's a question about how deep that commitment is whether armed shipments have uh restarted so all of these are places that we need to see uh greater caution and a recognition that as powerful as Trump is on the tails of this victory, that victory came from somewhere. paying attention to whose part of his coalition is important. So two pieces came out today or yesterday about all of this-ish.

And I don't think I'm going to read anything from the Unheard piece written by Poppy Sowerby about the three tribes of Magamen. I find it wrong, mostly. She identifies... identifies the the men in in maga and you know maybe maybe she is speaking just narrowly but it feels like she's talking about all the men who are like you know in interested in having Trump be president, she reduces it to high school cliques, to jocks, nerds, and bullies.

i think what she missed so hey i think she underestimates musk for instance she's like oh he's a nerd it's like nah he's a bully he's a nerd and a bully at this point because that's what happens to nerds who get power um but she but it forgets it forgets that actually because the democrats went so insane on all things actually masculine and and caused a rise in

frankly, only toxic forms of femininity as the righteous forms of power. Almost all the sane men went looking to the new Republicans as a place where they could be. They could be... manly right so you know many of the many of the real men in america who have you know have either voted for trump or are calling themselves republicans either now or forever are religious many are hard-working and honest and loyal and family men

and they don't fit any of the stereotypes produced in that piece. And I think it's a little bit grotesque and deeply unfair because at the same time that the Democrats are... still claiming that men can become women and that the only decent way to be a man is to be weak. Yes, there's some... total assholes out there who support trump for sure but i'm i'm concerned also that the

You know, that the Elon Musk sort of form of masculinity that's now catching all of the attention is going to overshadow, well, honestly, people like Thomas Massey, who's awesome. He's an awesome icon of masculinity. You know, he too should be included under this, you know, under this movement. And, you know, not if Trump keeps going after him and people like him. Yeah, it was jocks, nerds and bullies. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously at some level intentional or not a hit piece because there's no place to be, you know. It's phrased in a way that the point is it's negative about all of these things, right? It's not athletes and intellectuals. See, that's exactly it. It's like, you know, are there men who are athletic? Well, that doesn't make them jocks.

There are men who are smart about science and technology that doesn't make them a nerd. And, you know, like there are plenty of bullies out there. And, you know, her example is Andrew Tate. It's like, oh, yes, good. Like that one you got right. And, you know, he's got nothing else going for him except he's managed to compel a bunch.

of people that is something he's not. There are people in all three of those categories within MAGA, but you have to provide the neutral, at least neutral description of these categories before it becomes tolerable. Otherwise, it's just a way of... you know, trying to introduce nuance into deplorables. Yeah, no, exactly. In contrast, though, County Highway, which as longtime viewers will know, is the nation's only newspaper. It is the nation's only newspaper. It is.

it comes in hard copy every two months. I'm one of its columnists. I write the field notes column for County Highway. And they put up a piece, I think it was today, it might have been yesterday, online, which they really don't do. um and so this you can show my screen here um it's called the front porch is it not working again okay fantastic um The only byline here is the editors. Still not working? Fuck's sake. Okay, I'm just going to read it, and you guys are not going to get to see it.

The four paragraphs in the middle that I'm going to read from this county highway editorial is as follows. In retrospect, the day Trump survived, July 13th, 2024, now marks the dividing point between two radically different sets of expectations about... the American future, one that is now rapidly receding in the rearview mirror and another which is still being born.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was the day that Obama's permission structure machine came apart in full public view, to be replaced by a new and very different construction.

Where Obama's personal authority as de facto leader of the Democratic Party was at least partially diffused throughout the multiple networks, NGOs, bureaucracies, corporate interests, messaging verticals, security agencies, and the mainstream press, that used the Democratic Party as the main switchboard for their claims on power, the new American system would incarnate itself very differently in the public personas of two very famous and powerful men.

Trump, representing the power of the state, as well as his own heroic defiance of death, and Musk, representing both the magic of technology and the incredible wealth of the Silicon Valley tech elite. Musk brought with him his own entrepreneurial flair and wealth, as well as powerful AI-driven data tools that helped even the playing field in key states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

A techno-optimist might therefore understand Trump's win as the defeat of Obama's top-down command-and-control structure, which sought to use new technologies to limit and control public opinion. Once Musk used his billions to deliver X from the control of the Obamoids, the story goes, Trump's band of online citizen patriots stepped in to do their work, and America's one-party techno-dictatorship disintegrated into dust, as evidenced by the near-total disappearance of...

