#60: Do Not Eat! (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 60th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. DarkHorse merchandise now available at: store.darkhorsepodcast.org Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Pa...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 60.
Apologize for the late start.
Our tech has gone totally 2020 on us.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Boxing Day.
Happy Boxing Day!
I know that one's right.
Will you tell me, I am old enough that I should absolutely know this, having grown up around many Christians, do I say Merry Christmas now that Christmas is over, or do I not?
I have no idea.
You have no idea.
You don't know.
All right.
Well, definitely have a merry Boxing Day.
Since when are you all about protocol anyway?
I'm a late bloomer in this regard, at least.
So yes, I don't know.
I don't know what that's about.
I think I'm feeling a certain amount of trepidation.
I think a lot of us have been assuming that 2021 is simply going to be vastly better than 2020 just by simple matter of reversion to the mean.
It is very likely to be an improved year, but there's no telling.
I mean, it could be that whatever it is that put 2020 in motion the way it did is going to continue into 2021.
Gee, I wonder whether or not that could be the case.
Whatever put 2020 into motion the way it did, Say the public reveal of a virus on literally the last day of 2019 could perhaps follow us into 2020.
Not obeying temporal boundaries that are in fact entirely human constructs even while the astronomical realities of things like solstices are not human constructs.
Well, I was I was thinking that the larger context in which COVID is embedded, right, might be might be different.
Obviously, COVID is very unlikely to be cured by the beginning of the year.
And so I don't know, at least at least we have no presidential elections scheduled yet in 2021.
So it's likely to be better on those grounds alone.
Yep.
But I don't know.
I mean, none of us really have a good sense of exactly why everything seemed to come to a head in 2020.
Although, I have a hypothesis.
I honestly have no idea what we're talking about.
Could I just stop for a second?
Sure.
Zach, is there any way that we can get a view on the camera or is that just not going to happen?
All right.
It's just a little disconcerting to be talking into blackness.
Okay.
All right.
I'm going to save my hypothesis.
No, no.
Go for it.
Please go for it.
Nope.
I'm holding it back.
Why?
What just happened?
Let us move on to the material of the podcast as we had it scheduled.
So what was the... I'm eager to hear your hypothesis.
I'm going to hold it to a more appropriate place in the broadcast.
Fair enough.
So, we had a… I'm trying to remember.
So far, this is a very rocky start.
Welcome to Episode 60, everyone.
Here we are.
We're going to talk a little bit about those weird interstitial spaces between moments that are important and that mark transitions.
Hey, there's a screen.
Thank you, Zach.
And then obviously we're going to talk a little bit about locker rooms and climate change and the brain cases of shrews and maybe a little bit about traffic.
So, you know, all very coherent narrative as per 2020.
Right.
We'll just, we'll re-kick it off.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 60.
Here we are.
We are staring down the barrel of 2021 and raring to go.
Oh, we are raring.
We are.
What is raring?
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
The opposite of well done-ing, I guess.
Do you ever hear that word, absent being followed by to go?
No.
Are you ever raring?
On the couch?
New Year's resolution.
I'm inspired.
My first New Year's resolution is going to be at some point during 2021, at a moment when it's not wasted, I'm going to use the phrase, raring to stop.
I like it.
Very good.
Okay, well, I'm excited for the moment when you are raring to stop.
Raring to stop, yes.
Yes.
All right, so, right, so we are, yesterday was Christmas.
Merry Christmas, if that's still appropriate.
Merry Christmas to you.
Thank you.
And to all of you.
And Hanukkah had long since ended.
The solstice was four days prior, four days prior.
And of course, the New Year is coming right up.
And for me, growing up in a house that celebrated Christmas, albeit without very much, really any religious associations with it, even though my father had faith.
Um, this week between Christmas and New Year's always had a particularly, um, strange, somewhat wistful, somewhat sad, but also hopeful feel to it.
Um, you know, it's, of course, when you're a child, um, if you were normally in school, you're not in school right now.
I mean, our children haven't seen the inside of a classroom since March, so, um, this feels very much not like Not nearly as unusual as it normally would, but so the fact that you would normally not be in school and that your parents, if they both work, normally have at least several days off contributes to that.
But it's also, I think, about just the fact that there are these two major holidays, regardless of whether or not you actually celebrate Christmas.
In the US, it is so ubiquitous a part of the culture that it is all around you everywhere.
And by this moment, Hanukkah has almost always completely ended.
I think there may be some years when it continues on past into very late December.
And the new year, of course, is both A human construct in terms of us defining it as whatever it is five days from now, but also reflects an astronomical reality that is absolutely salient and important and would have been important to anyone trying to make a living on the planet in any way.
Until very, very recently.
It's only the very strange modern condition of being human in which maybe it doesn't really matter to you that you've gone a full cycle around the sun, right?
There's also this interstitialness of it.
It feels liminal.
And I actually want to return, I don't want to spend a ton of time today on this question of liminality, but when Carnival happens, when that time within, actually I don't know when it is this year, but in a few months, I want to come back to this question of what Carnival is as someone who has now taken students into Latin American Carnival in a couple of places and talk about what this moment of sort of shedding identity and playing with identity is.
It's almost a return to childhood.
And this moment in time feels a little bit like that.
It's got this potential of, okay, as much as that year was whatever that year was, let's see if we can phoenix this up.
If that thing is going to burn to the ground, what will rise from the ashes?
Can we make it something better, unexpected, emergent, that maybe no one, including ourselves, has imagined before?
Yeah, it is a weird kind of a stasis.
And you know, there has traditionally been a period in many calendars, because you and I have talked before, I think maybe even we talked last week, about the fact of the calendar being very hard to calibrate because it's not an integer number of days.
Which can be dealt with in a number of ways.
You can either physically instantiate the calendar where the exact presence of the sun on the horizon at some location is used as a marker.
That marker doesn't move.
The most famous one that people will be familiar with being Stonehenge.
Stonehenge, but there are many, many of these Earth clocks.
And in fact, there's one, I didn't know we were going to be talking about this, or I would have looked it up, but there's one somewhere in Northern North America.
There's one before the population had figured out how to calibrate their clock.
They had tried to do it, I think, based on the moon phase, which is also not an integer number with respect to the year, the number of complete moon cycles.
And so anyway, there's paleontological evidence of them having dug up their clock and rebuilt it again and again and again, trying to get it right.
But anyway, yes, so the interstitial space here after the solstice and before our new year, the new year obviously being arbitrary.
You know, as you were speaking, it occurred to me that it would not be arbitrary if it had been on the actual solstice.
And I do wonder if, in fact, obviously many their calendars differ as to when they place the new year, but this one doesn't seem to be so accidental.
