#74: Nothing to Ad (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 74th 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. This episode marks the first episode in which we broadcast ads. After speaking two ads at the top of the show, we devote the rest of the episode to a critique of advertising, a history of ads in nature (bird plumage or song, bright coloration or patterning on a toxic frog or butterfly), and a discussion of how ads have been...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 74 welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 74 and now for something completely and entirely different.
Yes, indeed.
We're going to go full Money Python this time.
We are going electric.
What?
We're going electric, like when Bob Dylan went electric.
Oh.
It caused quite a stir.
Did it?
Yes.
Okay.
We weren't alive.
It was a betrayal of everything that he stood for.
And this is a betrayal in exactly the same way.
Maybe we were alive.
When was this?
Boy, I think it was just before.
Boy, I shouldn't have introduced a topic like that without having looked it up.
But it was a thing.
Yeah, okay.
Wow.
So here we are, episode 74, and we are indeed going to do something entirely different this time.
We are going to start doing ads.
And in support of that, we are going to spend the entire episode after, near the top of the hour here, Speaking ads for two products that we actually legitimately vouch for, explaining what our position is on advertising, why it is, given what our position is on advertising, that we are now willing to do ads, and then we are going to present to you eight ads of our own for which we are in no way being paid, and in some of those cases it will be totally clear because the ads are not actually Pro bono work.
It's pro bono work.
Pure and simple.
Pure and simple.
So we are going to, just in a couple seconds here, do a couple of ads for products that we are now being paid to advertise.
But first, just one announcement at the top of the hour.
And one correction.
We'll go with your announcement and my correction.
We, for our Patreons, so we're working on a replacement for Super Chat such that we are not as beholden to YouTube and so that YouTube doesn't take the 35-40% of the revenue that we generate with any of the revenue that we generate with them.
So we tried out a test of the system several weeks ago and it didn't end up working, but we went ahead and did the half hour just live stream anyway.
We called it Wrong Answers to Bad Questions and it was actually a ton of fun.
So we're going to do another one of those for our patrons only.
I think it's going to be this Monday at 5 p.m.
And I haven't posted it on the Patreons yet.
We will do that.
And then once you are a member of our Patreon at $5 level or above, you'll be able to access that.
And you'll be able to ask – no, no, we'll do it with the chat, right?
And then I don't know if we're going to do wrong answers to bad questions again, or maybe we should do wrong answers to good questions, or good answers to bad questions.
We should talk about any other ideas.
Achieving greatness for fun and profit.
No.
No.
All right.
That can't be it.
Uh, we'll come up with something.
Um, yes.
Okay.
What's your correction?
Uh, my corre... So, we have, uh, made a policy of doing corrections on the show when we get something wrong.
It's painful, but it's great to get on the other side of these things.
Last week...
I was proposing a solution to the ever-given stuck in the Suez Canal, and I suggested a ship full of dried fruit and cabbage to come in the canal behind the ship and dislodge it.
Kind of push it along.
Right.
Nope.
I should have said prune juice and bran muffins.
It would have been way funnier.
I at least would have gotten the joke.
You would have gotten the joke immediately.
And I think there would have been a whole lot more hilarity.
So I just want to say.
That's not a correction.
No, it's a correction.
It is important to get these things right.
We take them seriously.
And I speak for myself.
I will do better.
All right.
Thank God.
Yes.
Right.
Well, if that's all it took.
Well, it was not an easy week for me.
Oh, yeah.
No, I didn't know.
After realizing almost immediately that I had said something suboptimal as far as punchline goes, and then having to live with it through this moment.
I feel better now, but... Sure you do.
So, right.
Okay.
I think we all do.
I can imagine that, yes.
Okay, so I think we should, we're going to do these two ads, so this is obviously very new to us, and then we will launch into our... Then we'll talk about how we feel about ads.
And then we'll talk about how we feel about ads, and then we will do our pro bono ad work for eight products that you won't see coming.
Right.
Top of the list of ads, Zach, do you want to, here we go.
That little bracket, if you're watching on YouTube, shows you that we are now in advertising space.
That's right.
Okay, so let's talk VPNs.
VPNs.
Yes, what is VPN?
VPN is a virtual private network and it is something you definitely need.
Why do you need it?
You need it because we're living in an era in which we have tremendous security problems and in which there's all kinds of forces trying to limit what content you can view where that you might want to sidestep.
So, a virtual private network allows you to do both these things.
It allows you to surf anonymously, even from the perspective of your ISP, who, frankly, in a private window on your browser can still see where you're going.
And in fact, in the US, your ISP is legally allowed to sell what it sees of your searches to advertisers, or to, rather, to advertisers, potentially, but to anyone it wants.
Yes, and so you want to shield your activity from your ISP no matter what.
It's good practice, whether or not you're surfing anything that they would give a damn about or not.
You just simply should shield yourself.
We are endorsing ExpressVPN.
So you need a VPN, and then the question is, well, there are many of them available to you.
Which one should you want?
And I must say, I've been on this VPN thing for a long time, and things have gotten a great deal better.
At first, it bogged your connection down so much that it was a huge trade-off.
But now, And you were just constantly aware that you were interfacing the internet via a VPN.
It was anything but invisible to you, the user.
Right.
That's different now.
At least with ExpressVPN.
With ExpressVPN, it's quite different.
The interface is thoroughly professional, has lots of choices.
They can Present your connection from something like a hundred and sixty different locations in ninety four different countries, which is quite a spectacular diversity.
It can be used if you were traveling to China, for example, you can use it to evade the Chinese controls on what you can observe on the Internet.
And because it is not just useful for avoiding, say, people phishing for your information while you're out in the world, it's really valuable at home as well.
Because your ISP, your internet service provider, is just as able to find and just as willing to find and source and sell your information when you're at home as when you're out in the world.
Absolutely.
It's a valuable product to be using at home as well.
So you can use it at home.
It works on virtually any device you can think of.
It certainly works on Android phones, iOS phones and tablets.
It works on most smart TVs, which is really cool.
It'll work on a computer, whether it's Windows or Mac or Linux.
Doesn't matter, it can work on any of these things.
And it's incredibly seamless.
The delay, if there is any, is barely detectable, which is really the most important thing with one of these.
You don't want it to bog down your streaming, for example.
And it's also super easy to set up.
Incredibly easy to set up, and it's very seamless.
It just sort of lives in it.
Well, at least on Mac, it lives in a bar at the top of the screen.
You can turn it on and off at will.
You can switch what country you appear to be in.
So all these things are important.
Here's one example of something you might want to do.
I'm not saying you want to do this, but the BBC limits, which you can see with BBC One Player, right?
They put out content that you can't view from elsewhere in the world.
But if, from the perspective of the net, you appear to be in Britain, you can watch things.
Now, I'm not saying you should do this because, of course, you have to be aware that Britain is part of the Five Eyes Network.
Nothing stops them from abducting you and waterboarding you in a black site for having watched the BBC without permission.
But were you willing to take that risk, this mechanism would allow you to do it.
Wow.
So, we are encouraging you to protect your online activity today with this VPN, which has been rated number one by both CNET and Wired.
So, you can visit our link, which will allow you some discounts, at expressvpn.com slash darkhorse to receive an extra three months free on a year's subscription.
That's expressvpn.com slash darkhorse, where you can learn more about ExpressVPN and also get that three months off offer.
All right, perfect.
Now something is supposed to happen on the screen there.
No, not yet.
Because now we're going to do our other ad.
Alright.
Okay, so our other ad is for a product I didn't bring into the room.
Oh no, it's not here?
It's in the other room.
So you are going to have to use your imaginations here.
Now, those of you who are used to listening to us on audio only are used to imagining up the visuals.
But in this case, imagine that we had a small bottle.
Well, I mean, to be fair, we didn't show ExpressVPN either, did we?
Well, that depends rather on whether or not they're already using it to watch us, where it exists as sort of an invisible filter.
Okay.
So, since we are just clearly quite new to all of this, and I cannot find my notes for this.
The lack of professionalism lends to the sense of authenticity.
It does, it does.
Okay.
So, we are also encouraging the use of a product called Omax CryoFreeze.
And it is basically a stick that you roll on that helps with pain.
But before we talk about it and our experience with it in particular, we wanted to say a few words about pain itself.
Pain is useful.
Pain is an indicator that something has gone wrong, that you've stretched something too far, that you've ripped something, that something is out of whack, something is amiss.
