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June 20, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:05:47
E24 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | “The sun inexorably rises and sets” | DarkHorse Podcast

The 24th livestream from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in their continuing discussion surrounding the novel coronavirus. Link to the Q&A portion of this episode: https://youtu.be/uIH7eIvjIfQSupport the Show.

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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream, what we are now calling the Post Joe Rogan Experience.
All right.
Is that what we're calling it?
I don't know.
It seemed to me at that moment that that's what we should call it.
But in any case, we are here.
This is our 24th live stream.
I am sitting with Dr. Heather Hying, and there is, as has been the case for months now, a lot going on in the world.
Yeah, which is part of why we started doing these.
But first, today is the solstice.
It is the solstice.
It is the solstice.
It is the summer solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice for those few people who are watching and live in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning it's the longest day of the year.
It is the moment during which also our twilights are actually lasting longest as well, for the same reason it's the longest day of the year.
So, first day of astronomical summer, historical midsummer, so Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night's Dream was about this moment, not a month and a half from now.
Yeah, you alerted me to this fact before.
I had not thought about it, but it makes a great deal of sense that what we call summer would actually have moved and we are now talking about in the same way that we have altered the meaning of time to become like laboratory time rather than time the way humans experience it.
We have altered summer to be this...
Solar definition rather than either defining it around the way the seasons actually happen where you are or defining it where the maximal day length would be the middle of that period.
We've defined it where it starts at this period where day lengths begin to shorten.
JG Yeah.
It could be defined mid-summer could be the solstice, right?
And that would also be astronomically global.
I mean, that would be a truth that applied to the whole Earth.
But this nature of seasonality is so varied depending on where you are on the planet.
Growing up in L.A., as you did as well, hearing these aphorisms like, April showers bring May flowers, thinking, I don't think it's ever rained in April in L.A.
I used to shower in April just to see if I could get flowers to happen and it never seemed to have any effect.
Yeah, the seasonality in LA, the Santa Ana winds that come in in September and October and start fires, there's no aphorisms about that.
Summer solstice is a reality.
It's the solstice everywhere on the planet, winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, summer in the Northern, and here we are.
Now the days get shorter but slowly, but the days also get warmer for a while.
So all else being equal, this is the point where you have the maximum opportunity to produce vitamin D per day.
Yes.
This is that point.
Which ever more evidence suggests that that is something that you might want to be doing right now, given that it seems to be protective against coronavirus.
Yes, it's something you should want to do for lots of reasons.
It makes you much healthier and less vulnerable in general, but with respect to COVID-19 might be particularly important.
Incidentally, I ran across something on this front, as long as we're talking about daylight.
A recent paper reflects that one of the hypotheses that we advanced and talked about turns out to be right, which is that one of the reasons that SARS-CoV-2 is not transmitted outdoors as easily as indoors, in fact, Vastly less easy is that apparently UV light is highly destructive of SARS-CoV-2.
So we now know that for a fact which opens the possibility, if that's the only factor, Then it suggests that outdoors might not be so safe at night, whereas if it's one of a couple of factors, like we've talked about, the other factor that's probably highly relevant is the airflow and the volume, the absolute volume of the air in question.
So we're developing a kind of model in which For some reason, instead of a virus being able to get into you and infect you, there's some level at which you can absorb these things not specifically.
They're dealt with maybe by macrophages or something, and at the point you've overwhelmed the macrophages, then you are in jeopardy.
And in an outdoor environment, the dissipation of these things, and if it's daytime, the destruction of them in the sunlight makes it unlikely you will cross that threshold.
Whereas indoors, it can happen in a five-minute conversation if somebody's sick and expelling virus towards you.
And I think most of our intuitions, if we've spent any time in the physical world, are pretty good on this front.
I'm remembering, as you talked about, I was in San Antonio in November of last year, and I found myself having dinner one night at an outdoor restaurant, but it was in a little alley between two buildings.
And I had been very eager to sit outside because I always am, unless conditions are stifling in some regard.
But because it was really narrow between two rather tall buildings, I had the sense that the air wasn't as fresh as I wanted it to be.
And given what we know about these transmissions inside interior restaurants of the coronavirus, where people sitting in line of the HVAC flow end up getting infected at much higher rates than those people outside of that.
Of course, if you're in some kind of an urban jungle, outside probably isn't going to be as protective as if you're in an outside space with a lot of airflow as well.
So we've got a few of these parameters to wrestle with.
Absolutely, and we have indicators from history that people have intuited certain things, sometimes incorrectly.
So I believe that both plague and malaria have been attributed to stale air in the historical past before the proper term theory of disease told us what was going on.
In the case of Malaria.
Malaria is exactly what it means.
It's not really a question of air volume.
It's a question of mosquitoes, which inhabit swampy kind of air.
And in the case of… So they just got… I mean, at a gross level, at an imprecise level, the observation is kind of accurate.
Right?
Like if you're hanging out in an area with stagnant water that tends to produce stagnant air, air that smells of the anoxic stuff that it's emerging from, you're more likely to have mosquitoes around, which are the things that vector malaria.
So it's inaccurate, but there is an observation that's real at the base.
It's also true that in the case of plague, which at least in the majority of cases is transmitted by fleas, you're also talking about a place, if you were in some dank place where, you know, there were rats, I mean rats in particular have a smell that you can detect walking into a room, so there is some sort of indicator in the air, and it's not that you're smelling fleas, but nonetheless it's good enough.
The sense that that's maybe not a smell that you want to hang around is And at some level, both of them are indicators of trust your nose, trust your senses.
If something is telling you back off, just like if you run into a decaying roadkill or a pile of feces, everything in you says don't get closer to that.
Yeah, those intuitions are built around that, which of course also fits with our sense of beauty, perhaps being an indicator of lots of proxies for things that are useful or valuable or tend to imply opportunity or whatever.
So anyway, what a shock that we are well designed for environments in which our senses can detect things that clue us into hazards we may not be able to name or describe.
And that many of us feel more afield than maybe we even recognize our ancestors would have because so many of us are not even living now in the environments in which we grew up.
Not only are our aphorisms, our cultural norms built around places that most of us may not live at the moment, but our developmental environment is not a match for our current environment.
And so we are simply out of touch with our own selves in a lot of ways.
Yeah, we are out of our depth in an environment that we have largely created.
