Hooves, Part 2

is running around on all middle fingers and toes. We talked about an ancient legend about the horse ridden by Julius Caesar, which some artists have depicted as having dock and hair and human feet instead of hoofs, at least on the first two legs. Rob's idea, I think was that this it's possible that these stories could be based on observations of what are called polydactyl horses, horses born with extra hooflets on the sides of the primary hoof, which do in fact exist.

for galloping speed. And these changes coincided with the law of peripheral toes until you end up with the modern horse and its relatives in the genus equis, so that would include the zebra and the ass, all having only one toe per foot, the columnar hoof. Now today, we wanted to continue the series on the horse hoof, getting into a couple other things about horsecof evolution as well

as the invention of the horseshoe. But before we do that, I wanted to take a brief detour into a metaphorical connection to the hoof, which concerns medical diagnostics, and more generally, the realm of statistical reasoning. So there's a famous aphorism widely used in medical education, often invoked by practicing physicians, and it goes like this, when you hear hoof beats,

look for horses, not zebras. Rob. I think this saying may have come up on the show in the past, though I couldn't remember when, but I'm sure you've heard this before, right, Yeah.

chapter in a second. But yeah, Rob, like you said, the point of this aphorism is that when a patient presents with symptoms X, Y, and Z, you should start by thinking about the most common conditions within the population associated with that cluster of symptoms, rather than jumping to

assumptions about rare diseases. So, for example, if a patient presents at a US clinic with flu like symptoms, it's better to start by investigating the possibility that they have the flu or common cold, or now maybe COVID, rather than to by investigating whether they have contracted the hindra

virus from a flying fox in Australia. Taylor traces this saying back to an American medical researcher named Theodore E. Woodward who lived nineteen fourteen to two thousand and five, who taught at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And it seems actually the common form of this aphorism might be a paraphrase, and the more accurate original quote may have been don't look for zebras on Green Street.

That might be a little perplexing, but it makes sense in the context because Green Street was the location of the University of Maryland hospital in Baltimore, and he was teaching at the University of Maryland two students there, So of course you can see why it would need to be rephrased to make more sense outside of its original locality.

But I also think the localization to Baltimore geography highlights something important, which is that this aphorism is only useful when you're talking about a no own population of patients in which the frequency of certain diseases or conditions is fairly well understood. Because if you were talking to a group of medical students, maybe in a region of southern Africa where zebras are abundant, it might make sense to use the aphorism inverted, I guess, depending on how many

horses there are around as well. But in the same sense, you have to know what the frequencies are in the population you're looking at before deploying this.

But I think as a general rule, when looking for explanations, we do have to be reminded to start by considering what is most likely in terms of frequency, because there are all kinds of mental biases that constantly tempt us to start looking for highly unusual causes for unexplained phenomena before we've exhausted all of the extremely commonplace candidates for one thing. Unusual causes and explanations are usually more exciting.

They kind of stick in the mind because of our level of interest in them, and they can quite easily then come to mind when we start searching around for an explanation. They're sort of at the top of the toy box right now. In this section of the book I was talking about, Taylor makes an interesting point about the zebra aphorism, which I hadn't quite considered. I was just thinking at the first order level of more common

explanations and less common explanations. But Taylor also writes quote as a clinical corollary, experienced diagnosticians look first for uncommon manifestations of common conditions rather than common manifestations of uncommon diseases. Now that seemed really interesting to me. I hadn't quite

thought about it that way. And of course it would depend on exactly how uncommon you mean in each clause of that sentence, Like if you were to represent them as actual percentage chances and stuff, the math might break out in different ways. But if a certain set of symptoms appears in I don't know, only three percent of cases of an extremely common condition that affects you, know,

millions of people every year. It is probably still worth investigating that diagnosis, the uncommon manifestation of the extremely common condition before you look at the possibility of a condition that matches the symptoms very closely. But you know, you might only see only a couple of cases in the world per year, it's extremely rare. You'd still get way more hits of confirmation on the on the uncommon version of the common condition.