Sometimes pain becomes chronic, at which point that pain signal is far less useful, right?
And in some cases also, even if the pain is acute, if the pain is so bad that you really can't think straight with it, so long as you take it easy and don't try to push through, now that you don't experience pain as the result of using a product, what you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, pain relief can be a very useful way, you know, one of these modern tools that we had far less access to in anything but modern times.
So I would just add to that, that pain is an adaptation.
It's a signal that you're either vulnerable or damaged and need to be extra wary to protect yourself.
And modifying pain by anesthetizing, which is an ancient tradition, is effectively human beings doing what human beings do.
We hack our own systems for improved effectiveness.
So you shouldn't neutralize every old pain that you have.
Some of it is important in order to guide your protection of something potentially damaged so it can heal.
But when you've got pain that you already know you've got an issue and you're just sick of dealing with the pain, there is something to do.
That's right.
So you wanted to talk a little bit about our experience with Omax CryoFreeze.
So people send us stuff that they want us to advertise and we got this product to test out and see.
And I must admit, I was a bit skeptical of it.
We went skiing, and I had a kind of a stiff neck after I do a fair amount of backward skiing, which involves a whole lot of craning your neck around in order not to run into things.
And I've never seen you run into anything while backwards skiing.
Yeah.
I have run into precious few things, forward or backward, but nonetheless, my neck hurt from this thing, and I thought, well, what's it going to hurt?
So the Omex Cryo Freeze has CBD in it, and so I rubbed it on my neck, and I was immediately impressed that it gives you kind of a cool feeling, and it smells nice.
So sort of immediately calls your attention to it, but I wasn't really expecting very much.
And then lo and behold, the pain went away and twice more.
So I thought that could be anecdote.
It could be pain goes away of its own accord.
And two more times I had pain and I thought, OK, I'll try it out.
And so, you know, there's a lot to be said about what it is that pain and one's subjective perception of it is.
But I can say three for three in the case of this particular product, it seemed to go away.
I also had a good experience with it and a friend of ours, again this is all anecdote, but a friend of ours who suffers from chronic pain from a number of debilitating injuries in the past has had terrific success alleviating some of that chronic pain.
And I will say, finally, I was a little concerned because I have tried CBD for pain before.
I've tried CBD tea and it triggers my allergy to marijuana.
It causes my lungs to fill with goo and so I wondered whether or not This would too, and it definitely did not.
So, all I can say is that every experience with it was positive, it did seem to have a good effect, and it didn't trigger the one thing that I feared might be negative.
Yeah.
So, Omax Health, which is the company that creates Omax Cryo Freeze, Is offering our listeners 20% off a full bottle of CryoFreeze CBD Pain Relief Roll-On, which is the product that we have used successfully.
And this discount is also applying to any product on their site.
Actually 20% off the entire site.
Go to omaxhealth.com and enter the code once again, Dark Horse.
So that's o-m-a-x-health.com, the code Dark Horse to get 20% off both CryoFreeze, which we recommend, and any of their products site-wide.
Awesome.
And let us know what you think.
All right.
We are out of paid advertising space.
We are out of paid advertising space, but this entire episode we are going to spend talking about advertising and then doing, like I said, eight pro bono ads at the end, which I think we're going to have some fun with.
All right.
All right.
OK, you want to start us out?
Yes.
Riffing on advertising?
So let us just say we have resisted participating in advertising for quite some time.
We've been approached numerous times about the possibility.
And we have felt, and I will speak for myself, I still feel that advertising is part of the problem, maybe a substantial part of the problem.
In fact, I would even say it is something like the root of all evil, that there is something about human beings in modern times where from the moment we wake up in the morning to we go to bed at night, we are constantly being bombarded by advertisements.
And while obviously There is something about advertisements that could be informative.
In general, if you watch advertisements and you say, well, what percentage of what's actually going on here is telling me something I don't know?
And what percentage is manipulating me into feeling some way that may have nothing to do with the product or may in fact be paradoxical?
Right.
It happens that I may feel some way about a shampoo based on the fact that they've shown an attractive model who is ostensibly using the shampoo and having the right effect on the crowd that the person walks into.
I don't know what it is, but the point is at some level, The rational response to advertising when it is not informative should probably be to punish the advertiser, right?
Because in some sense if you take two bottles of shampoo, like let's say you were at the market and you looked at two bottles of shampoo and they appeared to be equivalent but one of them you had seen an advertisement for and the other one you had not, at the same price, well, you would say, well, what fraction of the budget for this shampoo went into advertising rather than higher quality ingredients or research or whatever else might improve the product?
Well, there was in fact a line of products for a while.
I haven't seen it in stores for a while, or maybe it's just not in the stores that I go to, called ad-free, right?
That specifically was effectively created on the basis that what you see is what you get, and there's obviously always hidden costs in the form of R&D and packaging and you don't know what salaries, but there's no, you're not paying for them to have communicated to other people who aren't you about how great their product is.
Yes.
Now, the funny thing is, because we are the monkeys that we are, the idea of an entire ad-free zone of the market does not take off like wildfire, because the fact is we are manipulable, and very frequently we're most manipulated when we don't even think we're the target of an advertisement.
So... Oh, go ahead.
Well, this might be the right moment to talk about how advertising is hardly new to humans.
There are many kinds of ways that organisms advertise to one another, and we should talk a little bit about some of those.
In fact, we probably should have pulled up some pictures.
I actually think it might be worth just talking briefly about a framing, a new kind of framing that I believe you proposed.
So, whereas Darwin first said, okay, we've got natural selection and we've got sexual selection, where a very broad brush natural selection is about survival and sexual selection is about reproduction.
You have proposed perception-mediated selection, which is that selection which is about communication between two entities, individuals of some sort.
It doesn't have to be the same species.
In which the perception of the individual receiving the communicated signal decides what happens next.
And the perception may not actually be reflective of reality, but if the perception is such a thing, then that's going to change behavior and that's what needs to happen.
Right, so I didn't know that we were headed here.
But the point, the reason to declare a different category than the original Darwinian one is that actually there's a lot of sexual selection that isn't perception mediated and behaves much more like natural selection.
And then there's a lot of stuff over in natural selection space that is perception mediated where you get the same kinds of stuff you see in sexual selection.
And so really my point is… So advertising is all in perception mediated selection space.
Because it is inherently perception mediated.
That is to say, whether you have succeeded or failed is based on the perception of some other individual, right?
Are you hiding from them?
Are you augmenting some characteristic?
Whether or not it works is dependent on their perception.
But the point is, when perception is the mechanism through which selection is acting, deception is a huge fraction of the game.
Right?
So sexual selection looks weird because so much of it is perception mediated and therefore deception is all over the place.
Well, so deception isn't inherent to perception-mediated selection, however, right?
Perception opens the door to deception.
Perception opens the door to deception, right?
So you obviously can have honest indicators of quality with things like the, you know, the song of a bird or the plumage of a bird over in, you know, traditional sexual selection space.
honest indicators of, say, toxicity with regard to, say, the clades of frogs that I have worked on, the dart poison frogs in the Neotropics or the Mantellas in Madagascar, which are honestly indicating with their bright coloration that they also have these toxins on board, these lipophilic alkaloids.
And however, you also end up with mimics Of the honestly advertising species that may basically be able to signal toxicity, say, without actually bringing along the cost of having to build the toxins.
So, my point would be that the reason that sexual selection space looks weird is this arms race, right?
Females in general try to force males into displays that can't be faked, right?
And so in some sense, the reason that so many male displays are so expensive is that there is no way to build them out of some material that's close to free and get away with it because they wouldn't function.
So in any case, we can talk more about that another time.
But let's just say that in our cautious embrace of the advertising modality, We are aiming not to manipulate, but to engage in advertising that informs you about something that you probably do want to know and at least think about whether or not the object in question is something that you'd be better off with.
And certainly deception has no place.
So this is a small fraction of the available landscape of things that might be advertised that is actually available to us.
Yes, and indeed, we were approached about a number of products that we rejected.
In some cases, I think the products are good products given what they do, but we disagree with the premise of them being out there in the world in the way they are or what their claims are or something.
We're not here to dismiss those products publicly, but just to say that what we will end up vouching for here are things that we actually do.
Right, and so in some sense, the other way I think of viewing this is that the reason that I've joked about advertising being the root of all evil is that it becomes the driving force any place that it is the mechanism through which things are paid for.