Well, wait, before we move on from the solstice, I wanted to say one other thing, which is there's some facts about the solstice and other celestial events that I think need to be said out loud, because the lesson is not well taught in general.
I'm going to interrupt you and say that you, I mean we, but this is one of the things that you led.
When we used to teach together, you created a workshop that grew every time with, I wasn't prepared for this, but three pages of questions, like single line questions, like tens and tens, closing in on a hundred questions.
That you asked students to figure out, you know, what they knew about it and whether or not they actually knew or if they were just accepting something they've heard.
Everything from, you know, what is the solstice?
To why are seasons?
And, you know, what are tides?
What are tides and why are there two high tides a day?
That's the one.
That's the one that was the most stumping of people.
Yeah, that's the most stifling.
So, what I wanted to say was that A, I hope the religious folks in our audience won't take this the wrong way, but there are certain facts about the universe that really strongly suggest that one of two things has to be true.
Either the universe was not designed by an engineering entity that wanted all this to happen, or it was and that entity didn't like us or want us to succeed.
So, one of them.
Is that the number of days in a year is not an integer, but it's close.
Yeah.
And because it's close, what that means is that for cultures that try to figure out how long the calendar is, they can't nail it because they tend to be one day long or one day short at least.
And when you do that, you tend to think for some number of years that you've got it right because the vagaries, the noise of weather obscures the signal that you would detect as a slight shift every year of, you know, if you put the right data plant is this day, It won't be way off for 20 years maybe, right?
And you won't be able to detect it because of the, you know, the variation in the seasons.
Weather is noise to the climate underlying it.
Right.
And so, anyway, cultures around the world have, there have been two things done.
One is you try to calculate it better and better and eventually you discover that it's not an integer and you figure out what to do about that and you insert something like leap year in order to correct for the slight shift, right?
Which is, incidentally, why this year, right now, the solstice is on the 20th rather than the usual 21st.
This year is a leap year.
And so we had the 29th that got in the way.
We're ahead of it.
Other than that, yeah, it would be on the 21st as it usually is.
Although, really, the solstice is a moment in time, not a day.
And so it's at 5.30 p.m.
something today.
Anyway.
And so we celebrate short years, three years and four.
Yeah, that's right.
So, in any case, cultures have figured out another way to deal with this, which is not to go after the precision, which is so maddeningly difficult to nail, but it's to actually go empirical.
And so you'll find all of these clocks built into, you know, mountainsides and structures, circular structures in which, you know, on the solstice the sun comes through.
But anyway, there are all of these calendars that are physical calendars that don't need to be calibrated because they are physical and the lining up of several things allows you to actually know what day of the year it is.
So long as you don't have cloud cover.
Right.
Well, but I mean, you can still, as it approaches, you know, you're sort of tracking it.
But so there it is.
The basic point is the calendar has been frustratingly difficult to nail down.
It's actually very late emerging that we have a good answer to how long the year is that we can actually hang our hat on.
And many cultures have worked around that by going empirical, and it's left all of this beautiful architectural evidence all over the world.
And you know, a lot of it is convergent.
This isn't necessarily cultures getting it from each other, they're discovering the same problem and solving it in the same way.
Yes, there's certainly multiple evolutions of it.
We know that at Ingapurka, which is this Cañari-Inca sort of collaboration in Ecuador, is obviously independent from Stonehenge.
And there are many other examples that are independently evolved.
Arrivals at the same way, at the same problem, the same universal human problem of how is it that we figure out what this planet is that we're living on and when to plant, really?
I'm sure that there are other reasons that early humans, that prehistory humans, just meaning before humans were writing, needed to be accurate about the time of year, but agriculture is a huge one.
And so we can expect that these sorts of empirical ways of telling time over the course of a And so, actually, final point.
started to emerge 8,000, 12,000 years ago in the various places where agriculture started to emerge at exactly the same times.
And again, independently, several independent evolutions of agriculture across the world 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.
And so actually, final point, this also, it actually tells us something about our current There's something about the internet and all of us interacting across arbitrary distances and time zones and all of that that's actually very disorienting.
On the one hand, it alerts you to something true about the fact that you're on this planet full of people for whom it is not the same time of day, and they may be in the opposite season.
But it is disorienting in the sense that once upon a time, and not so long ago, Where you were seasonally was not so much a question of the calendar that we all share.
It was a question of how the calendar interfaced with the particular ocean currents that were near you or whatever.
And so I've always been troubled, for example, by the fact that we synonymize autumn with fall.
My sense is fall is the period when the leaves are falling, right?
And that varies a lot.
It's not... And in L.A., for instance, there is no fall, really.
There's not, unless you have, you know... Ornamentals.
Yeah, there's no one fall because the trees come from all over the place.
In a pre-Columbian L.A., there was no fall.
Right.
Yeah.
So anyway, just the fact of You know, even the discovery of time zones is an interesting fact, and until then, the question of what time it was is a little odd because, you know, you don't have to ask because it's obvious what time it is, at least, you know, during the day most days.
Well, I mean, actually, Zach, our producer and older teenage son, just reminded me of something that he learned in history this year, which I knew as well, which is that it was actually the advent of trains across the United States that forced cities and states and presumably the federal government to actually make uniform time, because otherwise there was no need for it.
But if a train's coming at a particular moment and you need to pick someone up, you need to catch a train, You actually all need to agree on what time it is and what that means.
There's no need for it, because horses are just not fast enough.
Even at a horse-crossing space, you don't have a disturbing discontinuity, whereas we now have... Well, but I think more to the point, you don't know for sure the horse is going to arrive at 4 p.m.
You can say, I expect to be there before dark.
You can send a letter and say, I'm hoping to be there before dark on the Saturday of the harvest moon, or whatever it is.
There's not a horse schedule the way there is a train schedule.
That's not really true.
You know, in the 16th century, the proto-fascists used to make the horses run on time, which was... Famously, I guess.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Oh, Zach says he thinks it was also about making the trains not crash.
So it was an aesthetic concern.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, one of these little niggling concerns.
Okay, so you went to LA.
Yes, I did go to LA.
And actually, I must tell you, I had not been on a plane.
Exactly.
You want to talk about that a little bit?
Because that was the first time either of us had traveled since February.
Yeah, and I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't very important.
You know, Joe Rogan is a special phenomenon and so it seemed worth doing in light of what's going on in the world and the opportunity to talk about it with Joe to his audience.