Barack Obama and his aides from public life. However, If one looks at the first month of the Trump presidency through the lens of what is essentially a power-sharing arrangement between the two most powerful men in America, it becomes difficult to see the new intra-party politics that will shape the country as any more inherently democratic than the once nascent one-party state.

have replaced. On any given day, Trump's revolution and easily look a lot more like a top-down cascade of the type that brought us bad progressive ideas like dei open borders and transgender surgeries for kids only this time the lunacy is coming from the right

There is a simple explanation for the strange uniformity of off-kilter thoughts and deeds across a seemingly unbridgeable political divide. One is the way that public opinion is manufactured on social media platforms. The second is that the United States is, and has been for some time not,

the two-party system that is still the focus of college classes in American government, but an inherently undemocratic oligarchy run by a relative handful of incredibly wealthy technologists and bankers in league with the national security complex that rewards its wealthy partner. with huge government contracts. That's the middle of this remarkable op-ed that you can find online for free on County Highway, although I encourage you to subscribe. And I think...

The editors just nail it. So this is the editors. This does not have a byline beyond the editors. It just says the editors. I have my suspicions. That feels like what I feel like I'm living in at the moment. Still hopeful, but it feels too much like... the same thing and this idea of like oh it's a two-party system you just go like no tech oligarchy feels much more like what it is that we are seeing

Yeah, I mean, we had two corrupt parties. Yes. Both of them are now in chaos at best. That... power vacuum is going to get filled by something and the structure of our constitution probably makes it a two-party replacement but who the two parties are and what their configuration is is still up for grabs the

danger you could have scripted this from a thousand miles out the danger of having ascended because the corrupt power structure had finally become visible to so many people that they would embrace anything that had the power to defeat it and that the thing that defeated it would then be in danger of

overplaying its hand because, I mean, as you and I have been hearing since we emerged into the public eye in 2017, the right is inclined in the face of a left that makes no sense right the democratic left doesn't make any sense all of the people who are actually

honorable left-leaning people have had to leave that structure because it is intolerant of them and they cannot stomach being partnered with something so clearly unpatriotic and dangerous so what we have been told is welcome to the right and the problem is the right is not right the right has a very important message this may be the moment for that message we have destroyed so many of the foundational elements of our civilization and

It is going to topple if we do not figure out how to conserve the important parts of it. But you cannot conserve your way out of this problem. We need... with respect to the things that are so fundamental that we cannot afford to lose them and we need progressivism to figure out what structures we don't yet have to deal with the problems that were not envisioned by our founders

That's scary. I agree. I'm scared about it. But it doesn't mean that you can't. It doesn't mean that there is a solution that does not involve a tension between the progressive instinct and the conservative.

sense of peril about progress right those two things are both necessary it is it is like a abductor adductor system it is the dynamic tension between those two instincts that makes the system work and no surprise that having seen the folks who are supposed to be the guardians of one of these two principals lose their frickin minds over sex and gender and epidemiology and economics and every other damn thing, right? It's not surprising to see the conservatives feeling like, oh, well.

We were just completely right. We're just right on everything and you should just leave us in charge and it'll be great. Right. And... No. We need the tension. We need the disagreement. We need the loyal opposition. Everyone does, and that will never change. We cannot exist in stability with no loyal opposition. Right. And when you say we, that could be ambiguous. But the point is you conservatives need that loyal opposition in order that you do the job that only you can do correctly.

right you need the opposing force and you need it to be honorable and patriotic and that's what's been missing but this is not a vindication of all things conservative we are in brand new territory and you know frankly Nobody has figured out how you deal with the problems that face us in the 21st century. That is a project for all of us, right? Let's keep the people who aren't patriots out of it. But the patriots are going to have to navigate that tension.

It's fundamental and hopefully the Trump administration can hear that critique and recognize its validity. Yeah, I would hope so. Shall we finish with elephants? We always do. We always do. Okay. You want to start showing the first video, Jen? And I will set it up while it's showing. It doesn't have sound. So this is from a new paper, Urban et al. 2025, published in Current Biology, called Water, Hose, Tool Use, and Showering Behavior by Asian Elephants. This is Mary.