as an uncommon manifestation of a common condition? In other words, are you looking at is kind of like a novel pattern or appearance in decay of just a normal, mundane animal, or are you going to jump to that extreme level and think, well, no, this is just how it looks and we've just never seen this creature before. Yeah.

old with Fever. I believe this incident took place in the US state of North Carolina. So it was a nine year old girl whose family spoke only French, and they presented at the hospital with the patient having an abdominal pain, vomiting, intermittent fevers, fatigue, and headache, and because there was a language barrier, everything had to be done with the help of an interpreter, and it seems that this led to some maybe some original misunderstandings about the

case history. So the doctors tried to diagnose based on all the normal explanations that they would be likely to see in their patient population, but none of the common diagnoses really fit her case. Her condition continued to get worse, it even became life threatening, and the breakthrough seemed to come when the doctors began looking outside the normal slate

of conditions encountered in their practice in the United States. Finally, they learned that the girl's family had just in the wa weeks before, arrived from the Congo, where malaria is common. The care providers eventually ordered a test that would put them on the right track. They write in their report, quote, this test was a peripheral blood smear, specifically a thick

and thin smear, which revealed Plasmodium falciparum. And this is one of the protozoa responsible for causing malaria, leading to a final diagnosis of cerebral malaria. And then they write from here they contacted the twenty four hour CDC hotline to immediately get the appropriate anti malarial medication. They put the girl on a quinine drip and admitted her to the pediatric intensive care unit. And then they say, quote remarkably, within four weeks she made a full recovery and returned

home with her family. So thankfully, the patient was all right in the end, but she potentially could have died if doctors hadn't made the locally unusual but correct diagnosis and given her the right treatment. And so the authors say in their conclusion quote, many of us are taught the common aphorism in medical school. When you hear hoof beats,

think horses, not zebras. When approaching a nine year old with fever, we hear the hoof beat symptoms and tend to think of the typical diagnoses that are commonly seen in our pediatric population. Yet if we are not thinking about the zebras, we will miss this common presentation of a disease that is uncommon north of the equator, which could lead to high morbidity and possibly even mortality for patients. So it's very good that they were able to discover

this intervene and probably save the girl's life. But it highlights how there's a difficult balance, Like if you go looking for zebras before you look for horses on Green Street, you will waste a lot of time and resources and potentially cause frequent misdiagnoses that could harm people. But if you never consider the possibility of zebras on Green Street, there will be rare but very real cases where you could save somebody's life but you don't.

rare amiba is eating my flesh? Or something to that effect, because that's what you saw in the headline, that's what you saw on the the documentary series that that that sensationalized a rare case, right.

It involves a balance between prioritizing likely explanations, which are you know, by very definition, almost always going to be correct, but also being open minded enough to catch the unusual ones when they arise. And obviously, I think a big part of the art of medicine is gaining good intuition and establishing sound processes to prioritize explanations in a reasonable way based on what we know about frequency, but then also to be able to catch the cases that are

unusual and intervene appropriately to help people. All right, you want to talk a little bit about the evolution of the horse hoof?

about why exactly the one toe was favored. We do know that the ancestors of horses and zebras and asses had multiple toes per foot, But what is gained by going quad bird, you know, the middle fingers across all four feet. So the evolution of is called monodactyly having one toe Monodactyly, it has long been assumed that that was useful for allowing a large animal like a modern horse,

to achieve greater running speed. But I came across an interesting alternative idea explored in a paper called the Evolution of equid monodact a review including a new hypothesis published in Frontiers and Ecology and Evolution by Christine M. Janis

and Raymond Bernor. And basically here the authors ask what if the evolution of the modern equine hoof was a product of selection for endurance rather than speed, meaning that the primary advantage conferred was in the evolution of an efficient and energy efficient spring foot that would support long

distance trots at medium speed to locate better food resources. So, under their hypothesis, the loss of extra toes may have been a coincidental byproduct of the selection for the more efficient spring foot, which helps the horse conserve energy while foraging, rather than an adaptation for top speed running, which again is assumed to be primarily for the purpose of escaping the jaws of predators. Now, I cite this not to