And it does sort of suggest a sort of near miss for the start of the year, you know, if it had been.
Well, it's the 21st, but I actually feel like there's value in it.
So, you know, you just said between the solstice and the New Year, I was thinking of really the week between Christmas and New Year's, but it's, you know, in terms of astronomical something, The solstice and whatever moment you've decided to call the new year still being reflective of, OK, one year ago we were in the same place relative around the sun.
It's a way of keeping track of your own life.
Having that delay of, in the case of solstice to new year, of, you know, 10 days-ish, a week and a half, actually potentially has value, right?
Like it allows you time to reflect and it's not just, OK, we're looking forward to this thing and boom, it happened, it's over.
And now, you know, move forward like this.
It actually allows for a slowdown.
You know, most people do not feel like we need more of a slowdown in 2020.
Right.
There's been plenty of that.
Thank you very much.
On the other hand, as much as we have been much more at home still, you know, not going out, not experiencing things that we would have been experiencing all of us as a result of COVID and the resultant political and cultural response to it.
There is, it has been difficult to get any distance enough to reflect and maybe we can use, not us necessarily right now, but maybe all of us can use these next few days to think on what actually we personally did that was appropriate.
It may have, you know, the virus and its downstream effects may have revealed things about our own selves, That are useful to us, both in terms of, wow, I actually have that capability or, huh, that came out and I wish it hadn't.
And now I can see it and maybe now I can act so that it is minimized in the future.
Yeah.
So there's two things.
There's sort of a, you know, personal growth, you know, monitoring from a fixed period before.
And then there's also a question of, you know, how different things are.
Obviously this year, you know, basically it is a year since COVID.
broke into the world framing.
But at some point, for example, we will face a year in which the price of fossil fuels has changed so much that getting coal in your stocking is a good thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Even if you're a child, do you think?
Well, sure.
I mean, for one thing, you know, it's worth enough.
You can trade it up for a PlayStation or whatever it is that you really want.
I think our children would actually prefer the oranges.
The oranges, oh sure, sure, yeah.
That's one of the reasons that we get them oranges.
That's right, for your whole crate.
Yep, absolutely.
Yeah, so I mean there's a lot to say here about the value of tradition and about, especially at a moment when it's very hard.
To have many of our normal traditions, to consider what their value actually is, to not overthrowing them just because it's what you did as a kid and you think you've outgrown them, or because you can't see what the value is.
You know, Chesterton's fence in the form of Chesterton's traditions, this sort of thing.
And that's not to say that all traditions have value or need to be carried forward, but think before you get rid of them and maybe in this, you know, unfortunate sort of whittled-down moment, consider whether or not there are more that you might create and establish.
And they might be annual, they might be, you know, when they're sort of daily, we tend to call them habits rather than tradition.
You know, there's some temporal scale long enough by which we tend to call it a tradition.
But even, you know, seasonal, you know, people who celebrate, for instance, the astronomical realities of the solstices and the equinoxes have those as rituals or traditions, and it helps remind them of sort of, yes, where they are in the seasons, but also To say, ah, last time I did this, I was here.
I was in this headspace.
I was with these people.
I felt this way.
It's also, you know, it's one of the reasons that people journal.
It's one of the reasons that people, you know, leave clues to what they used to think for their later selves to find, because it actually can calibrate you and your world.
Perfect.
All right.
Here's what I think.
Here's my hypothesis.
This is the one you were going?
Absolutely.
Awesome.
Okay.
Now mind you, if this is true, it's important and you need to pay attention.
2020 is what happens if you eat the silica gel.
That's the hypothesis.
So I don't know who ate the silica gel.
So you don't think it was collectively?
You don't think all of us secretly ate the silica gel?
No, no.
One person eats the silica gel, 2020 is the kind of year you get.
And so basically we all need to get on with it.
We've got a collective action problem here to beat the band, right?
We need everybody to just resist the urge to eat those little packets of silica gel.
Just throw them out with the box to your shoes.
You think it was an anti-authoritarian who just could not take it anymore?
It's like, do not eat.
Really?
Do not eat.
Really?
I'm just...
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
It was a rebel who was just... To hell with it.
Didn't care the risk they were putting the rest of us to.
Had no idea.
Well, damn them.
I hope it dried them right out.
So, before we talk about things totally distinct from this, we actually did something this week that used to be in your life a lot when you were growing up and was in my life a little A little bit.
And we had before this week never done it as a family.
I hadn't done this in decades.
Our older son, our producer, had been taken out for like an hour once.
And you had gone out with our younger son twice last year.
Two days.
Yep, two days.
And then COVID shut the whole thing down.
So what is it and what do you want to say about it?
Yeah.
So the thing is skiing, which is its own weird kind of phenomenon.
Alpine skiing.
Alpine skiing.
Yeah.
Downhill skiing, as they used to call it.
Which is, you know, it's a very fun, slightly artificial, but very much out in the fresh air and in a beautiful place kind of an activity.
And anyway, it's been something that has been hard for us to do.
I mean, it's expensive.
It's often far away.
And it just so happens Portland has good skiing within a couple of hours.
And so anyway, we just finally bit the bullet and did it.
Found ourselves on a beautiful volcano one lovely Wednesday morning.
Yes, on Mount Hood.
Now Toby and I had sort of innovated the process, you know, basically it's a couple hours away so you drive there and you drive home and working from your car is a whole different way of dealing with it.
So anyway, Toby and I figured that out.
Last year.
And then after two days, the ski resort actually made us a deal for a little bit extra.
If we just paid less than one extra lift ticket, they would give us a season pass for the rest of the season.
And so we did it.
And then COVID ended the ski season abruptly.
We've been resenting it ever since.
So anyway, this is our chance to get back on the slopes.
But I do want to show you a couple of pieces of video.
And then I want to make a connection, which I'm not 100% certain of, but I'm pretty sure.
Awesome.
So Zach, do you want to show, I don't know, why don't we start with Toby?
So this is going to be Toby on his third day of skiing.
This is his third day of skiing ever.
And this is actually... For those of you who know Mt.
Hood, this is Timberline we're at.
Yeah, this is Timberline, right up at Timberline.
I think that's the name of the resort.
And this is, you know, near the end of the day, so actually Toby's getting a little tired here.
But man, look at him!
Three days of skiing!
Right?
Stunning!
And he's 14.
Yeah, he's working and he's taking to it like a fish in water.
It's just a weird expression because the fish who live in water presumably always have.
Yes, exactly.
Like a mudskipper to mud maybe would be better.
It's less intuitive.
I think it's going to catch on.
Oh, I know it is.
All right, Zach, do you want to show the other video of the other son skiing?
On his first day of skiing?
Here's Zach.