I believe, not the woman that's Urban, the first author on the paper. The elephant's name is Mary, and she is using a hose to do what elephants often use their trunks to do.

and she is washing both sides of herself well and she is i think we're about to see uh not well she's washing her hind legs um and i'm here i'm just gonna read the abstract as we're seeing as we're watching so there she's used what they're calling a lasso move um to fling it over her head and wash her back um i can totally imagine doing that elephant or not elephant or not right but um

But until now, we didn't know that elephants could imagine doing it or that they would actually do it. So the abstract for this paper reads as follows.

Since Jane Goodall's famous observations of stick tool use by chimpanzees, animal tool use has been observed in numerous species, including many primates dolphins and birds some animals such as new caledonian crows even craft tools elephants frequently use tools and also modify them we studied water hose tool use in asian zoo elephants flexibility extension and water flow make hoses exceptionally complex

stools. Individual elephants differed markedly in their water hose handling. Female elephant Mary displayed sophisticated hose-showing behavior. She showed lateralized hose handling, systematically showered her body, and coordinated the drunk, drunk,

trunk-held, water hose, limb behaviors. Mary usually grasped the hose behind the tip, using it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, however, she grasped the hose further from the tip and swung it on her back, using hose flexibility and ballistics. Now, if we could go to the next video. at this point aggressive interactions between mary and the younger female elephant on charlie and shoot around mary showering time

At some point, Anchali started pulling the water hose towards herself, lifting and kinking it, then re-grasping and compressing the kink. The kink and clamp behavior disrupted water flow and was repeated in several sessions as a strict sequence of maneuvers. The efficacy

of water flow disruption increased over time. In control experience with multiple hoses, it was not clear whether Anceli specifically targeted Mary's showering hose. We also observed Anceli pressing down the water hose, performing an on-hose trunk stand, which also disrupted water flow.

We conclude that elephant shows sophisticated hose tool use of manipulation. So unless they're not totally convinced in this by the second observation that Anshali, the elephant on the right, is in fact... intentionally kinking the hose in order to antagonize mary who is the older elephant whom she presumably is resentful of but uh it is remarkable if true and regardless uh mary

The elephant on the left is definitely using the hose as a showerhead. Well, all right. I do not want to rain on anyone's parade here. Even the elephants? Well. I'm going to come to their defense. The elephants? Yeah. Okay. This is cool, but I find... Nothing surprising about an animal that intelligent with a dexterous appendage like a trunk discovering all of these things. So, you know, I mean, it's cool to see it.

But I don't know about you. As an animal behaviorist, I find that I am now regularly confronted with videos that tell me something about an animal's capacity that I didn't know. In the case of elephants, I think I would have guessed this. Yeah, although most of the videos you're confronted with, you can't tell if they're real. No, no. I agree that there's a problem about can't tell if they're real. But I'm even talking about, you know, videos from years ago. Okay.

But seeing, for example, that a turtle that is freed from the slow nature of its locomotion by a little motorized cart. That it can like whiz around and that it can navigate at a different speed, that its perceptual apparatus is not constrained to that speed, that that's just its mode of locomotion. And that's turtles. Turtles ain't bright. Maybe brighter than we think. But anyway, point being... Not as smart as elephants. No, they're not. I totally... If you told me...

that elephants, you know, can figure out that they can kink a hose to upend each other in the process of using it. I would have said, sure, of course. It's a highly intelligent animal with, you know, dexterousness enough to pull off. kinking a hose so but the idea the the the special thing in that interaction is the idea that an antagonist is kinking the hose of the other individual in order to get in the way of their shower

Oh, I totally get it. But, you know, if you saw, you know, if you saw a five year old, you know, siblings, if you saw a five year old do that to their sibling because they wanted the hose for themselves. it wouldn't be terribly surprising. Right. And I, you know, I, I, my sense is, you know,

You can't really compare the intelligence of a person and an elephant because language is so much a key piece of what makes humans intelligent in the way that they are. And elephants clearly don't have language at that level. But in terms of... How sophisticated their interaction, I mean, have you seen this video of orangutan, this orangutan who drives? No.