So you, as the viewer, become the product.
You know, you are delivered to advertisers and you get something ostensibly for free, but really it's not free because the advertisers wouldn't be paying for it if they didn't get access to your mind in a way that they could affect it.
You wanted to say something?
Well, at some point here I have a bit to talk about specifically with regard to people becoming the products when they are unwittingly so, when they don't know.
All right.
Well, we'll come back.
So I'll just say we in doing this, we will have to not do this to the extent that there's anything pulling us in the direction of making you and the audience into the product.
So in order for you not to be the product, we have to be effectively doing double duty, which is to say telling you things that we think are in your interest to know about.
All right.
Do you want to?
Yeah, so we talked about how advertising is ancient, and it opens the door to deception without being inherently deceptive.
It could just be a communication of state, of quality.
But it's certainly, you know, that ancient and sometimes honorable history has experienced Quite an acceleration of the dishonesty in modern times.
So I want to just tell a brief story and then read a tiny bit from an article written by Gloria Steinem in 1990, actually.
In college, I was proud to be a founding subscriber to the ad-free version of Ms.
Magazine.
Ms.
Magazine was formed in the early 70s, founded in part by Gloria Steinem, As a kind of a feminist magazine that was about things that would pertain to things that would be of interest to women that was not however a women's magazine.
Women's magazines tending to pander to stereotypes like you either belong in the kitchen and there and you know only with your children and therefore we're going to talk about things like cooking and childcare only.
Or to other kinds of stereotypes, all you want to do is get a man and so we are going to pander to and… I have never felt that way.
You haven't, but yes.
You walked out, walked back in and said that.
Pander to that part of womanhood and so lots of articles on Beauty and hotness and sexiness and fashion and makeup and all.
And Ms.
was not about that.
So what had happened, though, over the course of two-ish decades was that it had a very, very hard time attracting advertisers who did not dictate content.
And so Indeed, I actually did a big research project on this in college a couple years after this essay that Steinem wrote came out researching exactly how advertisers drive editorial content, specifically at magazines directed at teen girls, since I had at that point been a teen girl recently and had been an occasional reader of the magazine Seventeen and was, you know, even then as like a 13-year-old, because that's really the target audience of Seventeen,
Just appalled and pretty disgusted.
I spent less time with that magazine than a lot of people of my generation, but I spent some time with it and I was still affected.
I didn't know then, but was not surprised to find out later, how much power the advertisers actually had on driving the actual so-called content, the editorial content of the magazine.
Here's just a couple of examples.
And these examples happen to be from the Steinem article, but there are plenty more out there.
And this is not for teen girls' magazines, but actually at Ms.
Magazine.
Dow's cleaning products needed to be adjacent to children or fashion editorial.
Maidenform, which is a maker of bras and other apparel, required that, quote, no negative content be adjacent to the ads, including anything, quote, relating to illness, disillusionment, or large-size fashion.
De Beers Diamond Company prohibited magazines from placing its ads next to, quote, hard news or anti-love or romance-themed editorials.
Okay, so this is totally invisible to most readers of magazines, right?
And it turns out that for historical reasons that I won't go into here, women's magazines and then girls' magazines really were targeted by advertisers more so than any of the other magazines because they were understood to be basically catalogs for women rather than places where women could learn about how to be in the world.
So, one more thing from, you know, what we know simply from Ms.
Magazine, which should have been more immune to this than anything else.
Here's an anecdote that she, that that Steinem reports after years of trying to get advertisers even to play ball with her.
So she not only were advertisers coming in the door and demanding what's called complementary content, content that actually put their products into it or said nice things about their products in the so-called editorial content, or at least didn't put things they disagreed with on the same pages or sometimes in the same issue, but she couldn't even get some advertisers to come in the door.
And here's one story.
Out of chutzpah and desperation, I arrange a lunch with Leonard Lauder, president of Estée Lauder.
With the exception of Clinique, which is the brainchild of Carol Phillips, none of Lauder's hundreds of products has been advertised in Ms.
A year's schedule of ads for just three or four of them could save us.
Indeed, as the sign of a family-owned company whose ad practices are followed by the beauty industry, he is one of the few men who could liberate many pages in all women's magazines just by changing his mind about complimentary copy.
Again, complimentary copy is this euphemism for you have to change the actual content of your magazine if we are going to put ads in your magazine.
Over a lunch that costs more than we can pay for some articles, I, Steinem, explained the need for his leadership.
I also lay out the record of Ms.
More literary and journalistic prizes won.
More new issues introduced into the mainstream.
New writers discovered an impact on society than any other magazine.
More articles that became books.
Stories that became movies.
Ideas that became television series.
And newly advertised products that became profitable.
And, most important for him, a place for his ads to reach women who aren't reachable through any other women's magazine.
Indeed, if there is one constant characteristic of the ever-changing Ms.
Readership, it is their impact as leaders.
Whether it's waiting until later to have first babies, or pioneering PABA as sun protection and cosmetics, whatever they are doing today, a third to a half of American women will be doing three to five years from now.
It's never failed.
But, he says, Ms.
Readers are not our women.
They're not interested in things like fragrance and blush.
If they were, Ms.
would write articles about it.
On the contrary, I explain, surveys show they are more likely to buy such things than the readers of, say, Cosmopolitan or Vogue.
They're good customers because they're out in the world enough to need several sets of everything.
Home, work, purse, travel, gym, and so on.
They just don't need to write articles about these things.
No, they just don't need to read articles about these things.
Would he ask a men's magazine to publish monthly columns on how to shave before he advertised Aramis products, his line for men?
He concedes that beauty features are often concocted more for advertisers than readers, but Miz isn't appropriate for his ads anyway, he explains.
Why?
Because Estee Lauder, he says, is selling a kept woman mentality.
I can't quite believe this.
60% of the users of his products are salaried and generally resemble Ms.
Readers.
Besides, his company has the appeal of having been started by a creative and hard-working woman, his mother, Estee Lauder.
That doesn't matter, he says.
He knows his customers, and they would like to be kept women.
That's why he will never advertise on Ms.
Right.
So that's some of what's going on behind the scenes with advertisers.
Well, can I riff from there for a second?
Please.
Okay, so this raises really the next issue that I was hoping to talk about, which is, I have alleged, and I'm trying to remember where, maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it was even here on Dark Horse, that part of what is going on with the derangement of the West, and I really think, you know, it's a psychosis of sorts that we are watching, with the loss of the ability to track arguments and to extrapolate reasonably and all of that.
Is actually being driven by the fact that so much of the landscape through which we are interacting is advertising driven and my point is that that probably means that we are getting content.
That looks very different than we would otherwise be getting, not because human beings don't want the higher quality nuanced content, but because advertisers do not want us, in general, in our conscious mind.
They want us in our subconscious mind, where we can't necessarily track that we're being manipulated and persuaded of things that may not be factual, right?
So the idea is, factual content It caused you to have to think might be very desirable from the point of view of the consumer of the channel, but it would not be desirable from the point of view of an advertiser that really wants you in something, you know, just above a sleep level of awareness.
And so, in our case, I think the answer is We don't want any ad for which the advertiser isn't looking to have you in your conscious mind evaluating these claims and whether or not it adds up to you at a conscious level.
That's the desire is only that fraction of advertising that is not looking to catch you off guard.
That's really good.
Including when the point of the product is actually both of the ones that we advertised here today, is to background some complexity so that you can get on with your life.
Right?
Oh, that's good.
I hadn't even realized that connection between them.
Yeah.
You do not want to be conscious of everything going on in your life at all times.
That gets deeply painful and becomes unproductive very quickly.
But you want to be able to call to consciousness anything that you are being exposed to, any decisions you are making, before deciding, actually, I want to set and forget.
I do want to have brand loyalty over in this space because I just don't care about laundry detergent that much or whatever it is, right?
But you need at any moment to be able to say, wait, actually it's time to reassess.
And I think we will certainly never, we will never advertise anything with our words where we are trying to subvert that process.
And you know, we will, because we scrutinize all of these things and we have been approached by many different potential advertisers, we think about them very consciously.
So when we bring them to you, it's because they passed that process.
So I guess maybe we want before we embark on our eight pro bono ads to talk a little.
I mean, I think you've already done it, but given how we clearly feel about advertising and what kinds of harms we know it does in the world, why would we want anything to do with it?