This is day 1.2 for him.
So why do you say, I've heard you say this, because he had like an hour lesson in January of 2020.
But anyway, check this out.
This is a guy with, I mean, this is not quite the end of the day, so this is less than one full day of skiing, and look at him go!
Amazing, no?
So I could just be a proud father looking at my two men.
Fantastically coordinated.
Suns zipping down the mountain and feeling a kind of elation.
And it might mean nothing to anybody else, but... It means something to me.
Well, sure, it means something to you.
But here's the hypothesis about this.
Both of these boys have picked up skiing at a rate that I am not familiar with.
This does not look like, you know, a few days in, or in Zach's case, one day in.
And let me say before you continue, because you will not say this, that you are an extraordinary skier.
Like, you just are.
You skied so much as a child, and you also went out as a teenager with a good friend of yours who was also an excellent skier, and you pushed and pushed and pushed each other.
So, you know skiing.
Yeah.
You're both fantastically comfortable even after, you know, decades not being on the slopes.
But you know what you're looking at.
You know what you're talking about.
So, just to clarify this.
I was, after many years of skiing, an aggressive all-mountain skier when I was skiing with my, you know, teenage male friends.
We pushed limits and skied places that we shouldn't have and all of those things.
Um, and then, uh, you and I got together.
You weren't, uh, you hadn't done as much skiing.
Nor was I a teenage boy.
No, you were not a teenage boy, though you could give them a run for their money, but, uh, anyway, you and I perfected the art of goofing off on skis, um, which is... You taught me how to ski backwards, we spent a lot of time of, what's it called, in the slack country, in the trees, in the powder, right?
Yeah.
Is that what it's called, slack country?
It is now, I don't think it was then.
Yeah.
But anyway, so anyway, I very much like goofing off on skis.
I think I like it quite a bit more than I like the Daredevil stuff, which, you know, gets old very quickly.
But anyway, yeah, I do know what it looks like to learn to ski, and skiing has changed a lot.
There have been major innovations in the equipment.
The skis look unrecognizable.
Like that loop on the top of the...
But anyway, back to the point.
The point is, why are these boys learning this sport so quickly?
pain.
I mean, that is a marvelous invention.
How did we ski before that?
I don't know.
I remember it being painful.
It was painful.
But anyway, back to the point.
The point is, why are these boys learning this sport so quickly?
And I think the answer, and the boys concur, they've obviously only learned the once.
But the answer has to do, they are both very coordinated and athletic.
But the other thing is, they both have learned, and are much better than me actually, on electric unicycle, which is a very odd little device.
very important.
Very interesting and at some point I'm going to do a podcast on it with a friend who is a kind of an important person in that little world of electric unicyclists.
But anyway, This is a device.
It's a single wheel with two pedals on either side, and it's motorized, and basically there's a little computer in it that causes it to balance you.
As you tilt forward, it zips ahead to get back under you.
As you tilt backwards, it would zip backwards to get under you.
And you control the left-right balance and you steer by, you know, doing what you would do.
And the thing is, it's not exactly like skiing.
In fact, there's one way in which it's a mind-bending distinction from skiing, which is in skiing, if you put weight on a ski, it becomes your downhill ski.
That's how you turn even before you ever think of it that way.
On electric unicycle, I believe it is actually the reverse, which is very strange.
I think because it is powered rather than gravity pulling you downhill.
But anyway, it's a confusing little puzzle.
But the thing is, other than that, the similarities are many.
Right?
The way you control the thing and getting used to controlling the thing as you're... And the sense of precariousness and you need to have some faith in your body and in the tools you're using to not fail.
If you're constantly worried that something is going to fail on you, you just will never get going particularly.
Yeah.
And there's something about the control of momentum, the trusting, you know, as you're skiing down the hill, you know, you're not – you are using the sort of fluidness of it to get down – I don't even know how to explain it in words properly.
But the basic point that I want to make is that It is weird to find two things that are so dissimilar for which one is such a useful developmental experience for the other that in fact I don't know how fast relative to somebody who had just never been on either device this progress is.
As you know, I have not yet mastered the electric unicycle.
I haven't really tried yet.
But we're also a biking family.
We all bike and we all have really solid skills on both pavement and trail on bikes.
And yet you don't raise biking as an interesting and relevant precursor to having an advantage in learning how to ski.
Do you just not think of it, or do you think that there's really a difference?
In which case, you know, my observation that you have to really trust the tools that you're using isn't necessarily apropos, because the same thing would be true of biking.
Yeah, I mean, it may be.
I'm sure it has relevance in one regard.
There's something about the experience of moving at that rate and it being safe, which I'm sure just, you know, inures you to the fear you might otherwise have on skis for the first time.
But I don't, I think the way that you control a bike is sufficiently different.
You know, and also, you know, maybe what it is, there's something precarious about all sports in which you have, you are perched over a very low center of gravity, that the way you control yourself on skis It requires you to deal with that in the same way that a skateboard would, or skates, or any of those things.
And the electric unicycle is similar in this regard, in a way that a bike isn't.
A bike you can kind of barrel over large obstacles if you have tires appropriate to it and all.
So I think it's distinct, but I'm sure there's some relevance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Anything else to say about skiing?
I mean, no doubt, but right now?
Yeah, there should be.
I don't know.
It's interesting to return to it after so many decades, really, of no contact with it.
Yeah, literally decades.
I'm sure I was It was early mid-twenties, the last time I was on skis.
It was just wonderful.
Obviously, being outside, it was a perfect day.
It was cold, but it was sunny, and there was little wind, and the snow quality was quite remarkable for groomed slopes.
It was really nice.
And Mount Hood and, in fact, Timberline, where we were skiing, is especially nice.
It's kind of small.
I grew up skiing at Mammoth, as you did, and Mammoth is huge.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is, I think, six total lifts.
But it's interesting.
It's, you know, the lodge itself where you start is right at the tree line.
And you've got this, you know, Glorious, immense peak above, and anyway, it's a very nice little place to ski.
Yeah, indeed.
All right, well, you wanted to talk.
We've got shrews, we've got locker rooms, we've got a rare bit of good news regarding anthropogenic climate change.
Maybe.
You want to do them?
Yeah.
Maybe a rare bit of good news regarding anthropogenic climate change?
Yep.
So let's see, to get us there, let us talk about what I think is the biggest scary part of the whole global climate change picture, which has to do with frozen methane clathrates in the Arctic.
So basically, methane gets trapped in various forms.
One of them is frozen methane under the permafrost on land and under the sea floor.
And there is such an immense amount of this stuff trapped that it dwarfs any contribution that humans would make to global warming.
And the problem is that the positive...
Just because it's not a word that I am familiar with except from hearing you talk about it, Methane clathrates is the word you're using.