Well, there is a piece of video of an orangutan who clearly is, you know. Who gave the orangutan keys to their car? What were they thinking? That was an act of faith. in the in the first place but but anyway the idea that an orangutan obviously has no reason to have the skills that would allow it to drive on the other hand there's no reason that a person should either and yet we've built the vehicle so that a person of average intelligence

Do you know anything more about the story? Like people need to be taught how to drive. You don't just get into a car the first time and take off. Oh, I'm sure they didn't just let him figure it out. But anyway.

i hope i hope i'm not misunderstanding what i've seen i hope it's not ai generated but the point is intelligent animals confronted with uh artificial mechanisms can figure it out because in general, these things have been designed to be figured out by people who aren't, you know, thinking very carefully about what they're doing.

Now, Jen, I just sent you a link that I'm hoping you can pull up since the cable or something is not allowing my computer to show things directly. Since you brought up turtles. And I was not. going to talk about turtles today but i did have something to say about turtles because um someone on the oregon health authority board which advises on mental health issues for the state of oregon

identifies as a turtle and uses turtle pronouns. Turtle pronouns? I'm not aware of turtle pronouns. Well, I think the turtle pronouns turn out to be turtle.

they're on the what now uh spectrum no no no they're on the oregon health authority board which i have i still get uh regular updates from these people because i find their emails pretty reliably insane they were during during covet era they were you know always telling people where they could get their code vaccinations and they usually often and still do have poems from people writing in um

about mental health and the poems are never good. So you're going to want to click on the Oregon GOP thing that they're quote tweeting here and then go down and show this video with sound. You don't have sound? Okay, well, then you don't need to show this person. But they are...

This is just a montage clip of the Oregon Health Authority. They're apparently still meeting remotely, and maybe that's a geographic constraint, and maybe it's just they're all still scared of COVID. Well, apparently one of them is also a turtle. Travel a challenge. It has. The per diem would be just out of the world, out of this world, because there'd be so many diems involved. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Many diem. Yeah. So many, so many D, D, D.

Yeah, something like that. So, yeah, you don't have, you don't have, I mean, I don't need to, you don't need to. mock the individual person, even though that is kind of what we're doing, but we don't even have them up there. So it's just a montage of them introducing themselves across a series of Zoom meetings. And it's always, okay, I identify as a turtle and my pronouns are they, them, turtle.

And the person is clearly not putting the others on. Well, apparently not. Apparently not. And they don't look healthy. And, you know, it's a randomly obese turtle identifying. person who's on the board that is advising on mental health issues for the state of oregon and i got tagged in this what is going on what is going on and I think going back to this, I think, ill-advised, unheard piece saying that MAGA men are jocks or nerds or bullies. No, that's not right. That's not right, but...

What has happened on the pseudo left is this valorization of victim status. And, you know, we saw that with the progressive stack. where you don't get to speak unless you can identify some way in which your demographic has been historically oppressed. And so from that valorization of victim status, we now have a more broad valorization of weakness.

you know the left people on the left love to signal that what they really love is to is to help weak people and that has then become what i really love is to display that i'm weak like that you know my own weakness is part of why you need to take care of me and why the state needs to take care of me and frankly we have that here with this you know this crazy person advising on mental health

Right. And so, you know, of course, all the people who are actually interested in being strong and, you know, in recognizing their own weakness and thinking to themselves, how can I become stronger where I am weak as opposed to how can I exhibit my weakness? and flaunt it for the entire world. The people who want to exhibit their weakness and flaunt it stay on the pseudo-left, and the people who say, actually, I'm interested in being strong.

And there's nothing wrong with that. And I can be strong as a man. I can be strong as a woman. By being strong, many have fled this insane system and are now hanging out.

you know, in the middle, going like, I'm not, neither of these sides is making a lot of sense. One more point about turtles, though. Well, hold on. Okay. Before you get there. Yeah. The dog that didn't bark here is presumably... the trans activists who are not championing this trans species turtle person because the point is The validity of this person's claim to be a turtle and to the need for special pronouns, who knows, maybe surgery, maybe their hormones, is a good test case.