But the act of Getting on an airplane was of all the things that I've seen I think it was the most different from normal Right the experience from one end of the to the other of the airport of the airplane Everything was bizarre and although in some ways, you know, the airport was Wonderfully empty at some level.
It was you know, it was a calmer space and My plane exact do you have the video?
Can you put the video on that?
I took of my plane Okay, so we'll show you a video of what it looked like on my flight.
This is Portland to L.A.
You can see very few seats are full.
A flight that would have been full.
Yeah, this flight would have been jam-packed on a normal day.
So anyway, it's a very different and jarring experience and as much as lots of aspects of it were more comfortable I have to say the sense that something must have gone very very wrong for a plane to look like this during a normal flying period Was it just never lifts.
You're constantly reminded that something is way off Well, I mean, you're enclosed in your face mask, for one thing.
Yeah.
In fact, I wore, not only my bandana, I wore a double face mask, thinking that this was about the most dangerous thing I had engaged in since... Recirculated air that you cannot escape from.
Yeah.
Now, they do say, before we get on the plane there now, like these screens that broadcast information tell you that the air is HEPA filtered.
I couldn't get anybody to tell me for sure whether that was normal, and they're just telling us about it now, or that's been added.
Nobody seemed to know.
But, at the moment, it's broadcasting this information and all of these things are apparently... And that should do it, right?
This is a big virus, that should... HEPA filtration should do it.
Well, if it was the virus alone, it wouldn't be enough, but the fact that the virus travels in water droplets...
Really?
The virus alone would not be caught by HEPA filter?
Is that right?
I think that's right.
There is a number, I forget what the scale is called.
Yeah, I don't remember.
Anyway, also in both directions my flight was either cancelled or the plane was changed.
There's a lot that's just not functioning very well in this system.
So there is that.
But yes, I went to LA.
LA is also very off.
It's just coming out of lockdown, so there's beginning to be traffic again and things like that.
But it's rather surreal out there.
I'll bet.
I guess I'm curious, and maybe most people wouldn't be if they don't know L.A.
well, but the idea of an L.A.
without traffic strikes me as not really L.A.
in a much improved environment.
I think earlier in the lockdown we were hearing that the streets were empty and kids were playing ball on the streets and such.
Is there anything else you want to say about, you know, the experience of moving through L.A.
as it emerges from lockdown?
You know, the thing is, there's not very much reason to move through it.
Oh, okay.
So you just went to where you needed to go.
It's sort of, you know, wherever you are, you're probably experiencing, unless you're in New Zealand, in which case I wish I was there with you.
Or South Korea.
Right.
Are they completely free?
I'm not sure, actually.
I'm not sure.
But yeah, you're somewhere on pause, some kind of pause, and that experience varies a bit, but the weird sense of, you know, things happen in one place, and it can disrupt the functioning of a city, but for the world to be this way at once is very strange.
Yeah.
So, you were invited by Joe Rogan to go back on your fourth?
Fifth.
Fifth time.
Third time alone, I believe.
And early in your talk with him, you said that you had been struck by police twice in your life.
And the story that you told on air, actually, is one I had not heard.
And we must have been living together at the time, because the only time you lived in Berkeley was when we lived in Berkeley together.
You know, you said that you joined a protest against homelessness in Berkeley because you supported the cause, but you hadn't even known it was happening.
You probably, like, just biked through it.
I just biked down there.
Yeah, exactly.
And having joined it, you were promptly smacked by a cop with a baton.
Yeah, a cop knocked me down with a baton.
Amazing.
I didn't tell you?
No.
It must just not have come up.
You think I was too high to remember?
Couldn't say.
No, I think I would remember that.
I think you would too.
Yeah.
So you had your bike with you?
You knocked your bike down?
I had locked it.
No, I was on foot.
I was on foot.
I was moving, the crowd was moving towards the Berkeley campus and I was moving with them and I ran into this cop and I, you know, I remembered it.
Did other people get smacked down or just you?
No, no.
I don't think it was personal.
It was awful.
Yeah.
And it alerted me to this sort of sense, which is, you know, it was the first place that I really understood, okay, all I had to do to be this cop's enemy was to just be in favor of this cause and march this direction.
Yeah.
This had nothing to do with my behavior, right?
I was just, I was an enemy.
It was a peaceful protest.
You were marching towards the campus, you said?
Yeah, it was a loud, peaceful protest.
Okay, but loud, like angry loud or musical loud, chanting loud?
Not that it matters.
I would say it was, I mean, you know, it's a long time ago.
My memory is dim, but I would say it's, it was loud and angry.
Okay.
But it was what it was.
Nonetheless, I didn't, you know.
I didn't threaten anybody.
I wasn't breaking anything.
I was just going in that direction.
And so anyway, that was that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you said, well, there were two.
Joe said, what were they?
And you said, well, the first one is a long story from my first research gig in Jamaica.
And you then skipped to the next one and it didn't come back up.
But I'm thinking you might want to tell that story.
Because this one I know.
This is the Revenge Best Served Live, isn't it?
You're going to have me tell that story here?
This is not revenge.
I don't think, I mean, I think it's fascinating.
I think I at least watched that and thought, oh, like I know the story and I still want to hear it.
All right.
Well, let me see if I can put the story back together.
So I was, I guess I would have been This is when you spent seven weeks in Jamaica with Bob Trivers.
Yeah.
So Bob Trivers is a great evolutionary biologist who's a good friend of ours.
Actually, he was the officiant at our wedding long after this event.
So this would have been probably 1990, fall of 1990.
Fall of 1990.
So you would have been 21.
21 years old.
I was 22.
Okay, so I was in Jamaica, extended period of time.
I did not know in what manner I would be staying.
You'd be 91.
Sorry, probably 91.
91.
Okay, so I went with Bob to help him with research on lizards that he was doing.
Bob is a guy of European descent, but he prefers to live with black people.
He identifies as black before that was ever a thing.
So anyway, he lives in Jamaica and He was married to a Jamaican woman.
He's divorced, but he has kids with her and so he's still a member of their family and anyway, I went down to research with him and I arrived and he picked me up at the airport and I at that point discovered in what way I would be living in Jamaica.
He just said he would take care of it and he hadn't told me a thing.
And it turned out that I was living with his family, that one of the daughters of the family was away in the States with her husband, and so her room was free, and I stayed in her room.
And this is his mother-in-law's house, right?
Yep, Miss Neeny.
His former mother-in-law, Miss Neeny.