And people may also have heard things like gas hydrate or even fire ice in some context.
It's all the same thing.
If I had thought about it, I would have had a Video you can actually see in certain places in the Arctic methane on fire emerging from sediments and things.
So anyway, you can look that up and you can find it.
But yeah, it's basically these structures, these methane structures that hold, they hold methane stable in a frozen It's a crystalline structure.
Yeah, it involves water and anyway, they're also chemically interesting.
I don't know if you scroll up, maybe we can find it.
This is just Wikipedia.
Yeah, but they should have a picture of one chemically somewhere.
Maybe not.
Not so much.
Okay, in any case.
Oh, yeah, there you go.
It's too small, but yeah, there you go.
It's meaningless to almost everyone.
So I believe that's going to be the methane there in the center.
But anyway, this is a very potent, methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.
And there's a huge amount of it tied up in these frozen clathrates in the Arctic.
And some of it's under permafrost, some of it's under the seafloor.
But the danger is that It's stable because it's frozen.
And as the Earth warms, it is going to be released at some rate.
And what we have seen, there's a particular Russian academic outfit that does a lot of studying of methane releases.
In Siberia mostly.
Yeah, in the ocean.
It's a marine census.
So they found these huge plumes of methane.
And the problem is we don't have good baseline data.
Like, do you expect huge plumes of methane?
If so, are they more common?
Are they bigger?
We don't know.
Probably we know more than last time I checked in on this.
We because we don't have 100 years of data on these methane plumes, because in general, they're not of consequence.
We, it's hard to say how alarmed to be about the fact that there's suddenly huge amounts of methane bubbling up in the Arctic, but the danger is That we could get to a place where positive feedback would take climate change completely out of our control.
Because to the extent that it gets warmer than historically it has been, it will release- Faster.
Yeah.
Warmer, faster.
It will release a bunch of methane that was frozen that would otherwise have stayed frozen.
That methane, because it's a very potent greenhouse gas, will cause the following year to be that much warmer.
That following year will then release more methane.
And so what you'll get is eventually a release of a huge fraction of that stuff.
And at the point that that happens, there's basically nothing we can do, right?
This is no longer a question of us controlling climate change.
It's a question of us adapting to whatever is coming at whatever magnitude.
And so that dragon's breath hypothesis is, or the clathrate gun hypothesis, the idea that it would go off like a gun, is a very frightening prospect.
And those of us who are most concerned about this happening have our eye on this.
And my contention has been The day on which climate change is no longer something that we could control, even in principle, it will not make the news.
We will not know it has happened.
We will not know that threshold has been crossed.
It will just happen, and then we will live downstream of it.
But... It might not even be deducible in retrospect, right?
Like, you know, 5, 10, 20 years later.
You pinpoint it a little bit, but...
I think we will have a sense of it now.
We're doing enough monitoring, but the point is it's a threshold we will cross, but it's not a threshold that can be named specifically, I believe, in the present.
It's too complex.
So what emerged, and actually I owe my good friend Kevin.
A shout out for pointing me towards this, but Zach could you put up the, actually before you put up the article, could you put up the pictures of the craters, the Yamal craters?
You can just start with any of it.
Okay, so this is the floor of one of these craters in the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia.
Could you go to the next one?
Here's some people rappelling down in, so you get a sense for how big these craters are.
Go to the next one.
Okay, so here you can see from above, and those of you... I know I talked about this on the podcast with Katie Herzog, Yeah.
These craters are, I believe, very ominous, and I think that the images of them ought to be on everybody's mind.
I don't see these images nearly often enough, given what they suggest.
These craters were discovered… What kind of size?
I mean, I guess we saw a person in the last one, so we're talking a couple hundred feet across?
Yeah, a couple hundred feet across.
These were discovered, ironically enough, by fossil fuel petroleum workers who were traveling over the Yamal Peninsula by helicopter.
And they saw these holes in the ground.
Initially, we did not know the explanation for them.
The Dragon's Breath hypothesis that this was somehow an explosive release of methane was tested and turns out to be the best hypothesis, probably true, for what created them.
And the idea is this is such an unpopulated region that there are no people around to report, oh yeah, we heard that and we went and looked and that was never there before.
Right.
There are no eyewitnesses to these craters being formed.
Correct.
Now, I will say that the Amel Peninsula is pockmarked by geological processes, so how rare this actually is I don't know, but it is certainly rare within geological experience.
In fact, it's so rare that this particular formation does not have a name, right?
So we have names for other things, and in fact there were hypotheses that this was a pingo.
Pingo being a geological formation that arises when water freezes and ejects dirt out of a hole.
But it doesn't look like this.
It's not explosive, right?
It's just like, it's a cracking mass of dirt and it would be there rather than kaboom.
But yeah, there would be dirt remaining.
Right.
So this is not a pingo.
It turns out it's probably due to the explosive release of methane.
And that's very frightening because what it tells you is, God damn it, there's, you know, there's stuff going on on the methane release from the Arctic Channel that is profound in terms of its scale and new enough that we don't have a geological name for it, right?
As studied as geology is, this is new.
So that's scary.
And we ought to be very worried about it.
So in light of that having Yeah, why not?
That's still the guy rappelling.
Is there a fourth picture?
Okay, so now could you show the article?
So my friend Kevin forwarded me this article, which I cannot read at that scale.
Yeah, and so anyway this ...suggests something which may be the rare piece of good news that we get on the climate change front.
What this article describes is the discovery, initially, about tides and their effect on methane release.
And basically the idea was the higher the tide... So the moon here in the headline title is just about the moon controlling the tides?
Yes.
That basically the moon's effect on the height of the water column above the frozen clathrates controls how much release.
The more water is standing on top, the less likely the methane is to be released, which stands to reason, certainly.
So it's not a binary, are you covered with water or are you not?
It's actually the depth of the water by which you are covered is predictive.
This is a continuous variable, the depth of the water by which you are covered.
Is actually the greater the depth, the more protective against clathrate release.
Right.
Which is what is preserved or it's a hypothesis?
No, no.
This has now been tested.
Now, of course, always could be reversed.
But yes, the idea is the more water that's sitting on top of these methane hydrates, the less likely they are to be released, the smaller the plumes that we get.
And the reason that that is good news Is because it suggests a negative feedback on methane release, which is to say, if you take the scenario that we described up top, where methane release or something else causes the temperature to warm, that warming temperature then causes more methane to be released, which causes it to warm further.
That's a positive feedback.
There's no controlling that.
It will be controlled by some other process.
The water on top, however, is something sea levels, you all know, are slated to rise if the temperature goes up.
Why?