say that I think their hypothesis is definitely correct. I have no expertise to decide between which explanation of the horstof evolution better fits the evidence. But this possibility made me think back again to the Zebras on Green Street saying about how sometimes certain explanations seem more likely to us, not because they're actually more common, but because they're more

mentally salient. It reminds me I've talked before about this idea that I have the sort of sex and violence principle in evolutionary reasoning, where what I think I've observed is that when people without or sometimes even with biological training, are trying to think of possible evolutionary explanations for a trait in an organism, we are a little too quick to resort to explanations involving either predation or mating, and

we often overlook extremely common mechanism in nature, like temperature regulation and energy efficiency, which play a huge role in the success of a life form. But I think maybe they're not as interesting to our brains as sex or violence, so we're less likely to think of them. They do not bleed, so they do not lead in the mind.

you can. You're inevitably you're going to find those explanations that have to do with mating, or protection from predators, or protection when they're in conflict with others of their kind. But yeah, I guess sometimes these ideas that they're used for temperature regulation or something like that may may feel less excite, may feel more mundane. Though I guess you could also argue that maybe the more exotic or mysterious the feature is, like say those backridges on the stegosaurus,

maybe that cancels it out to some degree. I don't know, but it's hard to imagine a like a seven year old or an eight year old playing with the toy Stegasaurus and be like, look, Mom and dad, this guy's warming up in the sun watching. That's not what bathtub dinosaurs do. They bite each other.

horse only has one toe? I mean, it really does basically have only one toe that makes contact with the with the ground, But in what sense did it really quote lose the other toes. One example of this counter narrative I was reading is in an article in The New York Times by Veronique Greenwood published February eighth, twenty twenty, called a horse has five toes and then it doesn't.

And this article tells the story of a researcher named Catherine Kavanaugh, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, who was looking at preserved horse embryos in the lab when she discovered something very interesting, which is that during the earliest stages of gestation, the area of the embryo that will eventually develop to become the foot become the hoof.

In that area, the embryonic horses have five toes. So this period during development only lasts for a couple of days before the extra toes begin to sort of fuse and vanish. But to read from the article briefly, quote the discover reimplies something profound about how anatomical development works. As an embryo puts itself together, growing from a tiny wad of cells into multiple specialized tissues, fed by blood vessels and linked by the winding threads of nerves, it

is following a template. That template is subject to evolution, just like other things about the animal. But some moments in the process or some routes that development takes may not easily be altered. And so the researcher here, Catherine Kavanaugh, is quoted saying something about the early steps in toe development is stabilized. We don't know why, but that's what

we think is going on. So I found this also interesting because it's an example of how stages in development can become evolutionarily fixed even when they differ from the

final form. So like, for some reason, as the horse is growing as an embryo, it needs to develop five fingers before or five toes before it can lose four of the toes per hoof, so you know, eventually it will have functionally one toe making contact with the ground, but the development process has to go through this other stage first.

into the skeletal structure of this bipedal frog creature. Like that's even crazier, and I feel like that's more in line with what we know about the horses.

of attention over the years in varying fields. I mean, there's genetic research, there's archaeology, there's you know, various cultural inquiries. It's kind of all over the place, and there are a lot of unanswered questions about you know, especially when you get into you know, the exact who's and winds and wares, say horse domestication, and even the development or

the horseshoe. But I feel like covering the horseshoe also helps us understand the hoof a little bit more so, briefly talking about the modern horse, the modern horse has a long and pivotal history as a human steed. Many animals have, of course served as mounts for human riders, and many have served as a pack and draft animals.