Yeah, and I would say in some sense one of the many things I learned from my time in Jamaica was that effectively the divorce, Bob's divorce from the daughter didn't really change anything because they were related through the grandkids and so anyway.
So Bob was still part of the family even though he and the daughter no longer had a romantic relationship.
Right, exactly.
So in any case, I was staying in her room and this family So I'm sorry, you weren't staying in Bob's former wife's room, you're staying in one of the other daughter's rooms.
One of the other daughter's rooms, right.
And so anyway, Jamaica's a warm climate.
This is, by the way, off in the country, right?
This is in Southfield, Jamaica, which the only place that you might know about if you're not from Jamaica that you would have heard of that was anywhere nearby is Lover's Leap.
Lover's Leap is a famous vista where I think two people were supposed to have committed suicide together, lovers who couldn't be together.
And there may actually be an interaction with slavery in that story, which I've now forgotten.
But in any case, Lover's Leap is a famous place, Southfield is near it, and when I was in Southfield, it was primitive enough that there was no phone.
I brought a bike with me so I could ride to the junction to call you, since you and I were already involved and committed to each other, and so I had to have a bicycle to get to the junction because there was going to be no other way to make contact with you regularly.
So, anyway, and that was 10 or 15 miles away.
I don't know what the state of technology is there.
I would imagine it's changed a lot.
But in any case... Although probably, as we saw firsthand in Madagascar, that cell phones moved in and then landlines never happened.
So probably people have cell phones.
That could well be.
Could well be what happened.
It's a good prediction.
But anyway, so I was staying in this house, and the house is a house, but the kitchen is outside.
There's technically running water, which involves pumping water that's collected from rain off the roofs out of a big pool under a... so there's a big pool, collects water off the roofs, and then you pump it into an air tank above the house, and then that feeds the running water.
But for some reason that wasn't up and running, but there, you know, there were outhouses, and you took a shower by dropping a bucket into these big pools, and you tried not to knock the bottom out of the bucket when you did it.
Which was difficult.
But anyway, you would do that and you'd pour water over your head to shower and... So anyway, it was that kind of thing.
But the yard was basically the center of a community, right?
This was a... It was a clan.
A group of people who were affiliated in one way or another.
Not just the family itself.
And I became good friends with Lexi and Prince, who were somewhere near my age.
And anyway, it was very interesting to be, you know, to be friends with people who were living such different lives.
But anyway, we got along really well.
And it was...
Tremendous amount of fun.
So, here's where we get to the difficult part of the story.
At this time in my life, I smoked pot pretty regularly, and I was in Jamaica, and pot is very unstigmatized in Jamaica, and I wanted to have some, and I didn't want to be sourcing it a little bit at a time, so I, uh, and it was also, what?
I just had this image of a vat being pulled.
I wanted to have some, and I didn't want to source it a little bit at a time.
Well, don't forget this was your idea for me to tell this story.
So anyway, pot was cheap there.
It wasn't especially good.
It's what we would call ditch weed, right?
But it was plentiful.
So you could either buy it a little bit at a time, or you could buy one more than I was going to need.
So anyway, I think I threw a hundred bucks at the problem or something, and I ended up with ten times what I would have needed.
And so I had maybe an ounce of it, and I had given the rest to my friend Lexi.
And anyway, I was there and things were good and I was researching with Bob and I was learning a ton about how other people exist in the world and all of this.
And about lizards.
And about lizards.
And as my time in Jamaica was drawing to a close, one night I had gone to bed, just like I would any other night, and really late, like two in the morning, would be my recollection.
I hear a very loud thud and I wake up and I think I don't know what that is and suddenly I hear a lot of shouting and there are men streaming into the house and these officers obviously police officers dressed fully in Riot gear, military gear, they were heavily armed.
Multiple automatic weapons are coming through shouting about something.
I have no idea what the hell is going on and I'm just sitting there stunned, right?
I didn't, I mean, frankly, I probably hadn't seen a cop in Southfield.
It just was, you know, it was a little outpost somewhere and suddenly these cops from who knows where.
And anyway, One of them comes into my room and he... I cannot do a Jamaican accent.
It's a very difficult accent.
He says, you know, there's one white brother in here.
And then there's like a commotion.
What does this mean?
Anything like that?
So anyway, I'm sitting there and he's standing in the doorway and it's clear that I'm supposed to stay still and I stay perfectly still and they go streaming into the other rooms and I'm afraid because although pot is not a prosecutor defense in general in Jamaica, it's still illegal, right?
And I know that there's probably Half an ounce of pot under my bed, right?
You know, in a little paper bag.
And anyway, they kind of searched the room haphazardly.
And you still have no idea why they're there?
I have no idea.
What called them there?
No idea.
I'm just I can't even imagine because there's nothing about this family.
Nor at this point do you have any idea how the rest of the family is doing.
Right.
Like you're trapped in your room, the cop is saying, you stay here, or making it clear.
We're all pinned down.
But everyone's pinned down, you don't hear commotion, it doesn't sound like people are being dragged off, but you can't tell.
Right.
And so, um, okay, so the cop does a cursory search.
I think I detect that he does not find what is under my bed, and I breathe a kind of a half a sigh of relief, and they go into the next room over, which is Lexi's, and boom, they find the pot under his bed or wherever it was, his drawer or whatever, and they lead him out in handcuffs.
And, you know, I'm thinking, holy crap, what's going on here?
And so anyway, the cops finish their search of the house.
They're messy and raucous and, you know, they're probably... Are they destructive?
They're definitely like, they turn the place over.
But I don't know that they break stuff.
They don't pour stuff.
Yeah, not intentionally.
I mean, they break non-physical things.
Yeah.
They break trust and such.
And there must have been, you know, we got a glimpse, there must have been 10 or 15 cops, several vehicles, it was crazy.
So anyway, they stream out and they take Lexi with them and, you know, in handcuffs and they disappear into the night.
Lexi is one of how many young men?
At the house at this point?
- Well, that's the thing.
- Other than you? - So Lexi and Prince would have been the two older guys.
Bob's son, Johnny, was there, but he's younger.
He's young, yeah.
He's quite young.
So anyway, it was me and Lexi.
He would have been like, because we met and spent some time with Johnny when he lived with Bob in Santa Cruz for a while, a couple of years later.
So he was like 11 or 12.
Yeah.
He was still a kid.