Because the ice that currently holds a lot of that water will flow off the land and into the sea, causing elevation sea level.
That's a bad thing, especially if you live It's a bad thing for lots of reasons, but it may have this positive outgrowth, which is it will increase the depth of the water on top of the methane that is the greatest danger in this whole global climate change story.
And therefore, the warmer it gets, the more water will be on top of the methane clathrates, the harder it will be for it to be liberated.
So it may be.
A buffer rather than an accelerant of climate change.
Wow.
So that would be terrific news.
These clathrates, which are, it sounds like, littered across the what peninsula?
Yamal.
The Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.
This is tidelands or it's dry land but low lying such that even with relatively small amounts of sea level rise they would potentially be submerged?
As always, when we do this off the cuff, there's the danger of my saying something dumb, but it is Arctic permafrost.
So these are, it's dry land, low-lying, And basically it's tundra.
Tundra is, I think, the right term.
Arctic permafrost, which could therefore become sort of marshy if things warm up.
Right.
Maybe, depending on where the water table is and what the elevation is.
Yeah, and I have no doubt, actually, that some of it is marshy some of the time, but there's a permafrost layer That is buffered from the sun and below which resides an awful lot of methane apparently.
Oh, the test, I should say, the test in those craters involved descending into those craters to detect the levels of methane which were sky high.
Anyway, yes, a rare piece of good news.
One, and you know, I must say in the better discussions of climate change that I haven't done it recently, but I participated in years ago, there was always this sort of hope that buried somewhere in the complex system that controls the Earth's temperature was a hidden feedback that we had missed that could work in the right direction.
And while this probably isn't sufficient, in fact, You know, it is the warming that… it is the rise of sea level that brings the protection, so that's not a good thing.
But nonetheless, it is a feedback that at least I had never heard of before that would work in our favor rather than against us.
Wow.
Just fabulous.
Hope it's true.
Yep.
Hope we don't need to rely on it.
Yeah, it would well be great for us to get our ducks in a row one way or the other.
My sense, having thought a lot about all that we might do, is that mitigating the release of greenhouse gases, it's too little too late.
And that really our only plug and play hope for reversing what we know is coming is fusion power.
Fusion power, if we can get there, actually would allow us to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, right?
You could actively pull it out.
Yeah, you could pull it out of the atmosphere the way trees do, for example, but you could do it as a result of a process in which you could basically use huge amounts of energy liberated from between these subatomic particles, and that you could use that to make building materials out of CO2 in the atmosphere and use it for something useful and lower the temperature.
Well, yeah, the problem is we're not investing nearly enough in fusion power to get there in time.
I don't know why we're not.
I cannot imagine why we are not investing more in it.
We are investing, you know, Small, not tens of billions of dollars, which sounds like a lot until you realize that we're investing hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, globally in things like text messages.
So anyway, yes, we are being very foolish not to pursue fusion.
Yeah.
Hopefully we'll get there.
Let's talk briefly about shrews.
Of course.
Yes.
I mean, it's that point in the podcast where the mind shifts to the subject of shrews and other insectivores.
And other insectivores.
Okay, so let's just start there with a brief phylogenetic note from your sponsors, Deep History.
So shrews are insectivores, which sounds like it's a description of their diet because we have this language of carnivore, omnivore, insectivore, folivore, herbivore, but we are using that term in its phylogenetic meaning.
I made a comment maybe last week or two weeks ago about the carnivorans with whom we live, And that is not a standard use of the term.
That was a student of ours.
Brendan.
Brendan, who in talking about the difference between ecologically eating meat, being carnivorous, and phylogenetically being part of the lineage from which all extant carnivores, being part of the lineage who had a most recent common ancestor from which all extant carnivores members of this clade belong.
Those are called the carnivora, but not all the carnivora eat meat.
There are, for instance, fruit-eating kinkajous, some of my favorites, and there are plenty of things that eat meat that aren't in the carnivora, right?
So there are the carnivorans, which include basically the filiform ones, which are like cats and hyenas and weasels and such, and the caniform ones, which include dogs and bears and seals and lots of other stuff.
So, for people who caught your explanation there, this will then make sense of the fact that snakes are tetrapods by virtue of the fact that they are in the tetrapod lineage without being quadrupeds, right?
I don't know which is Greek and which is Latin, but tetrapod and quadruped mean exactly the same thing.
Four-footed.
In this family, we segregate these two things so that we can talk about snakes being tetrapods without tripping over it.
But quadruped refers to things that actually have four legs.
Exactly.
So snakes are tetrapods who do not have four legs because they are part of the lineage tetrapoda.
Kinkajous are carnivorans without ever eating meat, because they are part of the lineage that includes all of the carnivorans.
And there are insectivores, insectivora.
And actually, gosh, there's some new Latin name for that clade, I think.
I think that clade turns out not to be a clade.
It's not a clade.
It's a paraphyletic.
Oh, it's not.
So we're talking about that.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
So I don't even remember then who belongs where.
But rest assured, we'll figure it out and get back to you on that.
What shrews are not is rodents.
They're not rodents.
Half of all mammals are rodents, more than 2,000 species of rodents on the planet.
Another quarter of all the mammals are bats, and that leaves every other single thing you can think of that's a mammal in that remaining quarter.
And the insectivores, which includes shrews, are included in that quarter as well.
Shrews have little tiny heads under the best of conditions.
This is old news in zoology, and I'm just learning about this this week.
Given everything else that's going on, I'm not sure exactly why I was so taken by this, but I just kind of can't stop thinking about it.
August Denelle, this Polish zoologist, made the observation back in 1949.
back in 1949, he's long since dead, that the, not just the brains, but the brain cases, the actual skulls of shrews shrink in winter and regrow in the spring.
It became known as Donnell's phenomenon, the fact that shrews shrink their brain cases and also apparently their livers and their kidneys.
That's amazing, but there's something about the brain case itself, literally the skull shrinking by 15-20% or so in the winter and then regrowing in the spring that's so remarkable.
Donnell only observed this, he didn't do what's called a matched pairs experiment.
He was just looking sort of population-wide and noticing that I think it was museum specimens that died in the winter, had smaller skulls than those that were alive in the spring, that died in the spring and summer.
And so maybe this was just about selection acting differently on animals that had smaller skulls in the winter and in the summer.
in the summer, but in 2017, so again, not totally new, we find this published in Current Biology, profound reversible seasonal changes of individual skull size in a mammal.
And these guys did the work.
They tracked individuals, much to the dismay of the shrews, no doubt.
Oh, and to their significant others, who no doubt thought this was kind of cool the first time they heard it.
But then, dinner time after dinner time, they kept I was certain you were talking about the pair-bonded shrews and their significant others.
I can't speak to that.