We're doing well right now.
Thank you to the many supportive and generous viewers and listeners and people on our Patreon We are at the moment doing well, but it is to some degree at the discretion of YouTube and Patreon and Google and YouTube and Google being the same thing.
And so diversifying as much as possible where it is that we are, how it is that we are generating our our money so that we can continue to speak absolute truth without being dependent on the pleasure of someone.
You know, at any point that someone whom we are advertising says, actually it's not working for me, they pull, that's fine.
And at any point that someone approaches us and says we want you to advertise for them and we say not for us, we just don't go there.
So I would also point out, and this is delicate because it is very difficult to prove in any way that would be clear, but we get access to the back channel information for the Dark Horse YouTube channel, for example, and it has ceased adding up.
The podcast appears to be more popular than ever, which you would expect.
News of it would spread and people seem to very much like it.
On the other hand, we see a trend in viewership coming from Google that clearly indicates that in spite of the fact that it's popular with those who see it, that they're showing it to fewer people.
And so what does this portend?
Would they boot us, you know, at the point that they thought it wouldn't cause a stir?
I don't know.
Let us just say it is a vulnerable position, and from the point of view of our long-term ability to speak the truth irrespective of what comes at us, it is important that we carefully take this step.
Indeed.
Did you want to say anything about advertising to children, or should we save that?
Yeah, it's probably worth it, as long as we're spending the time here.
I would just say that, you know, as a measure of how dangerous advertising has become, I have for at least 15 years been making the claim that I believe there is no defense of advertising to children.
That it is impossible to come up with a rationale whereby it is acceptable, for example, to have a company that produces food advertising to children in a way that might change what it is they desire to eat or how much they desire to eat.
And that clearly we have an epidemic of ill health based in inability to regulate desire for food, both type and amount, amongst children for which there is no Um, known cause other than the fact that we have lots of corporations, uh, pushing various things in the direction of children.
So anyway, I keep asking, can anybody come up with a defense of the right of a company to advertise to a child who is presumably without the defenses that an adult might have?
And even adults aren't all that well defended, right?
And so I guess what I would say in closing is that the degree of harm that comes from dysregulating children's interaction with something like food, and the same could be said of a lot of other things, you know, what it is they desire and are therefore persuaded to pursue.
That advertising to children effectively maims people, right?
It does things that are as harmful to them as, I don't know, child molesting, something like that.
And to the extent that the society allows this to continue and doesn't do anything, even though it is at least very difficult and maybe impossible to come up with a justification that makes any sense, is a measure of how much we have I've fallen into the trap of imagining that advertising is just like a feature of the landscape and not something that we grant access.
Very good.
All right.
Should we do our pro bono advertisements?
Yeah, why not?
Why not?
Okay.
We're going to alternate, right?
Wow, this is not going well so far.
Oh, no, it is not.
It's not going well.
For those of you just listening, I just dropped several things off screen.
For most of these products, we both have an in and we have a relationship with the product.
Your relationship with this product is, I think, entirely through my relationship with the product.
So if you are an avid reader of physical books and you don't know about book darts, you should.
If you read books but it's all online or you don't really care for books that much and you never find yourself going to your bookshelf and opening books that you've read before, you don't want this product.
But if you do have, you know, upon moving into a home, insist that one of the first things that needs to happen is that we need to install lines and lines of bookshelves, as we did here, then this is an amazing, amazing thing.
Book darts are little tiny markers made of metal that are better than inking up your book, better than bookmarks, better than post-it flags.
They stick, but they aren't permanent.
They don't deform the book, no matter how many are in there.
So I have this pile, which because Zach is zoomed in on me, you can't see, but I have this pile of books.
I just pulled five books off of our shelves that I know that I had read or re-read recently enough to have book darted.
And so this one Which we will probably spend a whole episode talking about at some point.
Anatomy of an epidemic.
I don't know if you can see just how many book darts are inside that by the little glimmers, but the book is not deformed by it.
And any time that I pick up a book that I've read, I open it to any one of book darts and I see not just something of value from the book, but something about my state of mind when I was reading it.
What caught my eye?
And it's a kind of memory hack, I find, and a way to reinsert myself into long pieces of text, either fiction or nonfiction, that I've enjoyed before, but might be unlikely to pick up and read from scratch again.
Yeah.
I have several of these tins around the house.
Brett can attest to that, and I think you're now so accustomed to the telltale sound of the tin being opened that sometime if I'm reading it in bed at night, you'll hear that and find something to book dart, honey.
I literally pulled five books that I respect off the shelf and opened them to one of the book darted places.
I'm just going to read you a sentence or two from each of these book darted places.
Which also will reveal five books that I think are terrific.
I don't actually have a... I did not decide an order in advance, so we'll start with Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker.
Extraordinary and terrifying book.
Just one line in this.
He says, with regard to a presenter at an APA audience, I conclude that patients with schizophrenia not on antipsychotic medication for a long period of time have significantly better global functioning than those on antipsychotics.
That alone is worth the price of admission to this book, when you see that there are data to support the idea that antipsychotics are likely doing more harm than good.
So that's one.
We have, actually I'll do the fiction last, we have Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.
So, actually introduction by Helen Fisher, who we know.
So this is originally written in 1935, and just from the introduction, one of the things I bookmarked, I book darted, is two of these tribes have no idea that men and women are different in temperament.
They allow them different economic and religious roles, different skills, different vulnerabilities to evil magic and supernatural influences.
The Arapesh believe that painting in color is appropriate only to men, and the Mundugumor consider fishing an essentially feminine task.
But any idea that temperamental traits of the order of dominance, bravery, aggressiveness, objectivity, malleability are inalienably associated with one's sex as opposed to the other is entirely lacking.
This may seem strange to a civilization which in its sociology, its medicine, its slang, its poetry, and its obscenity accepts the socially defined differences between the sexes as having an innate basis.
She goes on.
So, fascinating little bit of cultural anthropology there from Margaret Mead from the early part of the 20th century.
We have Alice Drager's excellent book, Galileo's Middle Finger, Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice and Science, in which, among many other revelations, and this is published, boy, this is probably going to be 2016, 2015.
You gave this to me probably 2017.
You, Brett.
That didn't, so this is from chapter five, The Rot from Within.
That didn't mean that these scientists, or I, or anyone else, existed without bias.
It didn't mean their work wasn't shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties.
But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn't first and only political.
If they believed that good science couldn't be done by just ouija-boarding your answers, good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.
That's Draeger, a while ago.
A while ago.
A while ago.
I got to that before we met her, am I right?
Yes.
Before Evergreen blew up.
Yeah, before.
Back in the before times.
Another kind of before times.
Yep.
This excellent novel, Mating, by Norman Rush, which was actually, I see from the inscription, given to me as a gift by Elizabeth Wright when we were all on Barrow, Colorado Island together, when she was writing a book that largely Starred you.
Tapir's Morning Bath.
Tapir's Morning Bath.
Yeah.
So she gave me this book thinking I would enjoy it and it's really extraordinary.
And here's a line, here's a slight paragraph from it.
The author here is speaking about his protagonist.
One thing wrong with America, according to Dunoon, is that the society is converging to suppress unsupervised mass play, largely through the mechanisms of TV and adult-run sports like Little League.
His theory was that if you leave young males alone, they will go and play situations from fascism to feudalism to democracy.
So now there is a diffuse and thwarted attraction to fascism that is getting played out at the adult level.
He was fecund with theories.
And one more, just again to point out how rich the leaving behind a trail of book darts can be in terms of finding evidence of great thinking in the books on yourself.
This is from a novel Another excellent novel called The Overstory by Powers that just came out a year or two ago, I think.
This about one of the protagonists again.
The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world's most wondrous creatures, all these abandon Adam and he's left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence.
Property and mastery, nothing else counts.
Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
You did all that with book darts, huh?
I did all that with book darts.
Yeah.
So that's my pitch for book darts.
You know, it's actually, it's kind of marvelous because the fact that they do not physically alter the book in a permanent way, but do physically live in the book in a way that it's easier to find than if you've written something.
I've never been a fan of this.
You know, if you don't write in your books, you're not, you're a faker kind of a mentality.
For one thing, I would never write in a book because A, I wouldn't be able to read it later, right?
So what good would it do me?
And B, it just feels like defacing something.
And maybe if one had marvelous penmanship, it would be different.