So anyway, Lexi and Prince were there, but Prince was actually staying at the neighbor's house, house-sitting.
So he wasn't there.
So Lexi was the only young Jamaican man.
Yeah.
So okay, so we're all looking at each other.
The only Jamaican man gets taken off in handcuffs.
And, uh, anyway, we're looking at each other thinking, what just happened?
And, uh... We, like, the women of the house and you.
Johnny, Miss Nene, uh, and maybe... There's a woman, Karen, who didn't live right there, but she may have come over.
But anyway, we're looking at each other, not quite sure what to make of this, why it's happened, what's gonna happen to Lexi, we don't know.
And so anyway, as soon as we get our bearings, Johnny and I decide that we have to go tell Prince what's going on.
His best friend has been hauled off and whatever, just the next imperative thing is that he knows what's going on.
So Johnny and I head off and the houses are probably 150, 200 meters apart.
They're not right close to each other.
And anyway, we walk off across the night and my recollection is we get to the door of the house where Prince is house-sitting and I'm like mid-knock and hands grab me away from the door and suddenly I find myself up against the wall facing these cops.
They were going to... How did you, like, how did you not know they were there?
Well, that's the thing.
Were they quiet?
Somehow.
Yeah.
Either they saw us coming and maybe they'd left the cars.
I don't know what they had done, but for some reason we were there.
Stealth cops arrived here.
Completely surprised.
Wow.
Yeah.
So they grabbed Johnny and me.
Johnny too.
Yeah.
As a kid.
Yeah.
And they have us up against the wall.
And I realized, oh shit.
I had just thrown on clothing from, you know, the day before and in my pocket there's a joint and a lighter and the cop is searching me.
And he reaches into my pocket and he steals my lighter and misses the joint.
Lighters may be a rarer commodity in Southfield.
They are a fairly rare commodity.
You know, it's an object of value.
So anyway, I breathe another sigh of relief and the cop is being rough with me.
He's roughing me up a little bit.
Rough with Johnny too, as far as you know?
Yeah, both of us.
And I am not happy to be roughed up.
And so I'm trying to reason with him.
I later have a conversation with Bob about what I should have done, but nonetheless, I'm trying to reason with him.
I'm trying to be decent, and all of the things that you would do to get a cop to stop doing this to you, and it's not working.
And at some point, I curse in Jamaican, and I say, Ras Klaat, right?
And the cop He knocks me to the ground, right?
Kaboom!
With his arms?
He grabs me and throws me to the ground.
And I'm stunned.
This is not a normal occurrence in any way.
I kind of get back up and he tells me to stay there quietly and they go in and they search the house and I don't think they find anything in this house.
So they don't take Prince away.
They don't take Prince away, and then they disappear into the night, and they're gone.
Or so you think.
Stealth cops in riot gear, who knows where they're hiding?
Exactly.
So John and I go back to the house and we confer.
And you talk to Prince too?
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
I think at this point in the story… Is this the moment for me to ask you what Bob told you you should have done, or do you want to do what you didn't?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
So what does Bob say later you should have done before you continue the story?
Oh, he said I should have gone into upstanding American citizen proper English mode.
That I should have basically not tried to be of the population I should have emphasized being outside of it.
That's telling.
Yeah, it is telling.
Basically he's saying, you know, this is a man who has lived with and among and has family in Jamaica most of his adult life who's basically saying, as you have, use your privilege honorably.
Use it when you can.
Use it when you need it.
So that you can help those who don't have it.
Just as long as we're here, and since these things are on Wikipedia anyway, Bob Trivers was a Black Panther.
There's some story that I think I don't know about why he was, I think he was kicked out of the Black Panthers for his own good.
But I think he was still in the Black Panthers at the point that he actually had as a graduate student and graduated with a PhD, Huey P. Newton.
Huey Newton had a PhD in biology under the tutelage of Bob Drivers.
In evolutionary biology, yes.
I think that was after The Panthers.
He and Huey remained close.
Oh, okay.
And so anyway... I mean, he remained close with the Newton family, as we saw when we were friends, when we were living in the same place with him in the early 90s, long after... well, at least somewhat after Newton had been killed.
Yeah.
So his admonition was not Uh, it was a practical piece of advice.
It was not out of, uh, love for the police because obviously the tension between the Black Panthers and the police was intense.
And, um, at this point, you know, at the point he's giving me this advice, Huey Newton is already dead for years.
Um, so.
Okay.
So you and Johnny go back to the house.
We go back to the house.
We gather ourselves and eventually we go back to bed because there's nothing to do.
Right?
It's happened and we will find out.
There's not even any way to call anybody.
Right.
Nor would you know where to go.
Right.
So it's just over.
And so anyway, go back to bed and the next day we get up and try to figure out.
And Bob knows?
Bob doesn't know.
Bob's staying somewhere else.
Oh, I forgot to say this.
Bob actually had gone.
Sorry, Bob.
Bob's lovely.
No, Bob had gone to give a talk.
I really hope it's okay to say this.
I think it's public record.
I think Bob has talked about it.
He went to the CIA.
The CIA was interested in his work on deceit and self-deception.
And he does not feel, you know, I don't think he had any love of the CIA, but I don't think he felt like he was giving up any important secrets, in fact.
I mean, he's published his work on deceit and self-deception.
It's out there.
So, before he left, he was very proud of this joke that by lecturing on deceit and self-deception to the CIA, he was taking coals to Newcastle.
It's a pretty good joke.
Incidentally, the idea that the cop stole your lighter from you reminded me of one of Bob's examples of self-deception in his work on the subject, in which he reports that he is constantly stealing lighters from himself.
And thus leaving himself bereft of lighters.
Right.
Okay, so let me try to recall the order of events.
I think the next thing that happens is... This is going to be the next morning, you guys wake up.
Yeah, I think, so I'm now closing in on my leave date for Jamaica.
I have my ticket out, and so we're in the last couple days, and I think the next thing that happens is I go I make a point of going to the jail where Lexi has been taken to see him because I'm not going to see him otherwise.
And he and I have become friends and I just didn't want to leave the island not saying goodbye to him.
And so anyway, I, wherever the jail was, it was in one of the towns not too far away, you know, 30, 40 miles away, maybe.
And, uh, somehow I... maybe I got Uncle Vernie to drive me in Bob's car, as in... Car, in quotes.
Held together with duct tape and... As long as we're doing this, let's take this a little detour.