The point is, you know, this idea that you get to identify as something that you're not and that it becomes valid right down to the point of it being a medical. phenomenon and a matter of uh that you are entitled to governmental protections and services um why not it's as valid as anything else right

I'm not saying, you know, I think we need a society in which you feel like a turtle, you can feel like a turtle. But the idea that it is a governmental matter and that society needs to change itself. relative to your sense that you're a turtle well you can feel like whatever you want but frankly the idea so i think this is both a valorization of weakness and also it's a dare like we're living in a land of dare it's like the emperor has no clothes and

everyone's going like, um, who's going to say it? Cause I don't really feel like it. And increasingly a lot of people are saying, yeah, actually no clothes, not a turtle. wrong not a man you know like you know not not the sex that you're not that all of these things are simply not true but um But still, there is a substantial portion of the world, and at least the country, that is being cowed into submission by the dare, by the threat of, like, what?

really and you know this is part you know part of where you know the trans stuff um is well to reuse the phrase that used earlier but the tip of the spear in this regard is that it's it it's so perfectly puts all of these things in one place because like oh yes obviously not all of them and even not most probably but what we have here is a dare with women standing up and saying no no not in my spaces and these men are saying yeah you want army because i can hurt you

right and like it's just it's exactly what has happened forever when women stand up to aggressive men and the women are going like uh actually you see that you're doing the thing that we're telling you you're doing and they say i'm a woman so fight me

Like, I don't have to, because that's actually what, you know, the differences between the sexes and civilization suggest that I don't actually have to do that, and we get our own separate spaces. So, you know, Turtle doesn't get into that space. It's just...

bat shit crazy yeah it's just absurd it's just absurd um i would point out that all of these things connect together as you're suggesting and that the idea of um the sabotage of the system involved the dismantling of the normal structures that would shut down a runaway process of

absurd claims like the idea that you know we're not going to prosecute people for committing crimes anymore because there's of course a history that led them to commit crimes and so the uncompassionate to do so is a sabotage of the basic functionality of the system the idea but it doesn't that

Isn't that down the what turns out to be slippery slope from not guilty for reason of insanity? Doesn't finding a reason for the behavior that puts the behavior outside of the realm of personal ability to have prevented it doesn't that lead to all of these like well but you know it's a turtle or well you know i think it's what i said 2017 which is that the idea a naive bunch of people who've never built anything thought that

reparations in every interaction at every scale at all times was the right thing to do not realizing that among the many critiques you could level is that can't possibly work you can't have a civilization in which you attempt to do that you will destroy it almost instantaneously which is what we've seen um but the idea you know if i'm a man and i am and i decide that uh you know as a middling competitive swimmer

that i'm dissatisfied and that i might be much more happy to be the focus of attention if i identify as female and start swimming in the women's category We had the rules that said you couldn't do that, right? The thing about women's sports is men are not allowed in them. That's what makes them women's sports. But you can therefore see, though, how progressivism gets us here.

right like oh well we just need to change what's bad we need to be unburdened by what has been right like oh those rules well they're old rules the new rules are men can become women didn't you know he feels like a woman therefore he's going to swim against women

which is of course why postmodernism played such a role in this because the point is it was the contradiction that once you allowed it allowed you to invent your own game of chess on the fly while holding your opponent to the normal rules of chess yeah and you know

Yeah, postmodernism employs the Mott and Bailey rather well. Brilliantly. And so anyway, the failure to enforce the rule about not having a penis in women's sports... is not different than failing to enforce the rule against theft you know oh yeah at the level of a da who's just gonna you know play catch and release or something like this it's all the same thing and the point is you know

as at least some of the initial postmodernists would have had it it was a cryptic attack on the system it was not an argument right right it wasn't a belief that a sane person could hold it was like hey if we say that you know it was sophistry If we say this, you're not... It was sophistry in combination with Adair. An emperor has no clothes and an understanding that actually in a group of, in a large group...

It may take a long time before the first person stands up and says, hold on. Yeah. It's not even just a dare. I know exactly what you mean and you're not wrong, but it's a threat. Yeah. Right. And the point, you know, the point is, I mean, the incident. That brought us into the public eye. Me standing there in front of a bunch of students that you would think were probably my students accusing me of racism. Right. The point was, look, it's 2017. You're white enough.

if you have students of color saying you're guilty of racism in twenty seventeen you're done there is nothing you can do about that because the optics tell us who's guilty and it didn't work out that way but but anyway point being that a cryptic attack on the system came in the form of arguments that are incorrect but are hard to respond to that carry a sense of moral indignation for people who either haven't thought very much about it or have thought...