So one thing I do when I'm just taking a book out into the world and if I don't have a bag with me and so I don't also have a tin of book darts is I line the last page of the book with just a line of book darts so that if I do come upon something that I want to remember for later, I can pull it off the back page and put it where it goes.
Totally.
And if you do find yourself out and you don't have them, you can go into any 7-Eleven and you can ask the person behind the counter and get a quizzical look for free.
For free.
Yeah, quizzical looks for free at almost any 7-Eleven near you, I expect.
Yes, at your local 7-Eleven.
Or you can drive across the state to a different 7-Eleven.
If you want.
Just for variety.
Sure, sure.
Okay, that's ad number one of eight.
Ad number one.
You were gonna do this one next.
Yes.
Which you didn't want me to say by name.
No.
Okay.
So I wanted to talk to you all about the question of security.
You ever look at your home and worry that somebody is gonna sneak into your backyard, break in and take your stuff?
And then you think, well, what would the best solution to this be?
Right?
There's obvious dangers to having a firearm.
What you really need are dinosaurs.
Right?
A good dinosaur will give a burglar a scare like they wouldn't believe.
Oh, man.
But what are you going to do?
How are you going to get them?
Are you going to go online and buy some dinosaurs?
You could, but they might fly off.
So the best thing to do... This is awesome.
It's a little goofy.
All right.
The best thing to do is to attract wild dinosaurs to your backyard.
Scary.
Where you can enjoy them.
Terrifying.
They are terrifying.
Chirping dinosaurs.
Yeah, actually, Zach, do you want to show... I sent you a couple of dinosaur pictures.
Yeah, here's one.
I took that picture just yesterday of a little hummingbird.
That's a big'un.
Oh, it's a little'un.
It's a little'un.
And here is how I attracted it to our backyard in order to scare off would-be burglars.
And if I may, you bought, so for people just listening, you've got a hummingbird at some kind of a glass and metal contraption, which you bought at the thing that you're advertising here, which is Extant Dinosaur Stores.
From the Extant Dinosaur Store.
Yeah, which goes by various names depending on where you are.
By the way, I got you a little something.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking it's not your birthday, which it isn't.
This is from the Extant Dinosaur Store?
It is from the Extant Dinosaur Store.
Should I open it on air?
You should open it right now.
Wow, okay.
The Extant Dinosaur Store and Brett have delivered Unshimmy.
This is actually, you know, remarkably well wrapped for a dude.
I was actually, I was going to say that as I grow older and more manly, I get worse and worse at wrapping presents.
Okay.
Okay.
So I did not see this coming guys.
The Extant Dinosaur.
Oh, look at this.
Okay.
The Extant Dinosaur Store does not sell Extant Dinosaurs, but it sells Ways to attract them!
There you go.
And ways to break in after you've attracted them.
Except I can't open it.
Oh, I don't even know how this goes.
It flips up on the side there.
Oh, on the side side, yeah.
And there's a little critter even.
That's not an extant dinosaur, but something.
No, that's an arthropod.
Cool, so what kind of extant dinosaur is this nest box likely to attract?
You know?
You know, it's funny.
You're covered in hay.
Yeah, I'm covered in nesting material.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I feel safer already.
As well you should.
Can we arm the birds, though?
Because that, it feels to me, would solve a couple problems.
Yes, there may be regulations on this that we would want to check on before engaging in any arming of birds.
I also got you some of that insect and hot pepper suet you like.
Yum.
I think I won't eat that on air, but this is fabulous, even if you're not an extant dinosaur yourself.
Actually, no, I think really you have to be an extant dinosaur, which is to say, an avian dinosaur.
A bird.
Right, a bird.
Yes.
So anyway, the advertisement here is for your local bird supply shop to attract these animals to your yard.
And I will say, By the way, there's something important here, which is that the hot pepper is here not because birds love hot pepper, but because mammals don't.
And because squirrels don't like it.
And birds can't detect it.
Right?
The capsaicin.
Yes, in fact, here's the beautiful thing about that story, is it turns out that the capsaicin Was loaded into chili peppers because chili peppers are distributed by birds and it is loaded in to trick mammals into thinking that they are doing damage to themselves when they eat the chili peppers.
So the chili peppers will be left over for birds to eat and therefore distribute the seeds, which they do much better than mammals do.
So the thing is.
I always think it is a good idea to attract extant dinosaurs to your yard.
Whether or not they're keeping you safer.
But I never think it at the right time of year, and this time it's the right time of year, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's spring, so the animals are nesting, and putting up bird boxes is a good idea.
And so anyway, that's why this birthday present is a little early.
That's awesome, thank you.
Yeah, more bugs, more birds, more beautiful.
You maybe need a little help on the ad copy, but that's okay.
That's okay.
Insect and Hot Pepper Suet.
Excellent.
Yeah.
Insect and Hot Pepper Suet.
All right.
Are we done with the Extant Dinosaur Stores ad?
I believe so.
Okay.
Pro Bono Ad 2, Extant Dinosaur Stores.
Pro Bono Ad 3 is for... Did you find a picture of me in the jungle?
I sure did.
Hey, Zach, you want that now?
No, hold on a second, Zach.
Yeah, no, you could put it up.
So the next time you find yourself in the jungle, do yourself a favor and wear agle boots.
Now is this in fact from our time in the Amazon list?
Okay, so I'm in fact wearing agle boots here in the Amazon.
The jungle, for those who don't know, is more accurately called, and you could take it off whenever, Lowland Tropical Rainforest.
Okay.
Jungles can be found in Honduras and Costa Rica, in Brazil and Ecuador, in Madagascar and Indonesia, and India and Papua New Guinea, lots of places, among many other places.
But let's parse the term for a moment.
Why boots in jungles?
Why this particular type of boots in jungles?
Well, a jungle being a lowland tropical rainforest is lowland tropical in a rainforest.
Lowland refers to elevation, so it's close to sea level.
Tropical refers to it being within 23.5 degrees of the equator.
That's within the tropic lines.
Both proximity to the equator and elevation are correlated with a high biodiversity.
Lowland tropical ecosystems are going to be high biodiversity.
Lots of critters that are interested in getting at you or in other ways kind of maybe just impeding your progress.
Rainforest just refers to the type of precipitation that falls, as opposed to cloud forest.
In cloud forest, the precipitation tends to hang as water droplets in clouds.
It does, of course, rain, but the experience of being in a cloud forest is very much of being in a cloud, and the experience of being in a rain forest is very much of being frequently quite wet.
Because you're being rained on!
The rain is seasonal, but the seasons are like wet and wetter, and that means mud, okay?
So you've got this hot, wet, seething mass of biodiversity in the jungle, which again, lowland tropical rainforest being the technical term, And it's kind of a heaven for some of us.
Some of us really are driven to go there, and we were lucky enough to be in the Amazon in January of 2020, just before the entire world locked down.
But it is, as I said, deeply and unendingly muddy.
And there's also, except in some places like Madagascar, tend to be a fair number of poisonous snakes.
So, to protect yourself from both mud and snakes, you wear as close to knee-high as you can get rubber boots.
The rubber boots mean that you don't get mud into your shoes as you're slogging through and occasionally step into deep mud puddles, which happens a lot.
And the thick rubber keeps his protection against a snake bite if you should manage to step on one, because they tend to be cryptic, and it comes at you.
I've only had that happen once that I know of, where I actually saw a fer-de-lance strike at my boot.
And I wasn't wearing Eagle Boots then, but I was wearing boots that were good enough.
It was actually in the Amazon.
It was in the Brazilian Amazon.
No, actually that was in Costa Rica.
That was in Costa Rica.
I stepped on one in the Brazilian Amazon as well, but it just eyed me and I got away without it striking at me.
Um, so when, as you know, when we led our study abroad trip in 2016 and when I led the several that I led before that, um, the one, one of the very few actually hard and fast rules that I had was jungle boots at all times, no matter what, when you are in the forest, no exceptions.
And a lot of field stations have a lot of rules about keeping people safe, including you can never go into the forest alone, never go into the jungle alone.
I actually reject that rule completely.
Once, once you are Once you know something about what you're doing and have demonstrated proficiency in how to navigate and deal with things that come up, I actually, I'm not sure I've enforced going solitarily into the jungle, but it was certainly one of the things that I really strongly encourage, because there's nothing like it, being alone in the jungle with just you and, well, your jungle boots and, you know, whatever else you're wearing.