I mean, I'm sure they have opinions.
I don't think these shrews are pair-bonded.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
No, but the authors here might well be, and I'm sure they were sick of hearing.
Are you saying to me that you wish I would stop talking about shrews at this point?
No, no, no.
On the contrary.
I'm imagining that in general the significant others of these shrew-studying biologists were not ...themselves similarly interested in our case.
No, I'm all for this discussion.
Yeah, it's our children who are downstream of our enthusiasm, but we are equally enthusiastic about the skulls of shrews shrinking.
So they actually demonstrated it for sure.
So this Donnell's phenomenon turns out to be true, and apparently there's some evidence from weasels too.
Which is fascinating because weasels, as per our conversation, you know, five minutes ago, are actually carnivorans.
So they're not very closely related to shrews.
And I guess the reason that I am so surprised by this.
Yeah, go for it.
Here I got it.
Well, I don't got it, but I got a piece of it.
If I'm remembering my mammology correctly, both shrews and weasels do not hibernate.
This is absolutely true.
So this has been observed.
Shrews are apparently eating some crazy multiple of their own body weight every day to maintain themselves, and in winter it's harder to come by food, and brains are very expensive to feed.
And if you just shrink your brain and not your brain case, it's going to rattle around in there and not be very effective come spring.
So you got to shrink the whole thing.
So, you know, in terms of what the adaptive advantage might be, I can see that, although it also feels to me like everyone else is also hungry in winter.
And if you've now got less brain by which to evade predators, this might be challenging for you.
On the other hand, Shrews emit some odors that make them quite unpalatable to at least mammalian predators.
I don't know about hawks and such.
Birds have such different sensory... Most birds don't... It's traditionally thought, as you know, most birds don't have a very sophisticated sense of smell.
There are exceptions, like vultures.
Right.
And I don't know about the exhibitors, the hawks and such, falcons.
But the reason I find this shocking, honestly, is because we have in organismal biology a pretty old – I actually didn't go and look in the history to see how old – our understanding of The terms determinate and indeterminate growth are.
But what these terms mean is, if you have determinate growth, at some point as you reach adulthood, you hit a size and your skeleton does not grow anymore.
You can obviously grow out, you can always get fatter.
But your long bones don't continue to extend, for instance, right?
And, you know, we got sort of three types of skeletal stuff, but I think even the cranial skeleton really doesn't, you know, just doesn't.
Your appendicular skeleton and your cranial skeleton and your axial skeleton are all there.
And this has been understood to be what mammals have and what birds have.
Determinant growth.
There is maybe not a predetermined size because it's going to be affected by things like diet and environment.
But at the point you hit it and some other developmental things happen, you don't keep growing.
Compare that to organisms with indeterminate growth, which include most fishy fish, crocodiles, squamates like lizards and snakes, which actually do keep growing continuously throughout their lives.
Now that rate of growth slows dramatically and it almost looks asymptotic, like it almost looks like they're approaching some Some size at which they will stop, but they don't, it seems.
They keep growing and that's called indeterminate growth.
If we were seeing this braincase shrinking in winter and then regrowing again in spring in an organism with indeterminate growth, like a crocodile, that might be scarier than in a shrew.
But I wouldn't be so shocked by it.
Whatever is going on with regard to skeletal growth and development in crocodilians is clearly different.
It's more labile, it's more flexible over the lifetime of the organism than it has been understood to be in mammals.
And this thing that we're seeing in shrews suggests at least some mammals have this ability to not just turn back on change in bone, but actually reverse, actually go smaller, which I just didn't even know this was possible.
I'm frankly blown away by it.
Well, my guess would be that there's a whole landscape of this stuff that we just don't know yet because it's not that obvious.
100%.
And it's, you know, stuff in the neighborhood.
Right, like antlers, you know, antlers are bone.
True, true.
It doesn't get resorbed, it gets dropped and regrown, but there's something there.
So just a couple things.
Yeah, it's not reserved, but you do get something about male development prompts growth of new bone with an ability to then drop them at the end of the season.
Yep.
So, one thing I want to point out, though, is that this actually is reflective of something that you and I have long argued in many contexts, which is that the Any hypothesis about brain size that does not include the understanding that brain is the last thing you want to be big without a reason, right?
That any size that you find in the brain is there because it served the ancestors whose existence Caused it that very clumsily said but the the fact of the brain having grown larger over time cannot be explained by any Drift like cause because but gee Brett.
I thought we only use 10% of our brains right exactly that kind of nonsensical Claim just doesn't stand up to scrutiny because a the brain is so freakin expensive to run most expensive Organ in the body the size of the brain case makes it vulnerable Right, so the bigger it is, the more likely you are to crack it and die.
And it wildly increases mortality for women in childbirth.
Wildly increases mortality for women in childbirth.
And the hip widening decreases stability of walking.
Right, forces the baby to be born early, which causes a period of helplessness, which is much harder for the parents to deal with.
The loss of heat is proportional to the size of the brain.
And heat is a huge expense.
It's something like 85% of calories for endothermic, that is, warm-blooded creatures like ourselves.
So the point is, the number of things that push in the direction of, geez, if you can get away with a smaller brain, then do it, is huge.
Be a pinhead of true if you can.
Yes, be a pinheaded shrew if you can.
Now there's advice for you.
We'll all take that one into 2021.
But anyway, so this does suggest that there's intense enough pressure on these things that even within an individual, a seasonal opportunity to shrink the brain, however that works, is a good thing.
And that Selection has found it, it sounds like, maybe twice.
Maybe twice, yeah, which then of course raises the question of like, really, just twice?
Are we sure?
Right, and it probably won't be.
But then here's the question.
I wanna know.
You know, the thing about the brain is it's not like more is good, right?
More is good by virtue of how the neurons are connected to each other.
So exactly what way are these creatures economizing and then rebuilding?
What sort of structure is it that they can rebuild a brain that's of any use at all, right?
Yeah, what are they losing access to?
Right.
Like what can't they do in the winter that they can do in the summer?
I had a guess about that.
Yeah, actually, okay, so do I-ish.
Do you have it?
Yeah, it's a little bit poorly formed, but I got it in my head.
So I had two things.
One is maybe they're not losing the neurons.
Maybe they're basically collapsing the structures intact.
So there's a weird result in development where the cells of the baby are present long before they are fully infused with resource, right?
And so the point is you don't want to put the resource... Pregnancy is dangerous and you don't want to put the resource at risk before you have to because that's, you know, a penny saved is a penny earned, metabolically speaking.
And so is it possible that the brain is being shrunken in size that basically, you know, the... But they're still walking around.
Well, right, obviously there are lots of parts of it that won't be, but are there sets of circuits?
As opposed to fully lost.