way too much about it because they've spent all of their time in college classes in fields that don't really exist that claim all sorts of things and having been protected during their childhood from experiencing physical reality or actual risk and so don't have a sense of what

the world might look like right and so anyway it is amazing that this took over civilization and that it was allowed to go on for you know much yeah for a decade right and it really you know doors are falling out of planes you know 100 certain that the door fell out of the plane because of dei i don't know but if you look across all of the various failures you know most of them are born of mistakes that are just too dumb to imagine anybody actually making yeah

Yeah, DEI is all well and good in a made-up field that has no bearing on reality. Those made-up fields that have no bearing on reality shouldn't have been made up in the first place. But if you need to, you go over into your little corner and do that, and we're going to... probably stop funding that shit any moment now and the real fields where we're actually paying attention to what's going on in the world we're gonna do that based on merit

because that's what we need to do because all of us are relying on the roads and the bridges and the cell phones and everything else and the lights to stay on we need actual real scientists and engineers and also excellent artists who can actually see the world to be creating and producing and analyzing. I will make one defense of DEI. It would have made a marvelous college exercise as a thought experiment.

You take a class of smart people who haven't yet been in the world and you say, here's what we're going to do. We're going to transform civilization based on the following principles. Now play it through, figure out what will happen. It was an insane experiment to run with a nuclear power. But in a college classroom, figuring out how these lofty ideals devolve into...

the collapse of civilization in short order, because there was no other way that that could go, that would have been a worthy lesson for anybody who had taken it. It would have been. Yeah. Okay, one cool fact about turtles. There's only one cool fact about turtles? There are lots of cool facts about turtles. As you know, they're one of my least favorite herpclades. Yeah.

just not that impressed with them and i know they're impressive but i just have a hard time getting super impressed maybe because people look like that end up calling themselves turtles but you will recognize that most turtles have have hard shells Oh, yes. The carapace on top and the plastron on the bottom. And that produces, that creates a mostly inflexible volume for the turtles. And so...

When they have lungs full of air, when they're out walking and their heads are out and maybe they're standing around, they have lungs full of air, it can be harder for them. uh to deflate their lungs than it is for some other um other vertebrates and there are there are various ways that vertebrates have solved this um i've talked before about carrier's constraint which means that lizards who are moving like this can't

and run at the same time. Birds have gone bipedal and mammals move in this vertical plane, this undulating plane like this instead of side to side. Turtles, this isn't the only thing that they do, but if they find themselves with lungs full of air and they need to exhale and they're standing there, one way to do it is to pull their legs in, leaving no room with the air in their lungs and it causes them to exhale.

Okay, so if you're wondering what the hell Heather is talking about, you can do this. If you fill your mouth with air and then you thrust your tongue forward so it fills up the space, it shoots like that. It's the same thing. Yeah, but you don't look like a turtle when you do it. Thank you. I appreciate that. You're welcome. You're welcome. All right.

Yes. Yes. Yes, very much so. Okay, so we're going to do a Q&A after this on Locals. Please consider joining us there. We've got a question from our Discord server already. We've got some leftover questions from our Q&A we did on Sunday, but we'll be prioritizing.

after the discord question any questions that come in live in the chat on local so if you haven't joined us there consider doing so right now you can there will be a link somewhere i don't have it here but you can join us on locals and um And also our website, darkhorsepodcast.org has links to locals, to our merch store, has a calendar of when we're going to be.

uh coming up with new uh new live streams um you just put you just had a great conversation with robbie george robbie george people love this conversation and i i we've been thinking about why but it is a really cool conversation robbie george and i are uh unlikely friends i think he's a friend of yours too but you weren't in in the conversation but anyway it's a it's a very good conversation we cover a lot of ground and he is

So spectacularly good at entertaining questions in real time, thoughtfully thinking through their answers. And his area of expertise is so different from ours that anyway, it's a good conversation. You'll dig it if you haven't seen it already. Princeton. At Princeton, yep. And before we, please join us at our Q&A on Locals in, you know, 15 minutes or so, but before we come back with another evolutionary lens.

on march 18th you're going to put out another inside rail which i think is going to be awesome i think maybe we'll keep keep a lid on it or it is gonna be Off the freaking hook. I think people are going to be stunned. It's probably an area they haven't thought terribly much about. A friend of ours with a book coming out. It's amazing. It's going to be good.

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