The boots were non-negotiable because of the mud, because of the snakes, and the fact is that cheap rubber boots are available in towns near jungles every place that we've been.
Even, I think, in Madagascar where there's almost nothing available.
They tend to be lower than might be optimal.
You know, if you're dealing with big terrestrial vipers, they can launch themselves a little bit higher and you don't want to risk that.
Yeah.
And they tend to be a little thin.
They tend to be flimsy.
Most of what they tend to be is really uncomfortable.
Yeah.
They give you blisters.
They give you blisters.
You can get them on and off easily to, you know, empty them of water after you've been drenched in another downpour.
But they're not comfortable.
And if you're actually interested in slogging around the jungle all day, as some of us are, and I encourage everyone who has the opportunity to do so, you want these boots.
So they're not cheap.
But they're amazing.
They're Aigle Boots.
Aigle.
A-I-G-L-E.
Aigle Boots right here on the podcast.
It's our first podcast.
These were first actually introduced to me by a student of ours on that study abroad trip.
She was Going on about how great they were, and they were not cheap, and I thought, how good could they possibly be?
They wrap up tight, they feel so comfortable, they're actually impermeable to fangs, and they're fabulous.
Yes, they are not cheap except in comparison to not having them.
Yes, exactly.
If you're going to spend serious time, they're worth having.
And they're also great in the garden doing various things that you wouldn't want to do in shoes that will pick up mud.
They will pick up mud on the bottom, but you don't wear them inside.
No, you don't wear them inside.
But yeah, actually I was going to say too, in Pacific Northwest winters in particular, I wear these when I'm out walking or when I'm out trying once again to D.I.V.
the landscape, which is an endless task, but these boots make it better.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
That's ad number three.
Agle boots.
There you are.
OK.
The fourth one.
Yes.
So there's a kind of a category that is developing here.
I think everything of our pro bono ads so far, these are a few of our favorite things, things that you, our audience, should know about in case you're going to be involved in any of these activities or might want to be involved in some activity you don't yet know about.
And so I'm going to advocate For getting involved in these bad boys here.
This is a trail camera, and trail cameras exist primarily, I think, for hunters.
Hunters put these up in places in order to figure out where the game is and when it's around and when it isn't around.
But they are also widely used now by naturalists to figure out what the behavior patterns of animals are.
And it's also tremendously fun just to figure out whether or not you're studying creatures to figure out what's available.
At Tipitini, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where that picture that you showed of me in the eagle boots was taken, there was a long-time camera trap study run by a man named Diego Mosquera, who at that point was the field manager for the station.
And with the help of these so-called camera traps, these game cameras, he found that there were... I think there was... Privatologists already knew that there were 10 species of primates, but it was his camera trap work that revealed five different species of cats, of wild cats at Tipitini.
And so they're super useful.
as a research tool as well. - Totally, and I must say, it is marvelously fun and addictive to deploy these things.
A, you learn a lot, you deploy them somewhere you think is gonna be good and it isn't, and you learn a lot about the animals just in figuring out where they're gonna be, things you couldn't possibly validate without the camera because the animals are really good at avoiding you in many cases, and so, anyway, these come in different kinds.
They come in a regular flash camera version that takes night photos with the flash.
I'd recommend against that.
And then there are two versions that don't spook the animals.
There's a low glow that has a light red glow.
Animals do not see red in general.
Nocturnal animals don't.
And then there's a no glow, pure infrared one.
And anyway, they record on a little SD card whatever they see, and then you come collect the SD card.
There's some fancy ones now that if you have cell service where you deploy them, they will email you images of animals that happen by, which can be kind of neat.
I have, uh, I've deployed a couple cameras in a local, uh, wildlife area.
So the story is I was down there on my bike, um, and actually somebody recognized me.
Um, and I was talking to them and as we were talking, looking out over the nature reserve, there was clearly some sort of large bodied mammal, but we didn't know what it was.
And, um, Anyway, I narrowed it down.
It had to be one of a number of things.
It had to be either otter or beaver or could be nutria.
Mink?
Well, I was already interested.
I knew there were minks in this nature area, and I was interested to figure out where they were.
Do they swim much?
Minks?
Yeah.
Minks are always found on the shore of water.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure they can swim, but I don't know that they do swim all that much, but they are closely associated with water.
So otter, beaver, or nutria were the three most likely suspects.
Were the three most likely suspects.
So I went down there and started poking around a little bit.
That picture of the bald eagle in flight that I showed last time was me standing there trying to get a bead on these mammals and the bald eagle flew over.
And anyway, I did see the animals a second time, but I couldn't figure out what they were.
They were too far off.
And so I set up... Two.
Multiple.
Two animals.
Yeah.
Large, bodied, dark, low.
So anyway, I deployed a game camera.
And Zach, do you want to show what I came up with after about two weeks of... Well, why don't you show all of it?
Okay.
So here's the first thing.
That is a beaver.
Can you step through the images?
So that is a beaver emerging from the water, being filmed with infrared.
There you can see its eye shining back at the camera.
Here's the second beaver coming out of the water.
It's gonna go upslope here.
All right, so beaver.
That's really exciting.
Beaver is a rodent, and it's one of my favorite rodents.
Such an interesting creature.
They can be very shy.
Here's the second creature that the camera picked up.
Now, I think this is a muskrat and not a nutria.
It could be a nutria, though.
My sense of it being a muskrat... It looks fatter and squatter than a nutria.
Yeah, it's a little smaller, but nutria and muskrat.
So watch this.
It's going to take off into the water here.
Zoom!
Once it's in the water, it's almost indistinguishable, really.
Yep.
All right.
Keep going, Zach.
Here's during the day.
Oh, look!
It's a pair of river otters!
So this is a nature area that is on a tributary of The Willamette River, which runs right through Portland.
And so these are two river otters that presumably enter the water here and then swim right out into the Willamette and hunt fish and maybe... And shake their little otter fists at the boaters.
Probably they do.
You can see it's raining as they're descending into the water.
That's what I think we saw looking out at the I'm pretty sure it was going to be otters that were glumping along when I couldn't identify what it was.
When you were talking with the guy on the shore.
Yeah, for one thing it was during the day, and the otters here, it's not, I mean, and the beavers here are at least partially nocturnal, probably entirely nocturnal.
And now this last one's going to be a little bit difficult to make out, but... It's not a crocodile, is it?
No.
For those of you who are photographers, rule of thirds in the vertex of thirds in the lower left-hand part of the...
Screen you've got a little four-legged animal with a long tail there.
That is a mink!
So this one camera.
This is all from one camera.
It was all from one camera over the course of it looks like less than a week.
Yeah, in one go, this camera caught all of these things.
And it's amazing.
I mean, A, this gives me... To be fair, though, you've got decades training honing a naturalist's eye, not just as a field biologist, but also as a photographer.
And so you put it in the right place, right?
Like you could have put it somewhere where it wouldn't have caught anything.
I did.
And indeed, I've got one deployed right now that Caught absolutely nothing.
So that's a thing that happens, and you know, anyway, it's a fun game.
If you want a game that, you know, is very real, figuring out how to get the wildlife to show up on your game camera is a pretty good one.
And so I guess, yeah, you want to show the video?
This is from our backyard.
This is a coyote.
They unfortunately in Portland hunt house cats quite actively.
And this is literally probably 40 feet from our back deck.
Beautiful animal.
So that's actually from last two years ago.
Yeah, that is from two years ago.
Just a very high quality video.
So it does prove that you can get really good quality video and pictures out of these things if you place them carefully.
Anyway.
That's cool stuff.
So yeah, you've been getting some.
We've got unfortunately three coyotes right here over the last several days.
Oh yeah, we have been.
Yeah, and I will show some pictures at some point.
Indeed, actually last week people remember I was looking at an animal out the window that I said was very dark.
I now know from multiple kinds of evidence that it had to be a coyote, and my sense that it was very dark was off.
Everything else adds up.
Maddie went to the spot and immediately picked it out and started looking around for something, and now I've camera trapped around the area.
The coyotes come right through there, and so that's what I saw out the window.
And for those of you who might be concerned, if you hear yowling, it's because our cats are pissed because they're not allowed outside while there's this many coyotes right here who are clearly waiting for them.
Yeah.
They're waiting for snacks.
But anyway, think about whether, I mean, you can get these pretty cheap, you know, for a hundred bucks you can get one that does the basics and then, you know, you can go up from there.