Right.
As opposed to lost and then regained, which is mighty hard to imagine how that could be productive.
It is.
On the other hand, we know that, for instance, migrating songbirds literally lose their testes and regrow a pair upon landing in their northern breeding grounds because carrying around balls is too heavy to fly with for these birds.
The thing that I was wondering about shrews is if it's lost rather than shrunk down, or either way really, it's partially going to be about whatever the shrew equivalent of mating and dating is that they don't need in the winter.
Exactly.
That was going to be my hypothesis also was that there was a whole, you know, complexity surrounding reproduction that, you know, you're not going to need.
But again, I wouldn't imagine it would be lost.
I would imagine it would be put into gold storage, as it were.
Yeah.
But in passing, you just blew right by regrow a pair.
Oh, no.
Yes, I know.
But regrow a pair.
Now, that is an insult.
Perfect for an era in which so many people are losing their ability to say normal things in the face of a crowd of people shouting at them.
And I think I'm going to start telling people to regrow a pair.
Oh, I have actually, I've begun doing that occasionally.
Yeah, that's a good one.
It's a good one, I like it.
Yeah, it has broader applicability than if you were a bird landing in his northern breeding grounds.
I think there are a lot of contexts in which regrow a pair is useful advice.
In that case, you're just being supportive.
That's right.
Regrow a pair, right?
In fact, yeah, I mean if the right bird looked at you and said regrow a pair, you know, that'd be a good sign.
Yeah, get on with it, buddy.
Yeah, exactly.
Get on with it.
Exactly.
Alright, well, are we there with the shrews?
I think we're there with the shrews, yeah.
I think we've done shrews.
We're at an hour already?
Good lord.
My goodness.
How did that happen, even?
Well, we probably do want to talk about the transgender kerfuffle in the evergreen locker room.
Of all places.
Of all places.
Yeah.
So, how do we want to do this?
Do we want to show them the Cairo video?
Well, let's just set it up very briefly and then we'll show you a two-minute-ish video from local news up in Olympia, Washington, our former home for 15 years, more than that, and then we'll talk about it.
So, I don't know, you want to set it up?
Well, sure.
All right.
So let's be, you know, as always, we need to make an effort to be completely fair about this.
Let's just describe what apparently happened.
And this will be largely in the video also.
But apparently a trans woman, that is someone born male, and you will hear them stumble over that very claim in the news report.
But not the person, not the trans person.
No.
One of the parents.
Nope.
Well, actually, she does too.
But anyway, yes, the news report says that this person was born a man.
Nobody's born a man.
Nobody.
You know what I'm saying?
Born male.
Yeah, born male would be the traditional way of saying that.
And not assigned male either.
Born male.
Born male.
Right.
Sorry, we're not doing a very good job.
No, we're doing a terrible job.
This trans woman, born male, transitioned to female as an adult.
was apparently in the locker rooms at the Evergreen State College.
Now, Evergreen is a college, but those locker rooms were being rented out or somehow local high schools.
And swim teams for the elementary school kids.
Oh, I didn't know the elementary school kids.
As young as six.
I missed that.
So, these girls from these schools encountered this trans woman who has not surgically transitioned.
Non-op, not pre-op, either non-op.
Non-op.
No intention to have surgical change.
So, male genitalia in a female locker room where... In a middle-aged man where there's teenage girls and younger.
Right.
And some of the girls apparently reported this to their parents and the parents requested that something be done to get the situation remedied.
And anyway, the remedy.
Oh, yes.
Maybe we should just show them the video at this point.
Zach, do you have it?
The person at the center of this controversy says she is being discriminated against.
Forced to leave a facility she has a legal right to use.
I looked at her and said, excuse me?
And she said, you have to leave, I'll be right back.
Colleen Francis says she was using the sauna and women's locker room inside the recreation center at Evergreen State College two Wednesdays ago.
The same facilities used by two female high school swim teams from Olympia who practice in this pool.
A woman told Francis to leave.
She wouldn't identify herself.
All she said was that there were a couple of girls that came upstairs to the pool and said that there was a man in the sauna.
But Frances, who acknowledges she was born a man, says she has lived as a woman since 2009.
Still, someone called campus police, and local parents got wind of it.
They're uncomfortable with him being in there, her being in there, and they are a bit shocked by it.
Christy Holterman's daughter was one of the swimmers.
Holterman complained to Evergreen.
College officials tell us they have been working with the Olympia School District, which leases space at the pool.
But state law requires equal access to state facilities, regardless of sexual orientation.
So local school officials tell us they came up with a temporary solution.
There's a smaller private locker room next to the main locker room there at the pool and they've been using that.
But Frances says she believes the students need an education.
This is not 1959 Alabama.
We don't call the police for drinking from the wrong water fountain.
All right, so there you have it.
So this obviously raises interesting questions and That creates a pretty good illustration of why inventing pronouns and forcing some kind of new usage is not a solution to the problem.
Did you notice this?
That the spokesman for Evergreen there says that the college has attempted to come up with a remedy and that it has found some other locker rooms that they now use.
And it is unclear in the report whether they refers to the girls of these swim teams or whether they refers to the single individual in question.
Now, in fact, in writing they remedied this in a clumsy way, but in the written piece they clarify it in parentheses and they say that in fact it is the swim teams that are using these separate... Smaller, less good facilities because of this one person who in a separate report is revealed served in the military for 20 years and is now wearing a low
Estrogen patch and lipstick, apparently.
And that is... I'm sorry.
This makes me so angry.
Well, you know... So, we've talked about trans a lot, in a lot of places.
I encourage people to look at my letter wiki exchange with Abigail Schreier.
If you are concerned that I'm not being respectful, we have trans friends.
Say over and over that trans is real.
And actually one of the, I think the first question we're going to get to in our Q&A this next hour is some people who are really concerned that, you know, what could we possibly be talking about when we say that?
But create a system that's gameable and it's going to get gamed.
And how dare any system?
Put girls and young women at risk because a dude wearing lipstick who has sort of girly affectations wants to be in the sauna with his bits hanging out.
It's not okay.
Yeah, I agree it's not okay.
I'm not, you know, I'm not sure her name was revealed.
I think there's no harm in using it.
Colleen here, you know, I'm not sure that the onus is on her to figure out how to navigate this.
But I do think that the institution has an obligation to protect those girls first and foremost.
Well, as was the case in 2017 when what happened at Evergreen happened there, it is not primarily the individuals who are spouting garbage's fault.
It is the responsibility of the so-called adults to walk in and say, you're spouting garbage and you will stop now and we are going to take whatever power you have arrested illegitimately away from you.
This person, Colleen, is it?