So, among the many shocking lessons of my time in Jamaica was that there was a kind of inferiority complex among Jamaicans about the capacity that people that they saw coming from the U.S.
and other mainland countries had.
It was a sense of inferiority.
But from my perspective, I was around people who had tremendous ingenuity to be able to do things when they didn't necessarily have the right part, right?
You couldn't just source stuff.
And so they were tremendously ingenious at solving problems that in the States, you know, you would bring your car somewhere and they would just replace a part.
In Jamaica, they might have to fashion a part, or if they couldn't fashion a part, they'd have to kludge some solution to make the car run anyway, and they were constantly doing this.
And so, anyway, look, the opposite to me, but there was something about the razzle-dazzle nature of the, you know, the gadgets and techniques and the ease with which things work when you have exactly the right tool rather than not exactly the right tool that had left them with the wrong impression.
I'm reminded of the story from our first long trip through Central America with my, what, 1976 Toyota Corolla and the trip would have been in 1993, so this is not a new car and I never had it when it was new of course.
And the alternator broke, I mean so many things broke in that car, but the alternator broke at one point when we were still in Northern Mexico.
Yeah.
And we ended up flagging down someone who had an ability to tow it to the nearest place, nearest town.
And we said, God, there's not going to be a new alternator here.
Right.
How long are we stuck here?
How long are we stuck in this?
We don't even know where we are.
You know, northern central desert Mexico.
And the guy said, are you kidding me?
I rebuild them.
And at that point, 93, I think that was.
I can't remember.
91.
That would have been actually 91.
As well, that would have been right before you then went to Jamaica with Bob.
You know, he laughed at us, like, we don't use new alternators, we rebuild alternators.
And there was, as far as I know, almost no one rebuilding alternators in the U.S.
at that point.
Oh, right.
It could be done, but most people had lost the skill.
No, no.
In fact, there was a mechanism.
You would take your Old alternator in and you would get 10 bucks back on your new alternator.
I mean, it was just, you know, a core charge, right?
And nobody would rebuild it.
Just on this little, little deviation here.
I don't remember what he charged us in cash, but it was quite low.
But he also, you know, we had the car completely packed because we were going to be on the road for the summer and we didn't know where it was going to take us.
And one of the things we had was one of these like Costco sized cans of almonds.
And so he asked for payment in cash plus the almonds.
Yeah.
That's the family size.
Costco sized thing of almonds.
Yeah.
Probably still have those almonds.
At least the can.
I'm sure the can is being used.
It's probably being used.
Okay.
So anyway, I go and I see Lexi.
And the scene is a little frightening actually.
Lexi's a very robust dude, but he's a little shaken, right?
And he's in a concrete- So what's the set the scene for the jail?
Is he alone in the cell?
Is there a lot of people?
He's alone in a cell.
It's kind of a big cell.
But he's alone in a cell.
It's concrete, awful mattress and not much more beyond that.
But I talked to him.
I sit down with him.
They let me in and I talked to him and he tells me that they've got him Cleaning the marijuana that they're lifting off of people, of the stems and the seeds so that they can resell it.
Right?
So that's how corrupt this police department is.
And has he come to understand that the, at least the excuse, the cover story for them arresting him was because he was in possession of marijuana?
Oh no.
No.
Okay.
What I think the story was, was that a, I don't even know why there was a rival family.
I saw no evidence of, you know, I saw a little bit of interpersonal conflict sometimes in Jamaica and it was sometimes, you know, I learned interpersonal conflict in Jamaica is a bit louder than it is, you know, in the U.S.
usually.
But anyway, all of it pretty good-natured and affectionate.
So I wasn't aware that there was any tension.
I never saw it.
Between clans, effectively.
Right.
But somebody apparently reported that the family I was staying with had been involved in some sort of a theft of goods from a store, which I guarantee you didn't happen.
There were no goods.
And they wouldn't have done it.
Right.
It didn't happen.
But they came looking for that stuff and having failed to find it, and they did find pot and that was technically illegal, they used it for leverage or something.
Okay. - Don't want to waste a good suiting up into riot gear, do you? - I guess not.
I mean, every time I've suited up in riot gear, I have made sure to find some sort of an infraction to arrest people for.
- Yeah.
- Okay, so anyway, I see Lexi, we say goodbye, and I go back to Southfield.
And there's an errand that Bob has left.
I'm just going to ride along, but I think it's Uncle Vernie has to go to the hardware store to pick up some funds for some workers who are working on Bob's house that he's building down there.
Okay.
Bernie goes into the hardware store, and I'm sitting in the car.
And a Jamaican guy, who seems nice enough, comes up to the window and asks me if I'm interested in smoking a joint.
And this isn't so unusual.
It's a little unusual.
Bob's at the CIA at this point.
Are you the only white guy?
I'm the only white guy probably for 10 or 20 miles in any direction.
So on the average day the only other person of European descent you see is Bob and he's not even in country at this point.
Right.
Okay.
Which is a very interesting experience and among the many things I learned is that that Turns one of the tables, but not both of them, right?
So it turns the table of yeah, you're actually the minority and you feel it, but The white person is a powerful minority.
They're understood to be powerful and you know This has all kinds of implications that I find profoundly disturbing like the celebration of lighter-skinned children But you know, I'm an evolutionary biologist.
I can also tell you why that is the fact is in a world in which You know, there is something called white privilege or something that would be called white privilege if that term wasn't being borrowed and abused.
Lighter skinned children have opportunities that others might not.
And so, you know, it makes sense for people to root for such things because it might Give you a leg up in a situation where you would otherwise not get anywhere, so... No, and the fact is that even when you are a minority of one in your skin in a place when your skin looks like yours or mine, you can always choose, and at any moment you may choose to do just this, to go back to the place where you are not the minority.
And, you know, I experienced this in Madagascar, we did as well, but the time that I was there Without you, I really felt it very acutely that, okay, it is, yes, whenever I walk down the street, I'm, you know, the only white person for there, you know, hundreds of miles aside from Jessica, my field assistant, and people are intrigued and enchanted and scared and a little horrified.
In Northeast Madagascar, one of the myths is that the monster, the demon that comes and eats children comes in the form of a white woman.
Occasionally, children are actually deathly afraid because they've never seen one before.
How that myth started in a world without colonialism, I don't know.
Madagascar's myths are far older than the colonial influence of the French.
The fact is that at any moment, I could have Left.
Yeah.
Just as you could have left and you did, right?