You got any in particular that you recommend?
Because you've now got a few different types.
Yeah, I would say, I don't, I wouldn't worry too much about no glow versus low glow.
I think low glow is just fine, doesn't spook the animals at all.
But don't go flash.
Yeah, don't go with the visible flash.
I would say I like the Bushnell cameras.
Get one that has a screen so you can see what the camera is going to shoot rather than being surprised when you pick up your SD card.
Yeah.
And it's also really useful if they have a visible LED and a setting to test where the trigger zone is.
So basically, you can set it to test and then you can walk out where you expect an animal to be if you're on a deer trail or something like that.
And you can just make sure that if you walk there, you see the LED go off, then you know it triggers.
But anyway, yeah, I like the Bushnell ones are pretty good.
And I would say you can go to Trail Cam Pro, the website, and they have very good reviews on things.
And you can see, you know, they have all kinds of stuff that you can bolt things to trees and They all come with a strap for a reasonably small tree.
You can just strap them onto the tree.
It's easier to aim them if you have something with a little bit of a, you know, tripod head versatility like that.
But anyway, it's a fun game and I'd be curious what you come up with if you do manage to capture something.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Okay, our fifth of eight pro bono ads is for Comcast.
Comcast, as many of you will know, is the largest home internet and cable TV provider in the United States, and it's the second largest broadcasting and cable TV company in the world after AT&T.
So at least for our listeners and viewers in the U.S., and many outside of the U.S.
as well, you're going to be pretty familiar with it.
So what can we say that hasn't been said already?
Well, Comcast has the most amazing name recognition, really.
That's the best I can do, really.
It's hard to avoid.
If you can say one positive thing about Comcast, it is that it is ubiquitous.
It's everywhere.
In fact, it's really hard to opt out if you want internet or cable TV, especially if you live in some places.
You're stuck with Comcast.
They have, in fact, this little thing approaching what we like to call monopoly in many places.
That, of course, makes them less enthusiastic about customer service than they might otherwise be.
Why give a fuck about your customers if you have them over a barrel, after all?
Also, now that Comcast actually owns some content, did you know that they have bought NBCUniversal?
So that's part of the Comcast family now.
And then they're also, of course, in charge of content distribution in the form of ISPs.
Well, there seems to possibly be an antitrust issue there as well.
And there's also the little problem of their position on net neutrality, their resistance to any but the narrowest form of it, and some evidence that they have acted really not in any way on behalf of the consumers.
So all of which leaves customers of Comcast often feeling underwhelmed, at best, by their service.
But we have a code to help you with your experience at Comcast so that you might be able to get something truly special.
Use code BENDOVER at checkout and receive a customer service experience that you are unlikely to ever forget.
So I will say, Comcast may be the actual root of all evil and it may just sort of function through advertising or something, but we had the most spectacular run of, it wasn't even bad luck, it was just There was no luck involved.
It was Comcast.
It was Comcast.
So what we had was a situation in our previous house where for years we could not get a stable internet connection through Comcast.
And there was no alternative, right?
And those two things are undoubtedly connected.
So this went on year after year.
They must have come out eight times a year.
Always claimed to have solved it.
It never worked.
I replaced every modem and router multiple times to make sure it wasn't something on our end.
It wasn't cheap.
Simply did not work.
And then the crazy thing is...
We moved here.
There was no option for anything other than Comcast, so we signed up for it and we thought maybe it's at least just our old zip code or something.
The problem followed us here, and indeed, people who remember our early live streams will remember how unstable they were.
Well, that... That wasn't just us.
That lifted at the point that CenturyLink introduced fiber optic and we finally had the ability to get rid of Comcast and we got rid of them completely.
We don't get our television content through them.
How much did you enjoy the phone conversation that you had with Comcast where you cut the ties?
It was so awesome.
If you find that you're in an abusive relationship with Comcast, what you need to do is just walk away.
You will feel so much better when Comcast is out of your life.
Walking taller.
Right.
It's incredible what a terrible corporation it is and what a low quality product it delivers at such a high price.
Yeah.
No, it's all of those things.
Terrible corporation, awful product, high price.
Yeah.
What could be better?
Get yourself some book darts, some boots, and a trail camera instead.
You'll be happy you did.
Indeed.
Okay, next ad you have called WTAFC.
Right, this is my acronym for What the Actual Fuck, Costco.
Now, mind you, I don't hate Costco.
Nope.
I don't love shopping there, but the fact is I think there's a lot to recommend the place.
They do seem to source some pretty high quality stuff.
The prices are good.
We have too much choice in general, so sacrificing a bit of choice in order to get a really good price.
They apparently treat their employees well.
They treat their employees well.
So it's not a general complaint about Costco at all.
On the other hand, I have this experience and I can't quite get over it.
So I bought a shaver.
Now the reason I bought the shaver was that my last shaver, which was actually okay, was a fill-up shaver that had one defect that was an absolute deal killer.
The defect was that they had The button was a big lever on the front of the thing and there was no way to pack it into any item, any luggage, there was nothing you could do to prevent it from turning on in the luggage.
Anytime you checked your bag at the point your bag came off of the plane into the rotating carousel, whatever, it's been so long since we've flown I don't even remember, your bag would be humming.
Yeah, it was crazy.
It even happened once in the overhead compartment.
I think the turbulence set the thing up.
So anyway, I needed a new shaver, and so I looked at this one, and it had all sorts of cool stuff.
Some of which I didn't exactly need, but okay.
You know, I'm not planning to do a lot of manscaping, you know?
I mean, it's just...
Wait, and did you see an advertisement for this in one of the many men's magazines you read?
Ah, no.
I didn't see it in any of the men's magazines I don't read, which is all of them.
But here's the thing.
Okay, so I got it home and I was pretty excited to open it up.
And out popped this.
The box for the actual product.
It's only this big.
Now, what the actual fuck causes you to disguise this in this?
Because this may strike you as... Like, that's insane.
Right.
Right?
For those listening, that's close to two-thirds of the box that has nothing in it.
Yeah, it has nothing in it and it's actually made of stuff, right?
Now, I live on this planet.
My children live on this planet.
I don't want to see it liquidated any faster than necessary, right?
And I'm forced to ask all kinds of questions.
Did they ship it like this from China?
Or did they erect this box here?
It just doesn't make any sense.
And it's not like this is particularly stealable.
I don't think that's it.
I think it's one of these considerations like... Bigger is better.
I'm gonna spend more.
It feels like there's more stuff in there.
Or it takes up more real estate on the...
thing and catches your attention.
I don't know what the hell explains it, but please fucking stop.
The extra packaging is killing us.
And if I can just extend this to other places like Apple, right?
OK, this gorgeous packaging that everything comes in, the stuff that's too good to throw away.
So you fill your attic with boxes.
Oh, what if I sell the machine?
I need the box.
You know, I mean, come on.
The fact is we have an environmental right.
We don't need that.
And just as we should penalize advertisers who advertise at us without informing us, they're manipulating us, we should penalize them.
We should penalize entities that sell us more packaging than is necessary.
I don't want the stuff packaged in such a flimsy way that it's broken when I get it.
That's also bad for the planet.
But for God's sake, can you just make it simple, right?
Simple packaging, recyclable packaging.
That's what we want.
Excellent.
Rant over.
No, it's excellent.
Okay, two more ads in this pro bono ad edition of Darkers.
And incidentally, we didn't say that we are going to, as we are beginning to advertise actual things for which we are being paid, we are going to continue to do these pro bono ads for things that we find that we feel like telling you about.
And I should say, we didn't do this one thing, but people are free to send us products that they want us to advertise.
If you send us something really bad, we may do a pro bono ad about the bad product, so be warned.
Only send us stuff you believe in.
Excellent.
Okay, so this next one is a mishmash.
It's basically An advertisement for artisans.
Artisans of all sorts.
Artisans and craftsmen.
We have received some amazing gifts.
We are both, to some degree, artisans and craftspeople ourselves, but we have also received some remarkable things since we have been doing Dark Horse and before.
I just wanted to highlight a few of those things.
I encourage everyone, if you have any interest, whether or not you think you have any ability, to find a craft.
Find something over in arts or craft space that you can start to do.
So one is this ceramicist, Matthew Kelly.
So Zach, you can show my screen here.
This is his site.
He makes beautiful things.
He does several different kinds of firings.