I know that, at least on the Artifact and perhaps elsewhere in some core episodes, we've touched on the importance of the camel and the donkey, But the horse, the horse is just a whole different matter, both in terms of like the impact that it's had, like I think the larger impact that it's had globally, and also just how it has captured the imagination. Not to diminish the camel or the donkey, because in particular regions, the camel

and the donkey have been far more important. Whole books have been written about the camel and the donkey, and I've read parts of them. If you want to hear a little bit more about that, go back to the Monster Fact episode that I did on Donkeys of Dune,

which touched on this a little bit. Now, as we've discussed, the modern horse evolved over the course of fifty to sixty million years from a diminutive ancestor, and then it would have reached identifiable form somewhere around four to four point five million years ago, then migrating across the Bearing Straight via some sort of a primitive land bridge into Eurasia about eleven thousand years ago, and becoming stinct in North America after that, and it would not come back

around the globe to North America until it was reintroduced the European conc West in the fifteenth century see now. Of the wild horse's three ancestors, two when extinct, and a third the takei or Mongolian wild horse or Preswalski's horse, these are all the different names for the same creature. Essentially, this survived only in captivity and then was subsequently has been subsequently reintroduced into the wild, though with some important

caveats worth discussing. Should we come back around to talk about the reintroduction of a species. There are lots of sort of ups and downs with that particular story, as there are with some other species reintroduction tales. Now much has been written about the role of the horse in the history of human conflict, and there is indeed just so much that we we could and I guess should one day discuss about that, you know, the use of say, chariot technology, even the saddle like, they're just so many

different angles to take. Now. Its pointed out by equine warfare expert A Highland and this is in Brian fahe against the Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World. DNA evidence suggests that the domestication of the horse took place independently in several different places and times. And according to them, and this was this book came out in two thousand and four, so I'm going to touch in a more

recent source on all this in just a second. They were talking about the earliest domestication having possibly taken place on the Eurasian Step somewhere around four thousand BCE, though

they did highlight that the proof was inconclusive. I've also seen other sources just put it that the geographic origin of horse domestication is simply an unknown and there of course a handful of likely areas and times, based on different findings, spread across Eurasia from as far west as Iberia to as far east as Siberia now more recently.

The more recent source I was looking at on this though, was a twenty twenty one analysis of ancient horse DNA, and this seemed to narrow it down to the Eurasian step the Volga Dawn region, so that would seem to possibly be the strong contender for where the who. That's a little bit more complex, is pointed out by Amber Dance in a solid twenty twenty two article for Smithsonian

Magazine titled When Did Humans Domesticate the Horse? The region was home to diverse peoples who may have engaged in horse domestication, and the earliest time period the win in all of this sounds like it was maybe four two hundred years ago, pushing us back to the twenty one

hundred s BCE. Based on all of this, though, Dance also points out that quote clear evidence of horse domestication doesn't appear in the archaeological record until about five five hundred years ago, and that would push things back obviously now. As Highland and Fagan pointed out, stud records from twenty three hundred BC and what is now a RAQ include data on donkeys, mules, and some horses. There are Sumerian proverbs that refer to horse riding during this time period.

But yeah, like I say, this is topic we could go on about at some length, but suffice to say that the evidence points to this general time period, but it has still long been a topic of dispute. Now, one thing that I liked in Dance's article is that they point out that horses were coexisting alongside human beings long before we were able to ride them or really do anything with them. They were around during the time of Stone Age human beings. They no doubt inspired Stone

Age human beings and human populations. Our ancestors depicted them in their cave art, but it would have been a long time before they could figure out how to master these beasts and truly harness the power of the horse. Yeah.

about with its kind, you know, across the field. You know, maybe we're feeling some of the same things our ancient ancestors would have felt, you know, these sort of deep down impressions, but with the added level of we probably don't think about maybe running them down with our spears and cooking them up later and making things out of them. But of course this would have been This was how we interacted with pretty much everything in the natural world

during that time period. And of course if we were going to hunt a horse, we would have to depend on human ingenuity, human strategy, human tool use, and eventually when humans figure out about how to truly harness the horse, they also had to employ various tools. So if anyone out there, if you're like me, most of your experience with horses is probably in video games where you you break a wild horse or train a wild horse by doing something like I don't know, whistling at it, or

you know, you jump up on its back. I was asking my son, how do you how do you get a horse and Zelden, He's like, oh, you just jump on its back and I don't know, you do something else and then you're good to go.