Well, which brings me to the next part of the story.
Excellent.
So, I'm sitting there in Bob's car.
I have, this guy has come up who I don't know, offered to smoke a joint with me.
I probably should have said no, but I didn't have a reason to say no.
And so, he gets in the car and he rolls a joint and we're smoking it.
And he Starts talking about where I'm from and I, you know, I tell him and I say, you know, I say I'm headed back in a couple days and he offers to get me a large amount of pot to take back to the States.
And I say, Nope.
No, thank you, sir.
No, thank you.
He says, are you sure?
And I say, yeah, I'm sure.
I have no interest in that.
And immediately cops in riot gear descend on the car.
They yank him out of the car.
They appear to rough him up and throw him into the back of a vehicle, at which point they come to me.
And they pull me out of the car and they start giving me a very hard time.
You're alone or you're with Uncle Verny?
No, Uncle Verny is in the hardware store.
He doesn't see any of this?
He doesn't see any of this.
I'm out there.
The cop is giving me a hard time, and they start searching the car.
I have no idea what's in this car.
Lots of people use this car.
I don't know what's about to happen, right?
But anyway, they search the car.
They don't find anything, and the cop tells me That I am hanging out with the wrong people.
And I say, I don't think they're the wrong people.
I think they're very good people.
I really, I think they're excellent people.
I think you're making a mistake.
He said, you're wrong.
You are hanging out with the wrong people.
And I say, and he says, and you have to stop.
And I say, I am leaving Jamaica in two days.
And he said, that's too long.
You have to go tonight.
And then they drive off.
With the guy who had tried to get you to take a bunch of... had tried to get you to agree to take pot.
I believe I was being set up.
Yeah, exactly.
But in any case, they drive off and they tell me that I have to leave tonight.
I don't really have a good mechanism for even doing that.
Right.
But I more or less decide that's a bluff and I return to the house and I You know, do what I was planning to do anyway.
You tell your friends?
You tell Bernie?
Oh yeah, I tell everybody.
And anyway, so I proceed with my plans as they were scheduled and I fly out without incident.
Without further incident.
Without further.
Yeah, it's not entirely without incident.
And Lexi?
Lexi's released?
Weeks later, I believe.
He spent a good bit of time in jail for an offense that was not an offense that nobody would have thought twice about except the police.
Doing unpaid work that was itself part of the same offense.
Right.
Exactly.
So anyway, that story has a lot of depth to it.
And I guess this is the end of my public life.
So anyway, it's been great.
No, that's fabulous.
There are a lot more places to go with that, but I think it's important to... I see why you didn't want to go there with Joe, because it's a long story and you can definitely get dragged into a lot of things that maybe you had more important things to talk about.
But the fact that you have experienced abuse at the hands of police and watched your friends be abused and known that they were living a life that they could not escape.
That at any moment any of them, and you know they weren't, I assumed, I mean yes you told me the story at the time when you got back, but I assumed without asking that of course they weren't roughing up women.
Yeah, I didn't see that.
Right, and yeah I'm sure there are occasionally women, you know maybe more so now, who are involved in what the police would view as nefarious behaviors, and some of them really are, and so sometimes they do get roughed up, but in general it's going to be, you know, Active, riot-geared police raiding houses.
It's going to be men, mostly young men, who are going to be treated badly.
And you got off once?
Maybe because they didn't find anything?
Maybe also they weren't looking as hard because you were white?
Who knows?
I don't know.
I mean, I've thought a lot about what this meant.
What they were hoping to accomplish.
I can't really imagine That they were going to pin something on me and I was going to end up in a Jamaican prison, right?
If I'd been dumb enough to take their offer... Well, this is not your skin privilege, this is your nationality privilege, right?
Right, exactly.
Like the US government would just not have any of that.
Well, it might, but it's not worth the international incident.
So my guess would be maybe... I don't know, maybe they were hoping to extract some...
I get the impression they didn't know that I was there until they happened on me unexpectedly during their initial raid.
I sort of have the sense that it was organic until that moment and then something changed.
But I don't know.
That's important too, right?
that the dehumanization of the people on the other side, be it the police or whatever, or the protesters, or whatever group it is, actually requires that we imagine that they have simple rules and that they live by their pure principles actually requires that we imagine that they have simple rules and that they live by their pure principles at all moments, when in fact, under times of duress especially, especially if not perfectly trained, as we know
There are going to be snap decisions that aren't the ones that if you ask them in calm, measured voices when they aren't under duress, what would you do?
Different decisions are made.
This is when poor decision making happens, and that's not an excuse or justification, but rather an explanation in part.
So I should say, actually, one of the reasons I'm a little reluctant to tell the story, and I guess the deed is done now, is I certainly assume that, you know, 30 years later, that there's no harm to come from this.
Those officers have long since moved on.
Presumably everybody gets that the story is ancient history, but I really did Value my time living in Jamaica.
It gave me a window into Yes, how?
Jamaicans live and how this particular family live but also just a correction, you know until you live in another culture You only have your own experience to go by and so this was so eye-opening and so important as a formative experience that I you know, I cherish it and I And I value all of the interactions that I had and all of the people that I was living with who treated me so well, you know?
In the US, if you brought somebody into your house study abroad like, right?
You would do your best to be gracious to them, but it would not be as warm and decent as what I experienced among people who had really no reason to care for me, right?
At some level, they cared for you both because they loved Bob and they trusted him, and he wasn't bringing through a whole host of people.
He didn't have a research assistant every year.
You were there working with him that year, and I'm just totally guessing here, but maybe one year in five, maybe he would bring someone down to work with him, right?
So this was rare.
This wasn't just a constant sort of circulating tribe of random undergraduates from the US.
Um, but also, you know, you were real with them, and you were living in their home, and you were legitimately Befriending, and enjoying the food, and not complaining about the fact that you were showering with a bucket that you had to dip into a pool.
I've lived with you in those situations in other places, and I know for sure you didn't complain, even if it wasn't optimal.
But especially, again, I think you were there for seven weeks.
For seven weeks, everything is still just amazing, even the legitimate hardships of life.
where you don't have functional running water or reliable electricity and, oh, by the way, the cops in Reikir may suddenly show up when you didn't even know the cops were present.
Those things...
Are we live, Zach, still?
No, we're still there now.
Okay.
You were learning from every single thing that you were doing down there.
This is actually one of the things we used to say to our students when we would do study abroad.