And this, if I forgot to look it up, this mug that I'm holding is from his salt kiln that I think he built.
Truly, truly gorgeous work.
We also have, we were sent, so Zach you can take that down now.
I forgot to look into it, but this beautiful little leather case with these leather Dark Horse coasters.
Totally gorgeous.
Love the coasters.
Love the coasters.
We use them all the time.
Because of the way our Our cameras are aimed at the moment.
You can't see that our stuff is sitting on these coasters.
I thought they were going to stain.
They don't stain.
They don't stain.
And actually, I'm sorry, I didn't look back.
The guy who sent them to us said, I don't know if they'll work as coasters.
I just work in leather and I thought I'd make these for you.
They work great.
They're wonderful.
This, incidentally, these glasses that you see us drinking from are not a gift to us because of what we do here.
These are things we found at the farmer's market in Ashland, Oregon, a couple of years ago.
Made, you know, bought from the glassworker who actually made them.
Zach, do you want to show the picture that I sent you of the horse?
And I'm going to quickly look on my phone to see if I got I'm not positive who the artist is, and I'm really sorry about that, but when we find out, we'll put it in the show notes.
These people sent us this gorgeous piece of art, Woodburn, and they have their names on the back of it, but we hung it on a wall and it didn't easily come off the wall, so that's why I'm not using their names here.
We have next item.
This, Zachary, Giant Herbs and Tea here in Portland, Oregon.
The guy behind this is an herbalist and also now tea maker who is doing a tremendous amount with sort of traditional medicine and tinctures and stuff, and he sent us a box of Chais and tinctures, and we have enjoyed all of them that we've tried so far, but I just wanted to highlight two of them.
He is an herbalist and tea wizard, I can tell you from having drunk these teas.
They're really great.
They're amazing.
So here we have, I kid you not, Dark Horse, H-O-A-R-S-E, chai, onto which he's written, this logical blend will make you want to analyze its components.
Why does this taste so good?
And on the back, a unity of flavors without any hint of evergreen.
Perfect during a long day of voice work.
Sit back and grok this chai while discussing a heterodox opinion or reminding people where you really stand.
This chai is an olfactory wake-up call." So that's awesome.
And a little bit disappointingly, maybe my favorite one, he sent us like 12 or 14 of these, but maybe my favorite chai of his that I've had so far is Antifa chai.
It's Antifa chai.
And on it he's written, there are no leaders here, but its flavor shows up and burns on the way down.
A dash of horseradish to make the eyes water, chipotle and paprika to warm you up, an accent of guarana to keep the mind alert, a great drink to get you amped before your soccer match.
So.
These are great.
I recommend all of his work.
And then just one more artisan.
I mean, all artisans everywhere.
But our friend, Dave Stevens, who many have remarked on the knife in the back quarter in the sink, is a metalsmith.
And he made me a shave.
Swordsmith.
He's a swordsmith and he made me this machete.
So I also, in addition to agle boots, depending on where I am, will also sometimes carry a machete when I'm in the field.
Usually not, you know, not at Tipitini.
It's not necessary, but I have been in places where I needed it both for vines and for protection.
Not against snakes, but against drug runners, actually.
That's another story.
But this is gorgeous.
This is so gorgeous.
Can you hold it up so they can see the pattern well?
Yeah.
Oh, now I'm in a different camera.
Here we go.
So I'm sure Dave's watching.
He's like, show it a different way.
What are you doing, Heather?
Anyway, this is gorgeous.
And he also made for you.
No, no.
This is a historical sword from his shop.
Oh, okay.
I want to remove it without cutting myself.
Yeah, indeed.
All right, here, throw that suet into the air, and I will slice it into a... Yeah, so, you know, here's the thing.
This is historical, you say?
This is historical from... this is, I think, his first real sword.
It comes with a story, which I will not butcher by attempting to tell it here.
Um, but anyway, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you is no basis for a system of government.
However, a sword like this is one you can be truly, truly proud of.
And it does have some basis in history, but anyway, maybe I will solicit a copy of the story and post it for people.
Beautiful.
You know, in objection to Monty Python, which I rarely do, I feel like Arthur and Camelot were actually a pretty damn good system while it lasted.
Yeah, it definitely had its advantages.
Yeah, so don't slice off anything important.
I'm going to put this aside, and I'm also not going to trip on it.
After the podcast.
Yeah.
When I walk over there.
Please don't.
All right.
So artisans of all sorts, including all of these people and many more.
Okay.
Last free ad.
All right.
Last free ad.
This is a weird one, so buckle up.
So here's the thing.
Okay.
Really good tools are important.
And sometimes really good tools can get lost in the shuffle.
Now, I'm glad this tool is still available.
When I first encountered it, I wasn't exactly sure what its point was.
And it didn't really explain itself on the packaging.
You had to play with it.
It's not visible.
You have to show it.
Figure out what it is.
So what this is, is a... I feel like you're obscuring the vice grip part.
A crescent wrench with vice grip action.
Right?
Now, here's the thing.
A crescent wrench that is adjustable is a useful thing because you can set it to whatever size nut you need to put the thing on.
But it has a defect built into it, which is that when you put it onto something with flats like this, it has slack in it.
And so it tends to mar the nut and it doesn't hold on very much.
It can slip off.
And so the thing about this is by adding the vice grip action, this isn't the vice grip at all.
What it does is it holds the nut with no slack and it's reversible.
You just hit that little lever and it pops off.
And so the thing is, if you have used a tool like an adjustable crescent wrench a million times, you know this defect and you don't realize that the solution looks like this and that it works as well as it does.
In fact, I have two of these.
Sometimes you have two things and they're pointed in two different directions.
This also, you know, it holds on.
Yeah.
So there are lots of places where you want that ability to clamp and anyway if you need one of these I would get them.
They're cheap and they're well worth having in your shop.
And like with normal crescent wrenches, they come in different sizes, and I will say, just watching you handle it, the smaller one is better suited to my hands.
I'm not particularly small, I don't have particularly small hands, but there is actually a smaller size of this vice grip action crescent wrench that isn't useful for everything that the larger one is, but it fits other bodies.
Yeah.
I'm not sure the small one still exists in the market.
Oh, that's too bad.
I think this one might be the only one available.
There is another tool that we have two different sizes of, which is very useful in that way.
But the thing about this is This problem has been addressed many many times and almost all of the solutions are bad Right, so there are lots of different adjustable crescent wrenches.
There's one with a slide here.
That's particularly terrible Right, none of them really work.
But this one just happens to cut the Gordian knot and By using vice grip action for something that, you know, this doesn't work as a vice grip, right?
That's not its purpose.
But anyway, it's cool that it was solved, and I'm always disturbed that people don't know about it because hanging there at the hardware store, it doesn't immediately leap to mind what problem it's solving, right?
It's not obvious what it's for.
So anyway, think about whether you need a couple of those.
So, in conclusion, we are today advocating for, depending on who you are, the use of book darts, extant dinosaur stores, agle boots, trail cameras, artisans of all sorts, and adjustable crescent wrenches with vice grip locking, and we ask you to be very cautious when engaging Comcast, And the packaging associated with Costco.
Otherwise known as, what the actual fuck, Costco.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, do we have a thumbnail for this week?
We probably don't yet.
Could be the hummingbird picture, I don't know.
Extant dinosaur.
Extant Dinosaur, indeed.
All right.
So, are we there?
We're going to do our announcements?
I think we're there.
All right.
So, we will, as usual, take a 15-minute break and then be back with a live Q&A, answering questions that you have posed during the Super Chat.
A reminder, as I said at the top of the hour, this Monday at 5 p.m.
Pacific, we're going to have a patron-only test of our new Super Chat system, in which we will be, I think, looking at the live chat and answering questions that we decide in advance if we're going to give you bad answers to good questions or good answers to bad questions, or some combination, which should be fun, just very brief.
If you have other, if you're not interested in that, you may be interested in the once-a-month private Q&A at my Patreon.
Join us there at my Heather Hyang's Patreon, or Brett's Patreon, where he has two long conversations every month, usually the first Saturday and Sunday of the month.
This month, not so much because it's Easter, but because it's our younger son Toby's birthday.
We have delayed tomorrow's for a week.
All right, so if you are part of that conversation, it will be delayed a week.
We will do it next Sunday.
And as usual, any questions you can direct to darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
We've got some stuff for sale at www.store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
And our Clips channel continues to put out good, good clips.