bovine control mechanisms, so cows were domesticated much earlier. Humans had much earlier figured out some of the ways that they could use tools and things they built to control these large and powerful creatures, and they were able to adapt some of those for the domestication of the horse, and they evolved from there to include things like metal bits and harnesses, ultimately things like armor, horse armor for battle, chariot technology, and of course things like the saddle and

stirrup loops. But all of this discussion thus far has been in service of the horse hoof and of course

the horseshoe. As we mentioned already in the previous episode on the horse hoof, the hoof, while certainly an amazing adaptation, is not indestructible, and the domestication of the horse took this creature out of its sort of normal environment and in activities and placed it in those that suited us best, especially in the use of things like agriculture, travel, ultimately warfare, and at some point, and much like horse domestication itself,

likely various points in various times in ancient history, humans who made use of the horse realize that hoofs require special care, and that this care could in fact be preventative care, so the hoof, like the human foot, could be protected and reinforced.

And also we have we have nailed these these shoes. We call them a shoe, but you know, it's like it's like an iron loop onto the bottom of their their hoof walls in order to make them more capable of keeping up with what we need them to do. Technologically enhanced. Is the horse cyborgs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and in some respects now, there have been many different approaches to to this over the ages, because again, like the basic nut of it is the realization that oh man,

we're rough on these horses. We should we're having to like clean up and and take care of them after we we use them too hard. Let's try and protect that hoof a little bit. And there have been various ways to sort of address this again in different times, in different places. Some early examples from parts of Asia have been based in apparently in medicinal organic wrappings to

treat injuries. So you're working your horse too hard, the horse is suffering various injuries or ailments of the hoof, so you start wrapping it up in things to protect it and to heal it. And then it seems to be a case of treatment becoming preventative, where it's realized, oh, you know, let's just keep something wrapped around the hoof or at least when we're using the horse, or at least in certain environmental circumstances, and that can help make the hoof last longer.

These are basically different approaches where you would take like essentially like a leather sheath for the hoof, sometimes augmented with metal studs on the bottom, essentially making you know, you think about basically the same sort of adaptations you would make to a human boot. You know, well, it's like, let's wrap that foot up in leather, or it's a little slippery, let's put some studs on the bottom of that so it doesn't slip around. And it's also worth

noting that modern hoof boots exist as horseshoe alternatives. You see a lot of this, particularly in the realm of natural horsemanship, sort of like modern backing away from some of the the aspects of horsemanship that might be, you know, considered a little bit too rough or unnecessarily rough, especially for what we might be asking of our horses in the modern age, and so you might see a hoof boot, which in many of these cases they look like like

little like sports shoes for a horse. They can slip those on, and I'm to understand that also sometimes they're used in a dish to a normal horseshoe. Equestrians out there listening to the episode, if you have some thoughts on hoof boots right in, we would love to see them. Same goes for people who just like dressing like satyrs. We also want to see your hoof boots. Nobody needs to feel left out. But then there's also the hippo

sandal and this is exactly what it sounds like. It is a sandal of sorts for horse hoofs These were especially common in the Northwestern Roman Empire and it was I think largely a temporary solution. So the idea is this is not something that was nailed on. It was something that was strapped on, and if you look at examples, it looks like basically like a strap on horse hoof. You can see that like these were generally made out

of iron. They would cover the bottom of the hoof wall and then you would strap it on, but it wasn't going to be on their long term. Once you got wherever you were riding to, or I don't know, after battle or whatever the scenario is, then it's time to take these hippo sandals off. And then eventually we get to the proper iron horseshoe, which everyone knows what

this looks like. Because it exists in the public mind outside of mere equestrian interests, and even outside of its use on the horse, it has become an artifact of some significance across multiple cultures. It is this U shaped twist of iron that is actually nailed into place in the horse's hoof falls. The origin of this particular invention or artifact is also difficult to well nail down, I

guess you could say, with different possibilities emerging. I've read that the gulls are thought to have possibly innovated this. Others have said the Celts may have done it, or being among the first to do it, and there's some evidence stemming from ancient grave sites. But one thing to keep in mind here is that initially you might think, oh, well, they're made out of iron, at least they're going to