Yes, we are going to be studying evolution and ecology and animal behavior and tropical biology and philosophy of science and statistics and all of these things, but part of the reason to go is that we are now going to be living In someone else's culture, among other people, and we hope to, you know, we require that you be respectful and understand that you are guests in their culture and home, but we hope that you can manage to befriend
And, you know, learn to admire the different ways that different people do things and understand, you know, the ways in which your life as Americans is actually privileged and unique and the ways that America's got it wrong, too.
You know, what have we lost?
With all of the resources that we've got, you know, this is something that was said to me and to us in Madagascar a few times, you know, the observation from people that, yeah, you Americans, which, you know, they saw very, very few Americans to the degree they saw any Vasa, any white people, it was mostly French people.
You Americans seem to show up with lots of stuff, meaning we had boots and backpacks, like, you know, lots of stuff meant just that we could put shoes on our feet.
But you may not have the family connections that we have.
Oh, right.
And you, you know, there's also an exchange of wisdom that I thought was really profound.
So I recall, I often invoke Uncle Vernie.
Uncle Vernie was a great guy as a mechanic.
Yeah.
And he was one of these guys who was just, you know, super capable of figuring out a solution when the thing that you, you know, when The A-level solution wasn't available.
He had, you know, B through Z, uh, uh, you know, somewhere in his arsenal.
But I remember one day I was trying to, um, I was trying to lubricate my bicycle chain and I didn't have bike chain lubricant.
And he, uh, brought me some corn oil and I was like, I'm not so sure.
And he said, Brett, the wrong lubricant is better than no lubricant.
And to this day, there's a couple of instances where that's not true, like the pawls of a ratchet.
Why?
Because if you put a lubricant that is too thick, they can stick.
But in most cases, you know, there might be a best lubricant, but what you really need is something to lubricate the things, because otherwise they rub together.
And, uh, tear the apparatus apart.
But anyway, there's that.
But then there was also the other thing, which I found, I still think about it a lot, which is there was this gaggle of kids who ranged from very, very young, like... Like three.
3 to kids who were maybe, you know, 12, 13, 14.
And they were really fond of me because I would answer their questions.
And they had a lot of bad information coming to them.
A lot of it over, you know, TV and stuff.
Bad info.
American TV is what they're being exposed to mostly.
Yeah.
Now they find me confusing because I frequently tell them I don't understand what they're asking me because they speak in Patois and my Patois is weak.
And they don't even recognize, the kids don't, that they speak two languages.
They're code switching between school English and Patois.
So school English is not Patois, it's American English.
It's American English, yes, with a British accent.
Um, but anyway, it's, um, so this gaggle of kids was, you know, they were constantly following me around and I remember I was reading, um, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I think was my book that I was reading.
Yes, and there was a point at which, I think it may be the end of the book, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, where there's a scene where they have to euthanize their own dog.
And I knew I was going to cry, and I wanted to be alone.
But this gaggle of kids would not, like, would not take the hint.
And so everywhere I found a quiet place, like, kids would descend on me.
So anyway… So I don't remember, was it one of the kids or someone else who asked you, is the moon that we see in Jamaica the same moon that you see in the United States?
Yeah, that was Prince.
That's a great question.
And it just it points, you know, there's there's honest inquiry there.
And, you know, unless you too can answer all the questions on that list that you made about why the seasons and why the solstice and why the two tides and all of this, don't feel superior to someone asking a question like that, just because that happens to be one of the things that managed to get through education, you know, get through to you in education.
Oh, and especially, you know, I remember being kind of dismayed.
At one point I found a copy of the Weekly World News.
And the problem is the Weekly World News looks like a newspaper.
That's one of these tabloids, right?
Oh, it was the most ridiculous of them, you know.
And I think the particular issue I was looking at… A woman had given birth to an otter or something?
Like, I mean, just pure nonsense, right?
It's lizard people before it's time.
Yeah, exactly.
And so anyway, you've got just garbagey information that in the U.S.
you would know to discount, but it shows up looking like a newspaper in a place where they don't even have, they're not connected by phone, so there's no way to correct bad info.
But high literacy.
So, you know, something like that falls into people's hands and they actually do take it in, which is actually, you know, potentially a downside of literacy in a place without good written word.
Yeah, we don't think of that downside of literacy, but it potentially is one.
Anyway, so the thing, you know, Prince's question was a good one until you know for sure, I mean, very distantly separated places, but there's, you know, it led to several different discussions because, okay, it's the same moon, is the phase the same?
Right?
Well, if you think about it, why is the phase the same?
It takes you a second to put together why that would be and, you know, anyway, we could go down that rabbit hole and we shouldn't.
Well, I think we are over an hour already, and there were many other things that we wanted to talk about, but maybe... We have not talked about any of the horror in the world.
No, we haven't, but maybe, you know, maybe we should leave it... Well, I have this one quotation from James Baldwin that I wanted to finish with, but given that we've gone for an hour, and we'll be back on Tuesday, and we'll do a Q&A live stream right after this, you want to say just a couple words?
Can we take a quick show of hands?
Are you guys all right with that plan?
Great.
Terrific.
Yep.
I guess I'll say, okay, we'll save logistics for when Zach's got the end screen up.
So James Baldwin, who is an extraordinary writer and thinker, he's dead now, I had this to say, a very short quote, but it seems like it's a nice finish to us talking about the solstice to begin.
He says, Life is tragic, simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives.
We'll imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death, ought to decide indeed to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
One is responsible for life.
It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's Baldwin.
That is incredibly powerful.
It is.
All right.
On that note... So, we have just a couple of logistics things here.
We're going to pick up Super Chat questions as we always do from this hour, prioritizing by dollar amount, and then for the second half of the Q&A, we will look at Super Chat questions that come in in the next hour, in the order that they come in.
And we will miss some good ones, and for that we apologize, but we never have time to do all of them.
We have created a, what we're calling for now, Dark Horse Membership on my Patreon.
A private Q&A a month for people who sign up at the $5 level or higher.
Which it looks like, I put a poll up, so unless a lot more people sign up and change it, it looks like it's probably going to be on the last Sunday of the month this month on June 28th.
So if you are interested in that, you can go over to my Patreon and sign up.
And I feel like there was something else, but I've forgotten.
Don't know.
Well, if we figure out what it is, we can pick it up at the beginning of the livestream Q&A, which will start in about 15 minutes.
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