Has the freaking audacity to say, this isn't Alabama 1959, I think is the random year that she comes up with, rather than I think 57 is probably what she, 55, I don't remember.
No, it's not.
And frankly, A guy with an estrogen patch and lipstick is not a black person using a drinking fountain.
A guy with an estrogen patch and lipstick naked in a sauna with a bunch of girls?
It's a different situation, and everyone knew that until yesterday, and this is something we talked about.
This is, you know, Douglas Murray's formulation.
Like, it's one of these things that we all knew until yesterday, and how is it that we are all pretending that the Emperor has clothes?
The Emperor has no clothes here.
So I agree with you.
I still think the onus is on the institution, and while I think it is very clear, for many reasons, some of them biological, That the analogy to the drinking fountains is completely out of place.
It's despicable.
Well, is it despicable?
It's despicable that this person would claim that they were fighting a civil rights fight when what they're actually fighting for is the right to be naked in front of young women.
Look, she shouldn't be in that locker room.
You and I agree on that.
The question is, this is on institutions as a reflection of the rest of us to get this right and to prioritize those who actually are in need of protection.
And so in this case, what you have is somebody born male, right?
Now, why is it that women have their own locker rooms?
Why is it that they have their own, you know, divisions in sports and, you know, why?
Prisons.
Right.
That exists because males are in need of control for reasons.
It's not our fault.
But the fact is, as Evolutionary history gave us a power advantage, and that power advantage in the case of sexuality also creates a special hazard for women.
Not only are men in a position to overpower women on average, But the harm of having done so is that much greater.
Now, this is partially historical, but just the simple fact of women carrying pregnancies means that the jeopardy here is all the greater.
So, do women deserve protections from men?
Yes, they do, right?
For reasons that aren't any of our fault.
It just happens to be the situation.
There's an asymmetry in the biology, and that asymmetry justifies a protection.
That protection does not reverse because you decide that you're female, or because you feel female.
And therefore, the institution absolutely has to provide protections to these girls, rather than what they have apparently done here, which I can't say I'm all that surprised given how frequently this institution flies in the face of logic on such things, but has prioritized the rights of this individual trans woman That is to say, born male, transition to female.
They have prioritized her rights over the rights of numerous girls who are both disadvantaged by having been born female and therefore likely being smaller, are disadvantaged by virtue of their age, right?
And so they are actually vulnerable.
And so what I want to be careful of is when I saw that interview with Colleen here, Um, I thought the fact that she acknowledged that she was born male didn't seem sensitive about it, was willing to talk about the fact that, you know, one of these girls had apparently complained about a man in the locker room.
She talked about it in an adult fashion.
So I was, you know, I'm sympathetic that there's actually potentially something to be solved here, but there's no question who needs to be protected in this situation from whom, right?
I don't know that Colleen is a danger.
I assume she's not.
But the fact that we segregate women because somewhere in amongst men are men who are dangerous means that those protections should remain no matter what.
Yeah.
I'm going to end up ranting if I say much more about this.
Wow.
A 16-year-old girl who walks into a women's sauna naked and sees someone with cock and balls and reports that there's a man in the locker room, the person in possession of said cock and balls not being offended that someone saw them and identified them as male, that's a really low bar.
That is a really low bar for being impressed with this person's response.
Come on!
Look, I do think we, because, and I agree with your assessment that we have, you know, this is a dangerous thing to say, but I believe it is a literal thing, and that you're quite right about it, that you have The phenomenon of trans, whatever it may be, and then you have a bunch of people utilizing the opportunity to opt into two oppressed classes.
That is to say, trans people have a difficult road based on perceptions of them, and females are able to avail themselves of protections for the reasons we've already described.
And so the ability To opt into two protected categories is irresistible for some men, and they will do it.
They're unscrupulous men and they will do it.
But I just don't know.
I never want to assume that that's the explanation.
It is something that can be revealed in some cases.
I guess just one more thing, and I did allude to this earlier, but this case makes my blood pressure spike in part because the interview, which we showed you guys,
As this person, doing little sort of girly things with their hair and their necklace and like this, and this feels like, and I'm not the first, this is not the first time I've said this, I'm not the first to say it, and it will be said many, many times again, but this feels like the most regressive and misogynistic view of what woman is.
That I can, I mean, maybe not the most misogynistic and regressive view of what woman is, but it's It's incredibly retro.
It's incredibly woman-hating, actually.
It reduces... Like, that is not... Doing this doesn't make me a girl, right?
It reduces femaleness... No, that's not what it is!
It reduces it to an affectation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And there are plenty of us women out here who don't do that, and there are plenty of women who do.
And in neither case does the doing or not doing things like playing with our hair make us a woman.
No.
And if you're a dude who wants to play with your hair and act that way, okay.
But there is no way in which that makes you female.
No.
No.
The object of our ire really ought to be these ridiculous, phony progressives who actually imagine that in some biological sense that you become female by virtue of having declared a pronoun or two.
And I think we ought to refer to them as she-jerk liberals.
Oh, boy.
There's that.
Okay.
She-jerk liberals.
She-jerk liberals.
Yeah.
I think, you know, there's other places we could go, but I think that's a good place to stop for today, actually.
That bad, huh?
No, no, not good.
She-jerk liberals.
All right.
Well, yeah.
I guess we have then reached abruptly the end of this 60th livestream on the Dark Horse podcast.
Yes.
Yes.
I think we have.
Tomorrow, actually, is our private Q&A.
So we'll be back in 15 minutes for those watching with our Q&A.
Here today, but tomorrow is our private Q&A where we do a two-hour private Q&A for questions that have already been asked by patrons on my Patreon.
And if you join before tomorrow at 11 a.m.
Pacific at the $5 level or more, you can join in that conversation.
It's small enough that we have the chat visible to us and we can actually look at it unlike any of these live streams.
You have your $100 Patreon conversation for a handful of people next Saturday before this livestream.
You're looking at me like, holy hell, didn't I just have one?
No, no, you said for, yeah, it's more than a handful, but it's a nice group of people.
Two hands and two feet fulls.
Something like that, yeah.
Fingers and toes.
I presume they have fingers and toes.
I don't know.
So, you can find access to that at Brett's Patreon.
You know, there's merch listed there, but we're going to bring out some new stuff at some point soon.
So, rather than talk much about that, if you have logistical questions, you can email darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
You can access the Discord server at either of our Patreons, and we have a Clips channel that is putting out clips of what we talk about in these longer forms nearly daily at this point, I think.
Lots of stuff.
Lots of stuff.
And so please join us in 15 minutes, and if you are listening only, we will be back in the new year.
Awesome.
Alright, Merry Christmas if it's appropriate, Happy New Year, and we'll see you shortly, one way or the other.