keep longer. But then we have to realize iron would have been precious, and therefore iron would often be reused or even re forged, thus robbing us of evidence in many cases of these particular artifacts. But it's possible that the use of iron horseshoes go back to perhaps four hundred BCE. But like a lot of this, the use of iron horseshoes is rather broadly difficult to define and nail down because their use often bumps up against and

coexists with other forms of protecting the hoof. So you might have like a period of time and a part of the world where some people are using a horseshoe, some are using the hippo sandal or some other innovation, or indeed where there'll be a whole culture that's not using anything and they're depending on stage just switching out horses and find you know, realizing that they can't and shouldn't just run the horse to death, but they realize, well, we just need to switch them out more, and this

is going to be our approach to making the most out of a given hoof and making the hoofs and therefore the horse itself lasts longer for us. Now the horse shoe itself has a life all its own at this point outside of merely nailing it in place in the bottom of a horse's foot. As we've touched on a bit already, the horseshoe has long been seen as a good luck icon in many different cultures, in many different times, and it's only kind of interesting to chase

down like why this is? Like why did people start admiring the horseshoe and nailing it up and attracting some level of significance to it?

have you. And Hoggard wrote that, yeah, you find horseshoes being associated with good luck throughout the British Isles, Europe, the United States, quote, and it would seem the rest of the world. He writes that the horseshoe is sometimes displayed pointing upward quote, so that the luck doesn't run out, which I thought was fun. You know this idea that it's like, well, don't have it facing down, because then all the luck's going to run out of the ends

of the horseshoe. While in other areas other traditions, it is common to display the horseshoe with the points down.

horseshoes perceived power. One, and it's certainly a big one, is the closer relationship between humans and their horses. You know, these are animals that were highly important to the people who owned them and or used them. They were animals that we ultimately cared about, and we also had various, you know, supernatural traditions concerning them. And if not you're mundane horses, you have these ideas of mythic horses and

so forth. And this is something that also influenced the use of horse skulls and things like that in other traditions. The other key fact that he highlights is that these are made of iron, and iron was thought to provide protection against quote, witchcraft and the fairy folk. Yes, and as Hoggard chronicles in that book, iron horseshoes and iron nails were often used in these household productive magics, hidden

in walls and so forth. I also looked at this was an older paper, but I thought it highlighted some interesting concepts. This is an eighteen ninety six paper by Robert M. Lawrence published in the Journal of American Folklore titled The Folklore of the Horseshoe, and Lawrence points out that the horseshoe, though shaped the way it's shaped for practical reasons, obviously it would have essentially stood in or resembled pre existing and potent symbols in different traditions and

in different cultures. And he highlights some of the key ones here. So sure the horseshoe just a standard horseshoe, and then think about these. The first one he mentions is the idea of a of an arch, just a protective arch, something that would be even in an age before horseshoes positioned above a doorway or you know, on a threshold. I believe he highlights the I want to say a Scottish tradition of having an arch shaped from from just the branch of a tree would sometimes be used like this.

I mean, there's so many different ways the snake has been utilized in different iconography over the ages, but this one seems sensible. The idea of like the horseshoe as a serpent. Another big one the horseshoe is the crescent moon. Now, the next one is one that he writes that he thinks the evidence is mediocre for this, and he's kind of begrudgingly mentioned that. He's like, I'm gonna mention it, but I don't like it. And that's the horseshoe could

also stand in for various ophallic imagery. So the horseshoe as thallus.

maybe there's not as much sense behind this. This one I thought was interesting. The prong shape of the horseshoe has a deterrent to evil spirits or as a kind of trap. So the idea that the horseshoe is either the thing that's going to kind of like catch the limb of an evil spirit, you know, you know, like, oh, you put your limb, your arm in there, and now you can't get it out, or kind of like the prongs of some sort of a poking fork.

that captures traps or transmits bad luck. The position is sometimes important here, and like it could be a situation where it's like, Okay, here's the horseshoe. You got all your bad luck in that. Now leave it on the ground and see if someone picks it up and catches all that bad luck you just put into it. Then there's an idea of numerology coming into it, particularly concerning the number of nails in a horseshoe versus the number

of nail holes. He writes, quote, in Northumberland, the holes free of nails are counted as these indicate, presumably in years, how soon the finder of the shoe may expect to be married. And I guess in this case they're like, you know, you're out in the field, you find a horseshoe. It's like, oh, I found a horseshoe, let's find out how long I'm going to be single. Which and again, you know we're not familiar with this tradition, and we can kind of snicker at it. But I guess there

are a lot of things like this. I mean it's kind of on a very very like slender level. It's almost like, you know, not stepping on a crack, right, you know, like we know that's not there's not accurate, but we can't help but think about it when we do it. And so I can imagine it could be this tradition whereas, oh I found a horseshoe exciting for me, Maybe I'm going to take this home and put it up over my over my doorway for good luck. But

also what if it's right? What if I am three years from finding my wife that sort of thing.

comes this horseshoe. What does that horseshoe remind us of? Now, outside of all these superstitions and so forth and older traditions, the emblem of a horseshoe remains I think really potent. One example of this that came to mind is the various cartoon interpretations of this, as well as how it's

presented sometimes in science textbooks. The horseshoe magnet has become a kind of fixed symbol for magnetism, despite the fact that horse shoe magnets are technically obsolete, since like the nineteen fifties, you don't you don't need a horseshoe shaped magnet. All the magnets on your fridge are likely not horseshoe shaped.

of politics, which I'm to understand. I don't. I didn't know a lot about it previously, but it's my understanding. It's all so it's not something that's really that much of a thing within actual political science, but you sometimes see it in a lot of popular discourse about people's

political leanings and their ideologies. This idea that instead of it being like a sliding linear scale between on one on one end, like leftist extremism and on the other end right wing extremism, and then in the middle, you know, just just you know, middle of the road, you know, neutrality and so forth, then instead of it being shaped like that, we should really curve it, and then it's more of a horseshoe, and that by virtue of this

horseshoe shape, it's illustrated that the extremes of either side

are actually closer than you might think. And this is generally generally it's employed to talk about like either like an overarching theme, like perhaps that in the extremes there's more of a draw towards like a strong leader type or totalitarianism or something, or that you might find particular sentiments, say like an at anti vac scene sentiment in both the far left and the far right, despite these groups having little else in common in terms of their ideology.

And I'm not sure which version of the of the model people are really talking about. When they invoke it often.

going on here, and that complexity can be overwhelming. I mean, as we try to make sense of the world's around us, the larger world and perhaps even the closer world of our friend circles and our families and so forth, and it might be tempting to say, but hey, look at this horseshoe, Look at this, I think this explains it all.

You know, it provides maybe a simple model that may I mean, maybe it provides some insight, but also a level of insight that at least you can sort of nod your head at and think like, okay, well this kind of lines up with some of the things I'm observing.

for those main two parties. But you know that that doesn't fully explain people's the depths of people's beliefs and preferences.

think they can. They can. They're nice to look at, and maybe they're a nice focus sometimes to take you out of the past in the future and put you into the present. But they have all these little notes on them about what they're good for and what focus in the crystal will allegedly do for were you, and on one table I found one that it was promised, would help me connect with quote Christ consciousness, and on the other it would help me communicate with extraterrestrials. And

so generally speaking, I don't know. I would expect that people looking to connect with either would have rather different world views, you know, the person with the Christ crystal and the person with the extraterrestrial crystal, Like maybe they want different things out of life. But also they may have both wandered into this crystal store, which makes me think that think of the you know, the ends of the of the horseshoe, you know, arching towards each other.

jump to. We're interpreting like how people connected with this horseshoe with this, you know, for all intensive purposes, this new artifact that lines up with various symbols of potents, like the horns and antlers have long been and still are things of symbolic power.

Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays, we do listener mail, Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or Artifact, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.